Since the last post, I have been working on Physarum Polycephalum, a slime mould which is able to perform complex tasks, such as finding the shortest pathway in a maze. I managed to secure the mould and grow it in my lab. It is not very difficult to grow and is cheap to maintain, since you only have to supply agar and oats to keep it going. It has very...

When I have started my research into cell consciousness, I planned to work on mainly theoretical topics. However, I do have a wet lab and theory speaks louder when it is backed by experimental data. So I am looking for a good model system which is suitable to observe cell consciousness. It should be easy to obtain and handle, cheap to keep, and known...

I attended a lecture by Rosalind Picard at MIT, who is known for her research on “affective computing”. It was a great fun to watch a computer reading facial expressions of people and evaluate their emotion. It was apparently useful for autistic children and I am certain that it will find other uses. However, she did not provide any thoughtful insights...

Some of the most significant advances in science involved denials of the uniqueness of human being. For example, the earth we live was once believed to be the centre of the universe. Human was believed to be a unique creature created by the God. Science rejected both of them. Nowadays, few things are attributed only to human, but Consciousness is one...

Consciousness is often claimed to be the most important question in neuroscience/psychology/cognitive science/the entire biological science. For exampleThe most important scientific discovery of the present era will come when someone — or some group — discovers the answer to the following question: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain...

I attended a lecture by Edmund Rolls from Oxford today. While I only managed to understand less than half of the talk, it made me think of the importance of randomness in mind. Most people would agree that men are conscious but robots are not and one of the differences between the two is that human mind is stochastic but robot programs are deterministic....