The meaning of consciousness: We are conscious of something, if we can express it with words.
The meaning of consciousness Part 1: Extracting the complex features which identify our conscious concepts. Concepts and conscious (natural-language coded) knowledge: (conscious) concepts are the stereotypes we form to use as sequences-of-actions- building blocks, so that it becomes feasible to elaborate complex plans for the achievement of our goals. * Unsupervised learning is followd to learn low-level feature detectors of those patterns, which we find more frequently and most faithfully describe the environment; whereas supervised learning is followed to learn those high-level features, which are better suited to code the tasks we execute to achieve our goals. At this point we enter in the field of supervised learning. Until now, I have been discussing forms of unsupervised learning in the brain. However, generally, in order to be able to achieve some goal, some form of supervised learning will ultimately be necessary. The role of unsupervised learning is to highlight and squee...