As we've discussed in recent posts on consciousness, I think imagination has a crucial role to play in animal consciousness. It's part of a hierarchy I currently use to keep the broad aspects of cognition straight in my mind. Reflexes, instinctive or conditioned responses to simuli Perception, which increases the scope of what the reflexes … Continue reading Adding imagination to AI
Month: July 2017
The difficulty of interstellar travel for humans
Futurism.com has an article reviewing the results of a survey they conducted with their readers asking when the first human might leave the solar system. The leading answer was after the year 2100, which make sense given our current level of progress just getting humans back out of low Earth orbit. But I think the … Continue reading The difficulty of interstellar travel for humans
Does information require conscious interpretation to be information?
Peter Kassan has an article at Skeptic Magazine which sets out to disprove the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we're all living in a computer simulation. I personally find arguing about the simulation hypothesis unproductive. Short of the simulation owner deciding to jump in and contact us, we can't prove the hypothesis. Even if the … Continue reading Does information require conscious interpretation to be information?
Layers of self awareness and animal cognition
In the last consciousness post, which discussed issues with panpsychism and simple definitions of consciousness, I laid out five functional layers of cognition which I find helpful when trying to think about systems that are more or less conscious. Just to recap, those layers are: Reflexes, primal reactions to stimuli. Perception, sensory models of the … Continue reading Layers of self awareness and animal cognition
Recommendation: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
One of the things that many space enthusiasts find frustrating about the space age is how slow it's moving, at least relative to its early years. Humans made it to the moon almost 50 years ago, but since then seem to have retreated to low Earth orbit, working in space stations just above the atmosphere. … Continue reading Recommendation: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
SelfAwarePatterns 