Zen and its Western cousin, "Mindfulness" were a stop on my long journey to self-discovery. They introduced me to a line of investigation through subjective experience. In spite of the strong tradition against a philosophical interpretation in Taoism and Zen, all this came with a certain amount of "theory". To make a long story short, these disciplines challenge our idea of the "self" and, following ancient Buddhist tradition, regard the self (whatever that is) as impermanent**. Some would go as far as to claim that the self is an illusion. The Western "scientific" branch would claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain. Sam Harris is a leading popularizer of this view and he claims extensive subjective experience (hundreds of hours of meditation) as his "evidence". Antonio Damasio takes a different view, based on thousands of case studies (a more trustworthy kind of "evidence"). His view is that our fee...

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ... The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in. Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation. Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence. That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectual...

Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like. For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible . The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable . For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that ...

TED Talk: Can we build AI without losing control over it? This talk packs most AI mythology into a single 15 minute presentation. Harris joins a long list of "talking heads" that warn us that AI is a clear and present danger. We are just around the corner from an AI armageddon.  His bottom line is that this disaster is real and unavoidable. His complaint is that we are not sufficiently scared about it. AI, like the concept of God, becomes more and more real in the public mind just because everyone is talking about it. His assumptions: Intelligence is a matter of information processing . He employs the fallacy that our brains are "mere matter" so we will eventually build something like brains because our brains are just "mere matter" We will continue to improve our machines . We don't stand on a peak of intelligence . He assumes that intelligence is defined as in #1 and puts everyone on a curve between a chicken and John Van Neuman. It's "overw...

Interesting discussion between leading atheists  Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris , Ayaan Hirsi Ali A wide-ranging discussion of subtle issues with atheism, including an unusually subtle treatment of why people accept religion - the process of assimilation and the difficulty in freeing people from assimilation. Risks associated with criticizing Islam; When to take the gloves off - being polite to people who have been indoctrinated; Vetting the authorities; How liberal kids get assimilated to radical Islam; Sam Harris speaks eloquently about the powerful meme of Islam; Dawkins doesn't understand that everyone doesn't think like he does; Dennett refers to the "narrative arc" in TV shows and movies, which primes a person for assimilation; The appeal of Islam to intelligent, liberal women; Ali calls Islam a form of madness; Dennett compares crime committed for religious reasons with drunk driving Harris points out that religious delusion is excluded in DSM  Ar...