Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
Still on a fiction binge. The most recent one is The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt. It appears to be Hunt's first novel, and the writing shows a few rough edges, but not in any way that detracts from the experience of the story. The setting is an interstellar future. Humanity appears to be dominated … Continue reading The Immortality Thief
Still fighting dental issues, and so still burning through a lot of fiction. The latest is Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture trilogy. This is epic space opera in the spirit of James S.A. Corey's The Expanse, featuring a ragtag spaceship crew finding themselves embroiled in a war between different species and empires, and an overall … Continue reading The Final Architecture
Came across a blog post from John Scalzi this morning, advising that WordPress had informed him that his blog's sidebar Twitter feed would stop working soon. I haven't heard anything from WordPress about my own sidebar feed, but if it's going to stop working for VIP customers like Scalzi, I can't imagine it will be … Continue reading Twitter sidebar going away?
I haven't been posting much lately, mostly due to complications from a dental procedure. Often when sick and in pain, I fall back on entertainment to pass the time, and Megan O'Keefe's Protectorate trilogy turned out to be what I needed: a long epic tale with interesting concepts and compelling characters. In the far future … Continue reading The Protectorate trilogy
This is a long video. The first hour or so features presentations on the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory by Stanislas Dehaene, Recurrent Processing Theory by Victor Lamme, Higher Order Thought Theory by Steve Fleming, and Integration Information Theory by Melanie Boly. It also has some brief recorded remarks from Anil Seth on Predictive Coding. (Fleming … Continue reading The Great Consciousness Debate: ASSC 25
I recently did a post on Riccardo Manzotti’s interesting IAI article: There is no problem of consciousness (warning: possible paywall). In that article, Manzotti described his Mind Object Identity hypothesis. He also published a paper on this idea in 2019, which goes into much more detail. A quick recap. We make a mistake, he argues, in trying to … Continue reading Q&A on the Mind Object Identity hypothesis
Children of Memory is the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's trilogy: Children of Time. This series chronicles the rise of an interstellar civilization. At the beginning of the series, humanity has begun projects to terraform several planets in other solar systems. The plan is to use a genetic virus to uplift (make sapient) an implanted … Continue reading Children of Memory
In the history of discussions about consciousness, there have always been ideas that some aspects of human experience are irreducible to physics. Colors have long had a special place in these discussions. During the scientific revolution, colors lost their status as objective properties in the world, with people like Galileo relegating them to secondary qualities … Continue reading The function of color
Matt O'Dowd is starting to look at a question I find extremely interesting. What is the ontology of spacetime? A lot of physicists have begun to wonder whether its fundamental, or emergent from something else. Quantum entanglement is the one I'm familiar with, but I understand there are other possibilities. (This video is 26 minutes … Continue reading Is the question whether spacetime is real, or whether it’s fundamental?
This week the latest Mind Chat episode focused on whether regular people actually perceive a hard problem of consciousness, or if it's an issue largely created by philosophers. Keith Frankish and Philip Goff interview Michelle Liu and Edouard Machery. (The video is a bit over two hours. You don't necessarily need to watch it to … Continue reading Do regular people see a hard problem of consciousness?
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