Still alive. As I mentioned in the previous post back in October, the new job and family issues have been keeping me busy. Hopefully I'll get more time in the new year for blogging. A couple of people have suggested that I consider shorter posts more to generate discussion rather than waiting until I have … Continue reading Merry Christmas
Why I haven’t been posting lately
It's been a while since I've posted. It's probably fair to say that my posting frequency has plummeted to the lowest level since I started this blog in 2013. I feel obliged to offer an explanation. First, we've been undergoing an epic reorganization at work. In the early stages, this endeavor left me very unsettled … Continue reading Why I haven’t been posting lately
Breakthroughs in imagination
When thinking about human history, it's tempting to see some developments as inevitable. Some certainly were, but the sheer amount of time before some of them took place seem to make them remarkable. The human species, narrowly defined as Homo sapiens, is about 200,000 years old. Some argue that it's older, around 300,000 years, others … Continue reading Breakthroughs in imagination
The extraordinary low probability of intelligent life
Marc Defant gave a TEDx talk on the improbable events that had to happen in our planet's history for us to eventually evolve, along with the implications for other intelligent life in the galaxy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nCOhrYV7eg I find a lot to agree with in Defant's remarks, although there are a couple points I'd quibble with. The … Continue reading The extraordinary low probability of intelligent life
The layers of emotion creation
What are emotions? Where do they come from? Are they something innate or something we learn? The classic view is that they're precognitive impulses that happen to us. If so, this would imply that they have specific neural signatures. Early in her career, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett attempted to isolate the neural basis of emotions … Continue reading The layers of emotion creation
Politics is about self interest
I've read a lot of history, including American history of the 18th and 19th centuries. It's interesting to read about the politics of these periods. From a distance across generations and centuries, you can see the distinction between the self interested stances people took and the rhetoric that was used to justify those stances. An … Continue reading Politics is about self interest
Adding imagination to AI
As we've discussed in recent posts on consciousness, I think imagination has a crucial role to play in animal consciousness. It's part of a hierarchy I currently use to keep the broad aspects of cognition straight in my mind. Reflexes, instinctive or conditioned responses to simuli Perception, which increases the scope of what the reflexes … Continue reading Adding imagination to AI
The difficulty of interstellar travel for humans
Futurism.com has an article reviewing the results of a survey they conducted with their readers asking when the first human might leave the solar system. The leading answer was after the year 2100, which make sense given our current level of progress just getting humans back out of low Earth orbit. But I think the … Continue reading The difficulty of interstellar travel for humans
Does information require conscious interpretation to be information?
Peter Kassan has an article at Skeptic Magazine which sets out to disprove the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we're all living in a computer simulation. I personally find arguing about the simulation hypothesis unproductive. Short of the simulation owner deciding to jump in and contact us, we can't prove the hypothesis. Even if the … Continue reading Does information require conscious interpretation to be information?
Layers of self awareness and animal cognition
In the last consciousness post, which discussed issues with panpsychism and simple definitions of consciousness, I laid out five functional layers of cognition which I find helpful when trying to think about systems that are more or less conscious. Just to recap, those layers are: Reflexes, primal reactions to stimuli. Perception, sensory models of the … Continue reading Layers of self awareness and animal cognition
SelfAwarePatterns 