This is a talk by  John Searle , one of the "grey beards" in the AI field. It is remarkable that this was delivered in 2015 and is now charmingly obsolete. "Nobody has begun to think ..." His reliance on the idea that computers are all Turing machines is dated. He is over-confident in his answers to the "young Turks," who turn out to be building precisely what he thinks is impossible. Like other philosophers, he relies on a "101" understanding of a computer. For example, he highlights the idea that you need to be conscious to frame a question. Something it "feels like" is the essence - such as Damasio. Philosophy ... Inventor of some ideas popularized by Hofstadter The crucial element of "semantics" over "syntax" and the claim that computers can never do anything more than play with syntax (language). I would say that this misunderstands the nature of language, as Hofstadter describes language as an analogy engine. S...

I am particularly attracted to the idea of the "fractal", which is a scale-independent repetition of a theme. Nature seems to "discover" a few patterns then use them in endless patterns and variations. This is one of the building blocks of what is taking shape as a "theory of mind". To build a "super mind", it would make sense to design the largest scale of this mind in the cloud to tap the computational power of millions of volunteer machines (as in the cloud project to classify galaxies). However, perhaps this as already been done. At least to serve in my "thought experiment", Google may be enough. The "theme" that has me fascinated is the mapping of one brain state into another, using something similar to the Shrodinger Wave Equation. That equation describes the state of the universe in the "next instant" as a function of the state of the universe in the "previous instant". The mental equivalent would be...

" Laws of Form " are the foundation for mathematics based on the fundamental idea of categorization. Any freshman course will show how all of mathematics is built up on the foundation of set theory - the logic of categories. Even in High School, we are taught that there is no such thing as a "real" circle - in the real world, things that we call circles are actually only approximately circular. But we are left with the idea that a circle is a "real thing". "More real", in fact, than the circles of actual experience. We take the form of distinction for the form." There is a circularity in bringing into words what is quite clear without them. And yet it is in the bringing forth into formalisms that mathematics is articulated and universes of discourse come into being. The elusive beginning, before there was a difference, is the eye of the storm, the calm center from which these musings spring. There is a delicious circularity in this idea - so...

There is one place in our field of vision where we are blind , due to the "Rube Goldberg" design of our eyes. Octopuses have better eyes (presumably "designed" by a more skilful God, but don't get me started). Even though there is a patch of our retina devoted to passing the optical nerve through the retina, we don't "see" the hole. Our brains paint it over with what "ought" to be there. We are born with another huge blind spot. We have a full, 360 degree view of the world, in which we are free to explore and move around, but at the very centre is a hollow hole. We seem to be peering out of the hole but cannot see inside. We know that what is really inside this hole is 3 pounds of gooey meat that is somehow responsible for everything we see, but, just like the optic nerve that penetrates our retina, this bundle of nerves thoroughly hides its presence. We are all like this, all looking out from hollow heads. It is incredibly difficult to s...

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience". This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals. Mind Maps One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informal...

In spite of its official contempt for merely human ideas, Zen encompasses a wide variety of ideas. The most important one is inherited from Buddhism: the idea that the mind itself is an illusion. I'm calling this particular idea from Zen the "Z" meme, with due recognition that there is more to Zen than this meme. In fact, Zen meditation is particularly valuable in allowing the practitioner to sharpen his skills in self-reflection: the first step in answering the question, What am I. The Z meme purports to answer this question in a particular way (answer: nothing). I think this idea arises from fundamental errors of categorization and imagination. We are no longer required to think of the mind as a special kind of "stuff" (as Descartes did). We now routinely speak of "things" like processes and structures which are clearly real - not "illusions". Of course, there is usually some kind of old-fashioned "stuff" involved, but you can...

The " Dragon " blog plays with the idea of an emergent property of human organizations that creates a super-organism, "alive" in many respects. In Hofstadter's "Mind's I", (page 192) he sketches what, according to his theory, it would take for us to talk about something to have a "mind". It turns out to hinge on what H. calls a " representational system " - one that dynamically reflects what itself is "about". This has two aspects. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of self-reflection. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of perception - the special case of memes that more or less directly attach to events outside of the organism. It seems to me that governments and corporations qualify on both counts. Condition (1) is basically the condition that a discipline such as "Management Science" exists. Places like the Harvard Business School constantly pump out memes that are ...

If we are to think seriously about the consciousness and he brain, we need to consider the work of Douglas Hofstadter , the preeminent modern thinker on the subject. Hofstadter coined the term "neosphere" as the universe of memes , or ideas. In "I Am A Strange Loop", he explores what we mean when we say "I". Along the way, we learn to picture our mind in a completely new way, as a dynamic generator of memes, woven out of other memes and episodic memory. What we experience as "I" is the "master meme", the name we give to the process of meme-weaving we experience at any moment. The "master meme" is self referential or "recursive", which means it includes itself as part of its "explanation" of what is going on. Our language requires an "experiencer" for every experience, and this experiencer is (recursively) called "I" as well. This is Hofstader's  "Strange Loop". According to...

The "R" meme is the most powerful and widely-shared meme: that there is a "real world out there" independent of our minds. This is the intuitive insight that is denied or at least challenged by "Idealism" [1]. Denial of R turns out to be a powerful " intuition pump ". We imagining that the "real world" does not exist at all, and it's "all in our minds". This is a rather strong denial of Idealism, since an Idealist would, I think, admit that the real world exists -- just that we can't know anything about it other than what pops up in our minds. At the risk of spoiling the plot, the view of this blog is that the brain can be thought of as a fantastically complex and specially-constructed knot that intimately ties the mind M to the world R. This connection is so intimate that it is, in practice, impossible to say where mind ends and world begins [2]. In effect, this frames "Idealism" as a discussion about a dis...