Tag Archives: Consciousness

What is it about phenomenal consciousness that’s so mysterious?

Posted on June 16, 2019 by

I learned something new this week about the online magazine The Conversation.  A number of their articles that are shared around don’t show up in their RSS feeds or site navigation.  It appears these articles only come up in searches, … Continue reading →

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The sparsity of phenomenal consciousness, or of cognition, or both

Posted on May 27, 2019 by

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 … Continue reading →

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The unfolding argument: why Integrated Information Theory is not scientific

Posted on May 12, 2019 by

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 … Continue reading →

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Michael Graziano’s attention schema theory

Posted on May 11, 2019 by

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. Those of you who’ve known me for … Continue reading →

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Are zombies conscious?

Posted on May 5, 2019 by

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 … Continue reading →

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Protecting AI welfare?

Posted on April 27, 2019 by

John Basl and Eric Schwitzgebel have a short article at Aeon arguing that AI (artificial intelligence) should enjoy the same protection as animals do for scientific research.  They make the point that while AI is a long way off from … Continue reading →

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Do boiling crawfish suffer?

Posted on April 23, 2019 by

This Easter I visited one of my cousins and, as is tradition for a lot of people this time of year, we had a crawfish boil.  Eating boiled crawfish (crayfish for you non-Cajuns) is an ever present activity in southern … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

Frans de Waal on animal consciousness

Posted on April 19, 2019 by

Frans de Waal is a well known proponent of animals being much more like us than many people are comfortable admitting.  In this short two minute video, he gives his reason for concluding that at least some non-human animals are … Continue reading →

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Is superintelligence possible?

Posted on April 10, 2019 by

Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers sat down to “debate” the possibility of superintelligence.  I quoted “debate” because this was a pretty congenial discussion. (Note: there’s a transcript of this video on the Edge site, which might be more time efficient … Continue reading →

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David Chalmers on the meta-problem of consciousness

Posted on April 6, 2019 by

David Chalmers is famous as the philosopher who coined the hard problem of consciousness, the idea that how and why consciousness is produced from a physical system, how phenomenal experience arises from such a system, is an intractably difficult issue.  … Continue reading →

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