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What is it about phenomenal consciousness that’s so mysterious?
I learned something new this week about the online magazine The Conversation. A number of their articles that are shared around don’t show up in their RSS feeds or site navigation. It appears these articles only come up in searches, … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged access consciousness, Consciousness, panpsychism, phenomenal consciousness, Stanislas Dehaene, Steve Taylor
1 Comment
Chernobyl and the costs of power
When I first heard of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, it didn’t sound like something I’d be interested in watching. I generally don’t have a fascination for disaster porn and that’s mostly what it seemed like from a distance. But after numerous … Continue reading
Recommendation: Children of Ruin
Last year I recommended Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, a novel about the far future involving a struggle between an interstellar ark of refugees from a dying Earth and an accidental civilization of uplifted spiders over the one terraformed world … Continue reading
Posted in Science Fiction
Tagged Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, Science fiction, Space opera
18 Comments
The sparsity of phenomenal consciousness, or of cognition, or both
Ned Block gave a Google talk (embedded below) that was ostensibly supposed to be about why AI approaches to cognition won’t work. However, while he does address this topic briefly, it’s toward the end and he admits he hasn’t really … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged access consciousness, Consciousness, Ned Block, phenomenal consciousness, Philosophy of Mind
31 Comments
Reflections on Game of Thrones
(Warning: Here be spoilers!) Last week was the series finale for Game of Thrones, a series I’d been watching from the very beginning. Indeed, I first discovered George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books way back … Continue reading
Don’t trust your intuitions, they will betray you
A video at Aeon well worth checking out on what wrapping a rope around the Earth reveals about the limits of human intuition: If you tied a rope tight around the Earth’s equator and then added a single yard of … Continue reading
Is cosmology in crisis?
In past posts, when I’ve written about the expansion of the universe, I’ve generally referred to the rate of that expansion, the Hubble constant, as being around 70 km/s/megaparsec, that is, for every megaparsec a galaxy is distant from us, … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged Astronomy, astrophysics, Big Bang, Cosmology, Physics, Science, Space
23 Comments
Recommendation: The Nanotech Succession
Okay, having already recommended two of Linda Nagata’s books, Vast and Edges, I finally got around to reading the first and second book of her Nanotech Succession series. (I haven’t read the “zeroeth” book so this recommendation doesn’t include it.) … Continue reading
Posted in Science Fiction
Tagged Linda Nagata, Science fiction, Space opera, The Nanotech Succession
5 Comments
The unfolding argument: why Integrated Information Theory is not scientific
There’s an interesting new paper in Consciousness and Cognition on why causal theories such as IIT (integrated information theory) or RPT (recurrent processing theory) aren’t scientific: How can we explain consciousness? This question has become a vibrant topic of neuroscience … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged Brain, Consciousness, IIT, Integrated Information Theory, Mind
37 Comments
