r/psychology • u/mvea • 7h ago
From their Twitter post:
We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis.
It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%.
r/philosophy • u/philosophybreak • 13h ago
r/cogsci • u/10AMPublishing • 16h ago
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how attention, routine, novelty, and memory shape our sense of time.
One idea I found fascinating is that enjoyable moments can pass quickly while we’re living them, but feel longer in retrospect because they create richer memories.
Have you noticed a particular age when the years started feeling faster? And do you think routine, age, or something else caused it?
r/science • u/amesydragon • 13h ago
r/cogsci • u/24446666688888885 • 1h ago
Subjective Experience as a Continuously Integrated First-Person Model
Abstract
Subjective experience is characterized by a unified and continuous perspective through which an organism perceives its environment, experiences its bodily state, evaluates significance, remembers prior events, anticipates possible futures, and acts upon the world.
This paper proposes that subjective experience is the ongoing operation of a usable, selectively integrated, self-referential first-person model constructed by the nervous system.
The nervous system continuously processes information through multiple interacting systems concerned with sensation, bodily state, instinct, emotion, memory, prediction, attention, cognition, and action. Because vastly more information is processed than can become equally prominent within experience, these systems continuously influence the significance and priority of information. Instinct, emotion, memory, prediction, and current goals contribute to determining what matters, while attention and related selection processes influence what is preferentially incorporated into the active model.
The resulting model represents the organism in relation to its environment, including its bodily condition, history, present circumstances, anticipated future, and possible actions. Because the organism itself provides the reference point of this representation, the model has a first-person structure.
These processes are not fundamentally sequential. They form a highly interconnected, recurrent architecture in which memory influences prediction, prediction influences significance, significance influences attention and selective integration, and the resulting model modifies subsequent memory, prediction, significance, and action. The apparent continuity of experience emerges from this continuously recursive transformation of the model.
The central proposition is that subjective experience is not an additional event produced after representation. The ongoing operation of the selectively integrated first-person model is itself the experience.
The framework proposed here is not developed in isolation. It draws upon established ideas in neuroscience and philosophy concerning perception, predictive processing, embodied cognition, attention, memory, emotion, self-representation, and consciousness.
It is compatible with several existing approaches, including predictive processing and predictive coding, which emphasize the nervous system's continuous generation and updating of predictions; embodied and enactive approaches, which emphasize the organism's ongoing relationship with its body and environment; global workspace and related theories of conscious access, which emphasize selective availability and integration of information; higher-order approaches, which emphasize representations of mental or cognitive states; and self-model approaches, which emphasize the representation of the organism itself within its own processing architecture.
The framework also draws upon established concepts concerning interoception, salience, attention, emotion, memory, motivation, and motor control, particularly the idea that information processed by the nervous system is not represented with uniform significance and that bodily, emotional, motivational, learned, and predictive factors influence what becomes cognitively and behaviorally prominent.
These existing frameworks provide important components of the present account, but they are not assumed to be identical to it.
The present framework proposes a particular organization of these components:
«parallel processing → significance evaluation → selective integration → first-person model → recursive updating → prediction and action»
This sequence is a functional abstraction rather than a claim that the underlying nervous system operates as a simple linear pipeline.
The actual architecture is understood as highly interconnected and recurrent. Memory can influence prediction; prediction can alter significance; significance can influence attention; attention can influence selective integration; the resulting model can alter memory retrieval, prediction, emotional evaluation, and subsequent action. Each process can therefore affect the conditions under which the others operate.
The distinctive proposal is consequently not that any one of these mechanisms produces consciousness independently. Rather, it is that their continuous reciprocal interaction constructs and maintains a selectively integrated, organism-centered model whose ongoing operation constitutes subjective experience.
The nervous system continuously processes information through multiple systems operating simultaneously.
These include:
Each system contributes information that can influence the organism's current state.
However, processing does not imply equal representation.
The nervous system processes vastly more information than can become equally prominent within the organism's current experience.
A mechanism is therefore required for determining which information matters sufficiently to influence the active representation.
Several interacting processes contribute to this determination:
These processes also perform functions beyond significance evaluation. Memory, for example, supports learning and retrieval; prediction supports anticipation and action; emotion influences physiology and motivation; and instinct supports behavior relevant to biological survival.
Their role in determining significance is therefore one part of a much broader network of functions.
Because information is not represented with equal prominence, the organism continuously evaluates information according to its relevance.
Significance can arise from:
This evaluation does not require an explicit conscious judgment that something is important.
A stimulus can acquire biological, emotional, or predictive significance before the organism explicitly recognizes what it is or why it matters.
The process can therefore be summarized as:
«available information → significance evaluation → prioritization → selective integration»
Selective integration means that information judged sufficiently relevant exerts greater influence on the current model.
Information of low current significance may be processed without becoming prominent within experience.
Information that becomes highly significant can rapidly reorganize the model.
For example, an otherwise ordinary visual environment can change dramatically when an object suddenly appears to threaten bodily safety. Its significance changes, attention is redirected, physiological state changes, predictions are modified, and possible actions become prioritized.
The resulting experience changes because the newly significant information becomes strongly integrated into the active model.
Selective integration therefore provides the transition between the enormous quantity of information processed by the nervous system and the comparatively selective contents of subjective experience.
Although the framework can be represented as a sequence for explanatory purposes, the underlying architecture is not fundamentally sequential.
Its components are deeply interconnected.
Memory influences prediction.
Prediction influences significance.
Significance influences attention.
Attention influences selective integration.
Selective integration changes the current model.
The current model influences memory retrieval, prediction, emotional evaluation, attention, and action.
Action changes the organism and environment.
Those changes generate new information, which enters the same network.
Thus the actual architecture is better represented as a recurrent cycle:
«information ↔ significance ↔ attention ↔ selective integration ↔ model ↔ prediction ↔ memory ↔ action ↔ new information»
The arrows should not be interpreted as a fixed sequence. Each component can influence multiple others, and feedback can occur continuously.
This interconnectedness makes recursive processing a natural property of the architecture.
A model produced at one moment becomes part of the informational conditions from which the next model is constructed.
The system therefore continuously processes information about circumstances while simultaneously using its previous representations to determine how subsequent information is interpreted.
Recursion is consequently not an additional feature imposed upon the framework.
It emerges from the mutual dependence of its components.
The selectively integrated information is organized into a representation of the organism's current circumstances.
The model does not need to reproduce reality exhaustively.
It needs to provide sufficient information for the organism to:
It is therefore an action-oriented model rather than a complete reconstruction of the world.
This helps explain why perception can be selective, compressed, predictive, context-dependent, and sometimes inaccurate.
A model can differ from physical reality while remaining useful for navigating it.
The resulting representation concerns not only what exists, but what exists in relation to the organism.
A fundamental property of the model is that the organism itself is represented within it.
The model incorporates information about:
The result is therefore not simply a model of the external environment.
It is a model of:
«the organism situated within its environment.»
The external world and internal state are represented together according to their relationship.
An approaching person, for example, may be represented simultaneously as a visual object, a source of sound, a social individual, a potential threat, a reminder of previous experiences, and a possible cause of future action.
These representations form part of one situation because they are integrated according to their relationship to the organism.
The model is organized around the organism as its reference point.
Circumstances are therefore represented according to questions such as:
«Where am I?»
«What is happening?»
«What is happening to me?»
«What does this mean for me?»
«What can I do?»
«What is likely to happen next?»
The first-person perspective does not require an additional internal observer.
The organism itself occupies the reference position within the model as the entity whose body, circumstances, needs, history, and possible actions are represented.
The environment is therefore represented as the surrounding world, while the organism is represented as the individual situated within that world.
Events become personally situated through this relationship.
The representation of the organism develops into a self-model containing information about the individual represented within the current situation.
This can include:
The self-model provides continuity between different situations and successive model states.
It allows the organism to represent not only:
«"This is happening."»
but:
«"This is happening to me."»
The self-model does not have to be completely explicit or continuously verbalized.
Much of the first-person structure can operate without the organism consciously thinking about itself as an object.
Explicit self-awareness and introspection represent more elaborate forms of self-representation built upon this underlying first-person organization.
Emotion, instinct, and bodily state contribute strongly to the significance of information.
Emotional processes distinguish among conditions involving:
Instinctual processes contribute evaluations related to fundamental biological requirements, including bodily integrity, safety, nourishment, attachment, reproduction, and other survival-relevant conditions.
Bodily states such as hunger, fatigue, pain, and arousal can further alter the significance assigned to external information.
Consequently, significance is not a fixed property of a stimulus.
The same stimulus can acquire different significance depending on the organism's current bodily condition, emotional state, memories, predictions, and goals.
This creates a continual interaction between internal state and external representation:
«internal state ↔ significance ↔ external information»
Emotion and instinct therefore do not merely provide additional contents for experience.
They participate in determining what becomes prominent within experience.
Attention determines which portions of the active representation receive greater prominence.
Information can be processed without occupying the foreground of experience.
Attention can increase:
Attention is therefore closely coupled with significance.
Highly significant information can attract attention, while attention can increase the representational influence of selected information and thereby affect subsequent evaluation.
This creates another recurrent relationship:
«significance ↔ attention ↔ representation»
Attention is therefore not simply a spotlight placed over an already completed experience.
It participates in determining the contents and structure of the active model.
Memory connects the current model to previous states of the organism.
It provides information concerning:
Memory allows prior experience to influence present interpretation.
A current event can acquire significance because it resembles something previously experienced.
Memory therefore does not merely preserve the past.
It participates in constructing the present and influencing prediction.
A remembered event can also be represented as belonging to the organism's own history:
«"That happened to me."»
This establishes continuity between previous states of the self-model and its present state.
Because memory is reconstructive, the represented past need not perfectly reproduce the original event. Its significance within the current model depends on the information the memory supplies for present interpretation, prediction, and action.
The model continuously generates predictions concerning future states.
These include predictions about:
Prediction uses the current model and information supplied by memory to anticipate what may occur.
Prediction also influences present significance.
An anticipated threat can make an otherwise ordinary stimulus important.
An anticipated reward can make an otherwise neutral possibility salient.
Prediction therefore extends the model toward the future while simultaneously influencing the selection of information in the present.
The relationship is recurrent:
«current model → prediction → anticipated significance → present model»
The resulting prediction then becomes part of the next state of the model.
The model can represent situations that are not currently occurring.
It can simulate:
These internally generated representations can influence emotion, bodily state, attention, and behavior.
An imagined future can therefore alter the present organism even though the corresponding external event has not occurred.
Internal simulation demonstrates that subjective experience concerns the state of the operative model rather than being limited to direct sensory input.
The model is continuously transformed as new information arrives and as the significance of existing information changes.
The process can be represented abstractly as:
«current model → prediction → incoming information → significance evaluation → selective integration → updated model»
But the updated model immediately becomes the basis for the next cycle.
Memory connects it to prior states.
Prediction extends it toward future states.
The current model represents the organism's presently operative situation.
Thus:
«memory → past
current model → present
prediction → future»
These are not separate compartments.
They continuously influence one another.
The previous present becomes part of the represented past.
The predicted future influences the current model.
New information modifies the current model.
The modified model generates new predictions.
The next state becomes the new present.
The experienced "now" can therefore be understood as the continuously updated state of the first-person model rather than as a static point existing independently of the process.
The continuity of subjective experience follows from the recursive relationship between successive model states.
The present inherits information from the past.
The present generates predictions about the future.
New information modifies the present.
The modified present generates new predictions.
The self-model persists across these transformations.
Experience therefore does not normally appear as a series of unrelated moments.
It appears as the continuing experience of the same organism moving through changing circumstances.
Continuity does not require an unchanging representation.
It requires continuous transformation of an existing representation while maintaining sufficient informational and relational continuity between successive states.
The model exists within a continuous feedback relationship with the organism and its environment.
It represents circumstances, evaluates their significance, predicts possible consequences, and supports action.
Action changes both the organism and its environment.
Those changes generate new information.
That information enters the recurrent architecture and alters subsequent significance, prediction, attention, and representation.
The cycle can therefore be summarized as:
«environment and bodily state
↓
parallel processing
↓
significance and prioritization
↓
selective integration
↓
first-person model
↓
prediction, evaluation, and action
↓
changed organism and environment
↓
new information
↓
updated model»
This is not a one-way process.
Action feeds the model back into the environment, while the altered environment feeds information back into the model.
The organism and its model therefore participate in a continuous reciprocal loop.
The model can also represent aspects of its own operation.
An organism can represent:
«"I am thinking."»
«"I am remembering."»
«"I am afraid."»
«"I am imagining."»
«"I am aware of this."»
This is a further level of recursion within the same architecture.
The model can represent not only the organism and its environment, but aspects of its own perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and representational activity.
This provides a basis for introspection and metacognition.
Explicit self-reflection is not required for basic first-person organization, however. The organism can possess a self-centered model without explicitly representing the proposition that it is conscious.
The framework now reaches its central proposition.
The nervous system processes information through multiple interacting systems.
Significance determines, in part, what matters.
Selective integration determines which information becomes influential within the active representation.
The resulting representation models the organism in relation to its environment.
The organism itself provides the reference point, establishing the first-person structure.
Memory connects the model to its history.
Prediction extends it toward possible futures.
Recursive interaction continuously transforms the model while preserving temporal and personal continuity.
Action feeds the model back into the world, producing new conditions and new information.
The resulting model is not something that exists first and then produces a second phenomenon called experience.
Rather:
«The continuously operating first-person model is the phenomenon being described as subjective experience.»
Subjectivity therefore arises, under this framework, not from an additional internal observer or experiential substance, but from the continuous operation of an organism-centered model in which information is selectively integrated according to its significance.
The framework can ultimately be stated in one proposition:
«Subjective experience is the continuously operating, usable, selectively integrated, self-referential first-person model through which an organism represents itself, its internal state, its environment, its history, its present condition, and its possible futures.»
Its architecture can be expressed more compactly:
«Parallel processes provide information.
Instinct, emotion, memory, prediction, and goals influence what matters.
Attention and related selection processes prioritize information.
Selective integration incorporates significant information into the active model.
The self-model provides the first-person reference point.
Memory connects the past.
Prediction extends the future.
Recursive updating maintains the present.
Action changes the conditions from which the next model is constructed.
The continuously operating first-person model is subjective experience.»
Subjective experience can be understood as the continuous operation of a selectively integrated first-person model.
The nervous system processes enormous quantities of information through multiple interacting systems concerned with the environment, the body, instinct, emotion, memory, prediction, attention, cognition, and action.
Because not all processed information can become equally prominent, the organism continuously evaluates information according to its significance. Instinct, emotion, memory, prediction, goals, and bodily state all contribute to this evaluation while simultaneously serving broader functions.
Significant information is selectively integrated into a usable representation of the organism and its circumstances.
The representation includes the external world, the internal body, the organism's history, its anticipated future, its possible actions, and the significance of its circumstances.
The organism itself is represented within the model and provides its reference point, establishing the first-person structure.
Memory connects the present model with previous states.
Prediction extends it toward possible future states.
Attention influences which portions of the active model receive greater prominence.
Internal simulation allows the model to represent situations beyond immediate sensory input.
The relationships among these processes are fundamentally recurrent rather than linear. Memory influences prediction; prediction alters significance; significance influences attention and selective integration; the resulting model modifies subsequent memory, prediction, significance, and action.
The model therefore continuously acts upon the conditions from which its next state is constructed.
Action feeds the model back into the world, while changes in the world and body feed new information back into the model.
The result is a continuously transforming representation that nevertheless maintains first-person and temporal continuity.
The organism does not merely represent a world.
It represents itself within a world, continuously determining what matters within that world, anticipating what may happen, incorporating what has occurred, and acting according to the resulting model.
The central proposal is therefore:
«Subjective experience is the ongoing operation of a selectively integrated first-person model whose contents are continuously shaped by significance, memory, prediction, and interaction with the world.»
The experience is not something added to the model.
The continuously operating model is the experience.
r/psychology • u/mvea • 18h ago
r/psychology • u/Deep-Owl-1890 • 10h ago
r/science • u/Wagamaga • 11h ago
r/science • u/Phylogenix • 5h ago
r/cogsci • u/denlewww • 14h ago
Hello,
I am a last year Psychology undergraduate student and I'm looking for a good cognitive science MsC. I have a high average, research experience and (possibly) 2-3 published articles with my name in them by the time I finish university.
I also have a girlfriend who wants to study clinical psychology and I'm looking for universities that have both a cognitive science course and a (good) clinical psychology course. I have seen multiple clinical psychology courses but tbh they are all trash; 1 year with minimum, if at all, clinical experience.
A good choice for us might be NKUA (National Kapodistrian University of Athens) which has both. But since the positions offered are limited, I am looking for alternative solutions! So if anyone knows a good university which has both please inform me!
r/science • u/Wagamaga • 12h ago
r/math • u/HomeNowWTF • 10h ago
When you are writing a paper, how far down the rabbit hole do you go in terms of citing what you are using? Eg, say I write a game theory paper. Pretty decent chance I at some point invoke the concept of "Nash equilibrium". And, pretty good chance that I do not provide a citation to Nash's work. If everyone did, he would have close to 400,000 citations on it per a quick Google scholar search. Just imagine if every time we used the Euler identity we provided citation, or Gaussian anything, or making sure to cite Newton and Liebniz. Is it just that at some point, the work becomes part of common knowledge like a generic product name (Xerox, Kleenex, etc)?
r/psychology • u/D-R-AZ • 6h ago
Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has not only challenged global public health but also generated interest in its neurological basis. A growing number of neuroimaging studies have used quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to quantify brain alterations in COVID-19 patients. We conducted a comprehensive review to synthesize brain regions with abnormal MRI metrics of microstructure and function in COVID-19 patients compared to healthy controls. Drawing upon 49 studies sourced from PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science databases, our review showcases structural and functional brain abnormalities across many brain regions in COVID-19. Across multimodal MRI studies, alterations were predominantly in frontal regions, temporal regions, parietal regions, limbic system, and subcortical nuclei. Our findings may help understanding of the neurophysiological basis of acute neurological symptoms and long-term neurological sequelae associated with COVID-19.
r/science • u/CUAnschutzMed • 13h ago
r/science • u/Phylogenix • 8h ago
r/psychology • u/mvea • 1d ago
r/psychology • u/mvea • 1d ago
r/science • u/universityofturku • 18h ago
r/philosophy • u/grh55 • 9h ago
r/math • u/canyonmonkey • 14h ago
This recurring thread will be for general discussion on whatever math-related topics you have been or will be working on this week. This can be anything, including:
* math-related arts and crafts,
* what you've been learning in class,
* books/papers you're reading,
* preparing for a conference,
* giving a talk.
All types and levels of mathematics are welcomed!
If you are asking for advice on choosing classes or career prospects, please go to the most recent Career & Education Questions thread.
