Tag Archives: Mind

The system components of pain

Posted on June 5, 2017 by

Peter Hankins at Conscious Entities has a post looking at the morality of consciousness, which is a commentary on piece at Nautilus by Jim Davies on the same topic.  I recommend reading both posts in their entirety, but the overall … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Why embodiment does not make mind copying impossible

Posted on May 1, 2017 by

A while back, I highlighted a TEDX talk by Anil Seth where he discussed that cognition is largely a prediction machine.  Apparently Seth more recently gave another talk at the full TED conference, which is receiving rave reviews.  Unfortunately, that talk … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Steven Pinker: From neurons to consciousness

Posted on April 15, 2017 by

This lecture from Steven Pinker has been around for a while, but it seems to get at a question a few people have asked me recently: how does the information processing of neurons and synapses lead to conscious perception?  Pinker doesn’t answer this … Continue reading →

Posted in Zeitgeist | Tagged , , , , , | 14 Comments

Is consciousness only in the back of the brain?

Posted on April 6, 2017 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Why fears of an AI apocalypse are misguided

Posted on March 22, 2017 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Zeitgeist | Tagged , , , , , | 58 Comments

What about subjective experience implies anything non-physical?

Posted on March 9, 2017 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 98 Comments

What do scientific theories actually tell us about the world?

Posted on February 9, 2017 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 75 Comments