Category Archives: Consciousness

Human Creativity and Consciousness: Unintended Consequences of the Brain’s Extraordinary Energy Efficiency?

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Giorgio Bertini

It is proposed that both human creativity and human consciousness are (unintended) consequences of the human brain’s extraordinary energy efficiency. The topics of creativity and consciousness are treated separately, though have a common sub-structure. It is argued that creativity arises from a … Continue reading →

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Learning to Be Conscious

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Giorgio Bertini

Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed vastly different mechanisms to account for a phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to aspects of global workspace theory, higher-order theories, social theories, and predictive processing, we introduce a novel framework: the self-organizing metarepresentation account … Continue reading →

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The development of conscious control in childhood

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Giorgio Bertini

Developmental data suggest that the growth of executive function in childhood can be understood in terms of the development of consciousness. According to the ‘levels of consciousness’ (LOC) model, there are age-related increases in the highest degree of self-reflection or … Continue reading →

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Consciousness, joy, intelligence and society

Posted on April 12, 2018 by Giorgio Bertini

Consciousness is what drives us forward, is what decides, what sets targets, what defines our fate. And there is a fundamental sign of the achievement of this goals and satisfaction of our personal motivations, which is joy. Bergson says: “The … Continue reading →

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The Moral Importance of Understanding Consciousness

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Giorgio Bertini

Debating whether other beings are conscious can sometimes feel like an unimportant academic exercise. But it’s not. The conclusion we reach determines how we treat animals—our livestock, our research subjects, and our neighbors in cities and other places we live. … Continue reading →

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Truth from Trash – How Learning Makes Sense

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Giorgio Bertini

This study of learning in autonomous agents offers a bracing intellectual adventure. Chris Thornton makes the compelling claim that learning is not a passive discovery operation but an active process involving creativity on the part of the learner. Although theorists … Continue reading →

Posted in Consciousness, Creativity, Learning, Recursion, Relational learning | Tagged consciousness, creativity, Learning, Recursion, relational learning | Leave a comment

Social Consciousness, Education and Transformative Activity

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Giorgio Bertini

This paper examines two aspects of social consciousness: consciousness in the sense of knowledge of the objective reality and consciousness in the sense of awareness of oneself as a subject in his/her social ties with other persons-subjects. In the light … Continue reading →

Posted in Consciousness, Empiricism, Knowledge, Learning, Social emancipation, Subjectivity, Teaching | Tagged consciousness, empiricism, knowledge, Learning, social emancipation, subjectivity, teaching | Leave a comment

Education for Critical Consciousness

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Giorgio Bertini

Famous for his advocacy of ‘critical pedagogy’, Paulo Freire was Latin America’s foremost educationalist, a thinker, and writer whose work and ideas continue to exert enormous influence in education throughout the world today. Education for Critical Consciousness is the main … Continue reading →

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Futures of Education for Rapid Global Societal Change

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Giorgio Bertini

Education today has more in common with the nineteenth-century industrial age than with the twenty-first century. It is fragmented and compartmentalized, clinging to a factory approach to learning. We need to move away from mass education towards pluralism and planetary … Continue reading →