Scientific dreams and focus fictions on consciousness

Abstract

Life experience translates into psychological reality through memories, imaginations, visions, smells, touches as sensory perceptions, cognitive and affective processes. In a person’s focusing ability, someone does not live the consciousness of someone else. With 3D brain images, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to correlate and reconstruct the active parts of the brain with what is being observed by the subject (Naselaris et al., 2009). In human beings as a whole, the complex and the superior are included in the frame of extended consciousness, developed by Damásio (1999). If consciousness plays a key role in allowing us to bring information together in novel ways, researchers suggest that consciousness serves other functions too. Edelman et al. (2000), Nir et al. (2010) or Graziano (2013) have expanded the knowledge about the dynamic and correlational mental processes. Nili et al. (2015) questioned our imagination: “How does an information-processing machine produce subjective awareness?” The understanding of consciousness is discussed in five paradigm shifts. Here, a literary and phenomenological view on consciousness is examined, as well as a psychobiological, neurological, emotional, social-neurological perspective. The thoughts on consciousness that stem from science-fiction films and literature are analysed in the context of building an artificial intelligence (AI) machine.