Or bath. Douglas Adams endorsed baths for such purposes!
I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to sort out our thinking in new areas (from the French word essayer).
>Imagine going through life with a high-tech spam filter from the future that can filter out wikihow and boring science.
Happily it's available now and it's called intuition. If something is boring then avoid; if something is exciting then pursue.
Problems being that it's purely anecdotal and you have to know and trust yourself. If you're too attracted to prestige, money or job security then it's going to return a distorted signal. Which is why organised science is now bureaucratic and slow despite the fact that there are more scientists than ever before.
Very true. From those classic movies I've watched frequently my brain has gleaned a collection of images, phrases and situations which readily pop into mind. They're not all fully-fledged parables: they're mostly quick analogies which help me to grasp and sometimes to communicate what's going on in the real world.
The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty. Even in mathematics there's no certainty because mathematicians are fallible and someone may eventually find a flaw in a proof.
Outsider's uninformed opinion: if you attend AA then regardless of any official narrative or agenda this means you're spending important time with people who (a) used to drink, and (b) don't drink any more. Their example plus hearing what they've got to say seems like an excellent approach.
The lyrics do indeed sound crisp as if they were re-recorded, which is impossible. Anyone know if this was really done with AI, and what this field is called (music restoration?)
The video is uploaded on some random spanish channel and I can't find any information about it by searching.
My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of anything. Rocks don't have RAM.
You could quite reasonably consider an excited electron to be a 1-bit memory of experiencing a photon recently. My understanding of panpsychism is that it doesn't require everything to have an equally sophisticated consciousness/experience as ours, just some. And sure, an excited electron decays, but so do your memory and bits in RAM.
Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully say, "I see a pebble."
Edit: it can't truthfully think, "I see a pebble."
When I think about my first-person experience, it's something that happens in the present instant. The awareness of a distant and recent past may simply be a result of memory stimuli being presented by the brain to the consciousness at the present instant.
In this model, if I went under anesthesia and the King Particle got knocked out of its orbit and got replaced by another, the new consciousness would believe it was a continuation of the earlier one, because it would receive the same stimuli that its predecessor would have, and part of that stimuli was evolved to elicit a sensation for the continuity of self.
What this gets at is, is consciousness stateless? Is its experience a pure function of what is fed into it, or is it stateful?
That might be your definition of conciousness. That a system has to match input to something it holds in ram to be conscious. But I don't think it is shared by many.
Is a computer running voice recognicion software a conscious being in your book?
Well the reason I think it is that you can't just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something.
No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. Then it might be capable of consciousness, IDK. But being so capable it would then be a person rather than just an app.
I think the confusion here is due to the fact that there are two arguable parts to the definition of consciousness.
1) awareness of objects, events and other stimuli and the ability to respond to those inputs with some output. This is the world acting upon a conscious agent and the agent acting upon the world.
2) awareness of oneself and one's inner experience and self reflection and the ability to cause changes in oneself. This is the conscious agent acting on itself.
1 is generally agreed upon as the required part of the definition. 2 is subject to some argument. If you accept 1 alone then you leave open the question of the zombie problem usually given as every conscious agent except for yourself is just acting as if they have an inner life but really are just responding to outside stimulus by some unknown mechanism. This is really just behaviorism and I argue that it would also apply to an individual in that their inner experience may very well just be an illusion. This seems absurd (and I think it is) and that is why 2 is brought on as a further distinguishing factor, perhaps the distinguishing factor since you can now imagine a consciousness existing with only reference to itself.
This seems to be where your argument kicks in since you would need some state in order to build such an inner world but I think the point of the article is that you could suppose that there is some aspect of consciousness that underpins the whole thing. We've removed the requirement of outside stimulus, so now remove the inner stimulus of memory. What remains? Is there some other source of a priori stimulus? A generative factor from which perturbations in consciousness arise? Is there nothing but consciousness of being conscious? Absent that, is there simply a feeling of existence? This is the root at which we strike.
Thanks. It's possible to unconsciously interact with objects. My guess is that conscious perception requires both representations of oneself and the object, together with associated memories. e.g. a green ball has an associations with 'grass' and 'apple' among many other things.
We can imagine and create new things but their attributes are always recombinations of the attributes of old things we already know about.
>you would need some state in order to build such an inner world
This feels a bit like essentialism to me. As far as I'm concerned I just am that inner world. It is built from my memories and experiences.
It is true that the inner world is in a particular state at any given time. But it's not made out of some kind of 'state-iness' stuff, any more than a brick is built out of 'brickiness'. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
>is there simply a feeling of existence?
I don't think there's a feeling of existence per se. However one does with experience become aware of subtle sensations from the body at rest, for example noise in the optical system (static or 'snow'). One can then dream or imagine or think about these things too.
It is animism, the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive things only indirectly, via our mental representations of them. We (our minds) live in an inner, virtual, world. It matches the outer world only partially. The match is limited by matters such as how rational we are, how much we know, how much our culture knows, what our misconceptions and mistakes are, and so on. All very much in line with Karl Popper's epistemology.
Our mental representations are alive in the sense that they are labile and interconnected in all sorts of ways that make up our worldview. Creative geniuses don't consider their tools dispassionately. They literally relate to them, e.g. a certain equation might be like an old friend.
The problem for the animists is that just because things (trees, rocks, equations) are connected in our minds does not imply they are connected in the real, external universe. There aren't spirits 'out there'. If there is a spirit, it's 'in here' working behind the scene. It's the operation of our own brain. So primitive cultures had a very limited knowledge of how the outer physical world worked outside of necessary activities such as hunting. Scientific knowledge came later.
Materialists, on the other hand, i.e. most of us nowadays, assume that they perceive external physical reality directly. They forget they had to spend months just learning to see things when they were babies. (Or that this process was more about sorting out what was what than about building a telescope.) They assume that objects are are unconnected, like atoms in a void. This is of course true on the wider physical level but merely self-fulfilling in the inner world. Thus their mental representations of things (not us) remain relatively dormant. They never hear the 'wind in the willows' and never realise their full creative power.
Why is it not full AGI? Seems to me that the ability to perform 'spontaneous yet coherent storytelling' perforce makes one a universal explainer (i.e. a person).
I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to sort out our thinking in new areas (from the French word essayer).