Some researchers envision the brain as an operating system that is ‘installed’ on neural hardware. This naive viewpoint assumes that brains and minds are identical in all living creatures, and can be separated into neat categories like hardware and software.

Even to simulate such a hypothe...

Higher consciousness can survive without an internal monologue. Some degree of recovery from aphasia is possible. The brain has a higher degree of neural plasticity than once understood.

Although language is part of personal identity, it doesn't define the self.

Certain phenomena cannot be explained by a single activity, where individual components work in tandem with each other and it is hard to pinpoint where the process starts or ends. The workings of such a phenomenon, known as Strong Emergence, cannot be categorized or bracketed in a single...