Emil

If I created a very smart machine that turned out paintings, and it had a very human interface (Japanese automatons are becoming creepily believable in terms of their “social stimulus value,” so if one of these Turing-humans gave you art and it was good enough to be bought and sold on the fine art market, would that necessarily imply a…[Read more]

Posting here rather than repeating like a broken record in Unseen’s topic:

Unseen wrote:
We already know that decisions happen before we are aware that we made them […]

It still feels like I made the decision, whether or not it feels like it took time to happen. No definition of “experience” or “I” or “consciousness” or “sub-consciousness” can…[Read more]

Here’s a ten year old “Rama” video that’s still insightful, even if we’ve since updated theories about “mirror neurons”.

(I wrote the following post for Unseen’s excellent topic “Why Are We Conscious?“, but decided to post it here instead so as to not distract from his intended topic trajectory. I love this topic and think it fits well here. Most significant imo is the link to Jaak Pansepp’s work in the next-to-last paragraph.)

Unseen wrote:
Again, it comes down to…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Like I said, consciousness may simply be an accident. One that happened to certain beings on the planet, or maybe just to you.

That’s reasonable, or at least I’d say a long series of accidents that were selected by evolution to live on in genes. Life itself was shaped that way, in uncountable series’ of uncountable accidents and…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
If you really want to doubt, how can you be sure that you are conscious of anything real at all?

I’m not well learned in philosophy, so my opinions will often be relatively uninformed. That said…

I visualize “the hard problem” as being difficult, only because we so strongly tend to assume there must be some kind of meta nature…[Read more]

Sorry. Forgot to put quotes around the Wittgenstein quote. The very last paragraph is me not he.

PopeBeanie edit: I fixed it (post #24552).

I don’t think it’s necessary for a sophisticated system (or even being) to interact with and manipulate its environment to be self-aware or possess what we know as consciousness.

Perhaps it’s just an accident. Lucky or otherwise.

When you study Wittgenstein, you have consider some seemingly crazy ideas. Okay, you are conscious, but can you know…[Read more]

I agree with y’all. Funny how this only seems important to me now, at 65 years old. Answers to whys can be so cloaked in mystery, wonder, and feelings, and the hows are just textbook, pedantic, and require work. Mysteries and dramas are more fun, at least in a group setting like an audience or congregation. Just add fairy dust for the shared…[Read more]

In studying morality, the questions are all about “what” do we do and “why” do we do it?

Perhaps how is not as inspirational as why. As an engineer my schooling and career where consumed by the how. When I started managing a team of engineers in developing  a doppler weather RADAR, I found that I really had to drive in on the “WHY” we were doing this to inspire the team to figure out “HOW” we were actually going to do this.

Here’s Oliver Sacks, also focusing on hallucinations, but more specifically in patients experiencing them in the classic “I’m seeing or hearing things that aren’t there” sense. The link I’m providing skips past about half the video for people who want to just jump into the denser content, but you can click at the beginning of the time bar if you w…[Read more]

I have argued that point a few times 😉 It was established back in the 1590’s and until the 1970’s (I think) Catholics needed permission from their Church to attend. At the main entrance there is a statue of Oliver Goldsmith, the Irish poet and writer, with an opened book in his hand. It is rumored that if a virgin ever qualifies from Trinity the…[Read more]

lots of good videos in that  ‘trinity’ series Reg…but they gotta rename that place..