Andrew Goldbaum

In our experience of consciousness, the ability to represent the world as an integrated whole while allowing aspects of that world to constantly change is extremely important for our survival. Metastability is a dynamical process that allows for such a representation by combining a finite series of long-lived physical states with the ability to transition from one state to another at a moment’s notice. In the brain, this metastability is enacted by mesoscopic-scale coordination of neural circuits by complex patterns of oscillations. Increased metastability in the brain can distinguish conscious states from nonconscious states, which tend to exhibit either stereotyped and rigid patterns of activity or patterns that are incoherently flexible. Our lab has developed measures capable of detecting metastable states and relating them to our broader theory, the Quantum Darwinism Theory of Consciousness. This poster will go over the most important of these measures, phi spectral, which involves detecting how irreducible a system is to its individual parts by gauging how resistant the system is to being split along its weakest seam. Phi spectral is related to Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, maintaining the focus on irreducibility as a necessary condition for consciousness while leaving out the stronger ontological commitments that make IIT’s phi intractable to measure in real neural systems.

My name is Andrew Goldbaum. I am interested in the intersection between neuroscience, consciousness, valence states, and the ethical implications for both AI and our own society. I received my undergraduate degree in neuroscience from the University of St Andrews in the UK, and I am currently attending the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Florida Atlantic University, working under the supervision of Dr. Susan Schneider to investigate how the neuroscientific and physical underpinnings of consciousness come together to explain conscious experiences. Together, we are interested in developing scientific frameworks that enable the determination of consciousness in artificial systems. Currently, we are working on empirically testing the Quantum Darwinism Theory of Consciousness by examining whether mechanisms like nested neural oscillations, metastability, graph-theoretic information measures, hypergraphs, hypervectors, and classical traces left by quantum processes (the classical shadow) converge to account for differences between states of consciousness. My research is supported by a fellowship from the June Hirsch Jones foundation, and I recently presented on the relationship between metastability and consciousness at the 16th Oxford Workshop on Global Priorities Research.