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 friends described it as compelling, I finally checked it out, and spent the whole day … Continue reading Chernobyl and the costs of power
Category: Zeitgeist
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 justified it, beyond a vague proposition that while access consciousness involves information processing, maybe phenomenal … Continue reading The sparsity of phenomenal consciousness, or of cognition, or both
Is morality objective, yet relative?
Jason Mckenzie Alexander at iai.tv makes an interesting proposition, that morality is a social technology, one that goes out of date and frequently needs to be upgraded. He first describes the common sentiment that morals are objective in some timeless platonic sense. I discussed the problems with this view in a post a while back … Continue reading Is morality objective, yet relative?
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 slack, would the extra material make any noticeable difference to someone standing on the ground? … Continue reading Don’t trust your intuitions, they will betray you
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, it's moving away at 70 kilometers per second faster. So a galaxy 100 megapasecs away … Continue reading Is cosmology in crisis?
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 research in recent decades. A large body of empirical results has been accumulated, and many … Continue reading The unfolding argument: why Integrated Information Theory is not scientific
Michael Graziano’s attention schema theory
It's been a while since I've had a chance to highlight Graziano's attention schema theory. This brief video is the very barest of sketches, but I think it gets the main idea across. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MASBIB7zPo4 Those of you who've known me for a while might remember that I was once quite taken with this theory of … Continue reading Michael Graziano’s attention schema theory
Brain inspired hardware
The Scientist has an interesting article up reporting on the progress that's being made in neuromorphic hardware. But the fact that computers “think” very differently than our brains do actually gives them an advantage when it comes to tasks like number crunching, while making them decidedly primitive in other areas, such as understanding human speech … Continue reading Brain inspired hardware
Are zombies conscious?
This is not a question about philosophical zombies. I did a post on them a while back. (The TL;DR is that I find that whole concept ranges from incoherent to dubious, depending on the exact version.) This post is on the zombies we see in fiction, such as Night of the Living Dead, the Resident … Continue reading Are zombies conscious?
Emotions, feelings, and action programs
Sean Carroll's latest Mindscape podcast features an interview with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: When we talk about the mind, we are constantly talking about consciousness and cognition. Antonio Damasio wants us to talk about our feelings. But it’s not in an effort to be more touchy-feely; Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, believes that feelings … Continue reading Emotions, feelings, and action programs
SelfAwarePatterns 