Detecting Consciousness: A Unique Role for Neuroimaging
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Full frame distilled prediction
Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
- Candidate categories
- Meta-epidemiology (narrow)
- Consensus categories
- none
- Domain
- Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
- Study design
- Candidate signal: Not applicableConsensus signal: none
- Genre
- Candidate signal: ReviewConsensus signal: Review
- Teacher disagreement score
- 0.843
- Threshold uncertainty score
- 1.000
- Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated·codex-gemma-dda1882f352a
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.344 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
How can we ever know, unequivocally, that another person is conscious and aware? Putting aside deeper philosophical considerations about the nature of consciousness itself, historically, the only reliable method for detecting awareness in others has been through a predicted behavioral response to an external prompt or command. The answer may take the form of spoken words or a nonverbal signal such as a hand movement or the blink of an eye, but it is this answer, and only this answer, that allows us to infer awareness. In recent years, rapid technological developments in the field of neuroimaging have provided new methods for revealing thoughts, actions, and intentions based solely on the pattern of activity that is observed in the brain. In specialized centers, these methods are now being employed routinely to detect consciousness in behaviorally nonresponsive patients when all existing clinical techniques have failed to provide that information. In this review, I compare those circumstances in which neuroimaging data can be used to infer consciousness in the absence of a behavioral response with those circumstances in which it cannot. This distinction is fundamental for understanding and interpreting patterns of brain activity following acute brain injury and has profound implications for clinical care, diagnosis, prognosis, and medical-legal decision-making (relating to the prolongation, or otherwise, of life after severe brain injury). It also sheds light on more basic scientific questions about the nature of consciousness and the neural representation of our own thoughts and intentions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Annual Review of Psychology
- Topic
- Traumatic Brain Injury Research
- Field
- Medicine
- Canadian institutions
- Western University
- Funders
- not available
- Keywords
- ConsciousnessPsychologyNeuroimagingPersistent vegetative stateCognitive psychologyFunctional neuroimagingRepresentation (politics)AsideCognitive scienceMinimally conscious stateNeuroscienceLinguistics
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes