Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
An interesting preprint was released this week: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness. The paper is long and has has sixteen authors, although two: Patrick Butlin and Robert Long, are flagged as the primaries. The list of contributors includes Jonathan Birch, Stephen Fleming, Grace Lindsay, Matthias Michel, and Eric Schwitzgebel, all … Continue reading How to tell if AI is conscious
It's been a few weeks since I last posted on social media and there have been developments. Twitter is now officially gone, replaced with X. For some reason, the symbolism of this move seems to have convinced a lot of people that the old Twitter is gone in a way the last several months of … Continue reading The need for self curation in social media
Zach Weinersmith is a man after my own heart when it comes to consciousness, as today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows. As the consciousness is in the eye of the beholder and hierarchy of definitions guy, I feel this comic. It also resonates with Jacy Reese Anthis' conscious semanticism outlook. Click through for the original … Continue reading SMBC: Consciousness: a definition thing
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
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?
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
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
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?
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
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