Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
I think the problem of consciousness is primarily one of definition. The word "consciousness" can refer to a range of concepts. Some of the concepts are scientifically tractable, while others, once we clarify them, are metaphysical assumptions that we can either choose to hold or dismiss. This is one of the reasons I find exploring … Continue reading Manifest and fundamental consciousness
This is the fourth in a series of posts on Jonathan Birch’s book, The Edge of Sentience. This one covers the section on artificial intelligence. Birch begins the section by acknowledging how counter intuitive the idea might be of sentience existing in systems we build, ones that aren't alive and have no body. But he urges us to … Continue reading The edge of sentience in AI
This is the third in a series of posts on Jonathan Birch's book, The Edge of Sentience. This one covers the section on animal sentience. I think it's fair to say that this is the section Birch is most passionate about. It's definitely the one where I feel his activism most keenly. A concept he … Continue reading The edge of sentience in animals
This is the second in a series of posts on Jonathan Birch's book, The Edge of Sentience. This one is on borderline cases of sentience in humans. Birch looks at cases involving humans with disorders of consciousness, such as those in vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as fetuses, embryos, and neural organoids made … Continue reading The edge of sentience in humans
I'm currently reading Jonathan Birch's The Edge of Sentience, a book focusing on the boundary between systems that can feel pleasure or pain, and those that can't, and the related ethics. While this is a subject I'm interested in, I'm leery of the activism the animal portions of it attract. I have nothing in particular … Continue reading The semantic indeterminacy of sentience
Spurred by a couple of recent conversations, I've been thinking about computation in the brain. It was accelerated this week by the news that the connectome of the fly brain is complete, a mapping of its 140,000 neurons and 55 million synapses. It's a big improvement over the 302 neurons of the C. Elegans worm, … Continue reading Classic and connectionist computationalism
What does the knowledge argument actually demonstrate? The argument, which shows up in various forms in numerous philosophical papers and thought experiments, is that we can have a complete physical understanding of a conscious being, but still not know how it feels to be that being. We can know everything about a bat's nervous system, … Continue reading The problem with the knowledge argument
Is studying conscious experience different from studying behavior? In a number of recent conversations I've had, the distinction between experience and behavior has come up. There's a strong sentiment that we can study behavior scientifically, including all the intermediate mental states that enable it. But experience is seen as something distinct from that, something that … Continue reading Experience and behavior
In the last thread, someone asked what exactly is it about consciousness that illusionists say is illusory? One quick answer is that for illusionists, the properties people see in experience that incline us to think that consciousness is a metaphysically hard problem, are what's illusory. In weak illusionism, the properties aren't what they seem. In … Continue reading Illusionism and functionalism
Can we in principle ever deduce the mental from the physical? Christopher Devlin Brown and David Papineau have a new paper out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled: Illusionism and A Posteriori Physicalism; No Fact of the Matter. (Note: the link is to a free version.) As the title makes clear, the overall gist … Continue reading Illusionism and types of physicalism
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