This week, as announced a couple of months ago, the Twitter feed on my blog's sidebar finally broke. It was removed to put it out of its misery. This came after a fresh week of chaos at Twitter itself. Last week Elon Musk announced that you had to be logged in to view tweets. Which … Continue reading The sorry state of social media
Author: SelfAwarePatterns
A middle aged guy who loves discussing science, philosophy, history, science fiction, and many other nerdy topics.
Experiencing without knowing?
On Twitter, the Neuroskeptic shared a new paper, in which an Israeli team claims to have demonstrated phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness: Experiencing without knowing? Empirical evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access. A quick reminder. In the 1990s Ned Block famously made a distinction between phenomenal consciousness (p-consciousness) and access consciousness (a-consciousness). P-consciousness is conceptualized … Continue reading Experiencing without knowing?
Slow Time Between the Stars
This weekend Locus Magazine announced the winners of this year's Locus Awards. John Scalzi's novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, won the award for best science fiction novel. Shortly after the announcement, Scalzi took some criticism online for the quality of his writing. Apparently people don't think he does it right, that his writing is too … Continue reading Slow Time Between the Stars
Workspace vs integration: results starting to come in
A few years ago it was announced that The Templeton Foundation was funding an adversarial collaboration on theories of consciousness. The initial plan was to pit Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) against Integrated Information Theory (IIT), although the initiative plans to move on to other theories once these have been tested. Early on, I had … Continue reading Workspace vs integration: results starting to come in
Heaven’s River
Some years ago I did post reviewing Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse series. In the first book, Bob Johansson wakes up in the future to discover that he died but that his mind was uploaded into a computer. He's forced into being the control system for a Von Neumann probe, a self replicating interstellar craft. Being … Continue reading Heaven’s River
Avatar: The Way of Water, and mind uploading
As usual, I'm late to the party, not having seen this in the theaters. But it became available for streaming this weekend. As with the first, it's a visually stunning movie. And also as with the first, while I know I was supposed to be captivated by the animals and vegetation, and was to some … Continue reading Avatar: The Way of Water, and mind uploading
The Immortality Thief
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
The Final Architecture
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
Twitter sidebar going away?
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?
The Protectorate trilogy
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
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