BIP-Better Intuition Pumps, Outline

By Wayne Brown

  1. Introduction - Intuition pumps, thanks to Dennett. Basic "pumps" - zombies, "kinda", heterophenomenology, memes etc.
  2. M-The Wonderful Mind. "Mind" as the 1st person account of "all there is" - the Universe.  Can heterophenomenology tell us anything interesting about the mind? Is there anything it must leave out?
  3. Object Oriented Analysis - OOA - How Computers Really Work
    • OOA as the "meme" behind a large class of human-made machines
    • Self-replication - an alternative to "life"
  4. What is life? Are we machines?
    • Why life is "poorly designed" from the OOA perspective
      • Is DNA "software"?
      • Are protein molecules machines?
      • Are living things "objects" or "classes" of objects in the OOA sense?
    • Why poor design may be a feature, not a bug
  5. The Xombie - Can we build a person?
    • Using OOA to sketch a schematic for a Xombie
    • Complete set of human senses and "memory bank" 
    • Ability to learn, discover, make mistakes, "know" things that are not true
    • Ability to create
    • Deep Blue - state of the art treated as a "black box component" having meaningful access to all human knowledge as well as what humans don't know
    • What might not be "obvious" to a Xombie?
    • What would count as Xombie "thinking"
    • Why would a Xombie "want" to do anything? Minsky discussion
    • Would the Xombie mind be superior to the human mind in any fundamental way?
  6. Emergence - ant hills, armies, corporations. 
  7. Emergence - the Internet. Is it alive? Can it ever be? Will it take over?
  8. Is a corporation alive? What is the corporate mind? Is it alive?
  9. Consciousness. What's the problem?

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