title: Computational consciousness: building a self-preserving organism.
abstract: Consciousness has been a subject of crescent interest among the neuroscience community. However, building machine models of it is quite challenging, as it involves many characteristics and properties of the human brain which are poorly defined or are very abstract. Here I propose to use information theory (IT) to give a mathematical framework to understand consciousness. For this reason, I used the term "computational". This work is grounded on some recent results on the use of IT to understand how the cortex codes information, where redundancy reduction plays a fundamental role. Basically, I propose a system, here called "organism", whose strategy is to extract the maximal amount of information from the environment in order to survive. To highlight the proposed framework, I show a simple organism composed of a single neuron which adapts itself to the outside dynamics by taking into account its internal state, whose perception is understood here to be related to "feelings".
authors.affiliation: Federal University of Maranhão, Maranhão, Brazil. allan@ufma.br
authors.forename: Allan Kardec
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Barros
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D008960:Models, Psychological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*