Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
There's an interesting debate going on among some neuroscientists about which parts of the brain are involved in subjective experience. On the one side are Christof Koch, Giuilio Tononi, and colleagues who argue that consciousness exists wholly in the back of the brain, that the frontal structures are not involved. On the other side are neuroscientists … Continue reading Is consciousness only in the back of the brain?
One of the categories here on the blog is Science Fiction, mainly because I read and watch a lot of it. Occasionally, someone wanting to get into the literary version of the genre asks me for recommendations on good initial books to start with. My recommendation often depends on the person, but I frequently suggest they try … Continue reading The success of John Scalzi’s descriptive minimalism
In this Big Think video, Steven Pinker makes a point I've made before, that fear of artificial intelligence comes with a deep misunderstanding about the relationship between intelligence and motivation. Human minds come with survival instincts, programmatic goals hammered out by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Artificial intelligence isn't going to have those … Continue reading Why fears of an AI apocalypse are misguided
YouTube channel Crash Course is starting a new series on what is perhaps the most social of social sciences: Sociology. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnCJU6PaCio The social sciences, such as sociology, but also psychology, economics, anthropology, and other similar fields get a lot of grief from people about not being "real" science. This criticism is typically justified by noting … Continue reading Are the social sciences “real” science?
Mary's room is a classic philosophical thought experiment about consciousness. The Wikipedia article on what's called the knowledge argument quotes Frank Jackson, the originator of the argument, as follows: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white … Continue reading What about subjective experience implies anything non-physical?
I read a lot of books, and as I've posted about before, the lion share of those books these days are Kindle e-books. E-books aren't for everyone, but for the last several years they've been my preferred way to consume a book. I love the way I can buy a book and immediately start reading it, the … Continue reading Kindle Oasis: a quick review
Occasionally on this blog, when pondering the far future, I've pushed back on the idea that the long term fate of civilization is to be machine robotic type life, instead noting that a truly advanced civilization would instead be engineered life, that it would make a lot more sense for its "machines" to be biological systems. Admittedly, … Continue reading Recommendation: The Stars Are Legion
One of the things that's exciting about learning new things, is that often a new understanding in one area sheds light on what might seem like a completely separate topic. For me, information about how the brain works appears to have shed new light on a question in the philosophy of of science, where there has long … Continue reading What do scientific theories actually tell us about the world?
This weekend, I watched the movie 'Arrival'. It starts off with the now common scenario of several floating ships appearing in the skies around the world. But unlike most movies in this mold, it focuses on humanity's efforts to communicate with the aliens and understand why they've come. The protagonist is an expert in linguistics. I … Continue reading Arrival, the shape of aliens, and bridging the communication barrier
I've talked before about Roger Perry's famous split-brain patient experiments. Patients with severe epileptic seizures used to undergo a collosotomy, a procedure to cut the connections between the left and right hemispheres of their cerebrum. It often helped alleviate their symptoms and, remarkably, the patients afterward remained mentally functional, at least to outside appearances. Each hemisphere … Continue reading Split brain does not lead to split consciousness – University of Amsterdam
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