There is a great video on the subject here . It's illustrative of the "rabbit hole" we go down when trying to "explain" something. Ultimately, this is the same rabbit hole we go down when we try to "explain" anything. "What is consciousness'' has the same problems as "What is gravity?". Any "explanation" would be another description, requiring a certain amount of hand waving to count as pulling the curtain back. Toward the end, there is a discussion of the difference between "thoughts" and "reality." The problem is framing the issue as a "problem" to be solved. The "problem" can be reduced to the collapse of the wave function (see below). This is not to say we are not left with a mystery. It's just that it has nothing to do with "consciousness". For me, conscousness is a side issue. Certainly, consciousness is a vast mystery - perhaps THE mystery. But we don't ne...

Lifespan 100 but reaching limits around 120. Under the scenario, immortality is not assumed. Aging still happens Cancer < 100 rare, no Altzeimer's, most degenerative diseases conquered Molecular enhancements and bio advancements lead to a boost to brain activity in all ages. "work" on a military conscription model from an early age. People expect to contribute, train, and get rewarded for it. Calgary 2023 is a model for 2022. Wonderful indoor spaces. Library, Devonian Gardens Issue of assisted suicide - can people opt out, and under what conditions? The nature of AGI - is similar to the relationship of your iPhone to the cloud. Robots are appendages of cloud-based intelligence. Coin Artificial Global Intelligence. Embodiment makes a difference, but we may know something about "consciousness" by then.

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...

Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Descartes took it for granted that "mind" or "soul" existed in different universes. He wondered about how these universes communicated. Specifically, he wondered how "spirit" can move "matter". There are many who still take the idea of the spirit world seriously. They imagine the "soul" can be separated from the body and migrates on to some other universe (heaven) at death or somehow migrate to another body. Let's put this belief system to one side. From here on, I will speak to those who don't take this idea seriously. These days, those of us who are scientifically inclined imagine the "mind" to be a phenomenon that somehow happens in the Universe that is governed by physical law (and perhaps other laws so far undiscovered). Exactly how this happens is a live debate and a key area of investigation in the new university departments of "Cognitive Studies". These same departmen...

We all know what we are saying when we talk about what is meaningful to us. These are first-person statements. If the Universe is imagined as "outside" and the mind is "inside", meaning is on the "inside". Einstein remarked that he was amazed that the fundamental laws of nature are discoverable and, by the way, beautiful. There is something behind this observation that seems almost spiritual - in fact, people talk about " Einstein's God ". Wilczek asks the same question on " A Beautiful Question ". He's noting the same deep beauty Einstein is talking about and asking the subtle question - is the Universe "really" beautiful? So here's a possible road to a "solution" to the hard problem: How do we experience meaning in the Universe? How does it feel to find meaning? Damasio builds his account of "mind" on this very question. This is not merely an "outside" mechanical idea. It...

This post is fun to read once processed by Perplexity AI here . Len writes: My thoughts on this matter have to do with the physical substrate of consciousness and its possible dependence on entanglement as a means of messaging. Well .. "The physical substrate of consciousness" ... There are some metaphors and analogies in that idea that need to be made explicit (Hofstader's Surfaces and Essences is always looking over my shoulder). The analogy at work here seems to be that "consciousness" is like a thing of some sort - a kind of physical substance. It would seem to be as easy to think of consciousness as a process - particularly a kind of "calculation". It does seem that calculations need a "substrate" - a physical medium to work. Hofstadter spent a lot of time on this idea in his famous "Goedel, Escher, Bach", which won him a Pulitzer. In fact, the idea underlies most of the Science Fiction ideas about consciousness, incl...

Strange Order Of Things This is a hard review to write. In my opinion, Damasio is one of the greats when it comes to figuring out the secrets of "mind". I looked forward to this book. I reserved it from the library and when that was too slow, I bought the book. Damasio's approach is original and profound Sadly this particular book is flawed in so many ways I doubt it will have the impact it deserves.  The biggest problem is the " Fog Factor ". Great stretches of this book would be virtually inaccessible to all but the most determined reader due to run-on sentences, big words and tiresome repetition. It's just abominably written. The issue is compounded by the fact that Damasio seems to lose his thread of thought to ramble on in the final chapters about the sorry state of the world. Damasio is a brilliant brain scientist. As a commentator on world affairs, he has little of interest to offer. This is particularly disappointing since his general theory comes so...

This essay is an " intuition pump ". The term was invented by Daniel Dennet. An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to nudge us from our usual way of thinking to see the world in a new way. Bees have approximately one million neurons in 0.5 mm; humans have 100 billion neurons. And yet bees can learn, and understand abstract concepts,  and make complex decisions But does a bee know it's a bee? With a mere million neurons in a speck of a brain, it's not surprising that a bee doesn't have a lot of mental hardware for luxuries like "consciousness." Its brain is busy doing things like being a skillful a flight controller. It's not surprising that we don't have bee philosophers. But if we did, would they ask a similar question of us? Do we know we are human? Is it possible that I know less about what it is to be human than a bee knows about being a bee? But don't I know everything there is to know about the experience of b...

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 ...

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me. At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), b...

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” (one might say the same of Dennett, but that is another essay ...) "Origin" is an important book. It inspires more notes than will fit in a single post. A sympathetic portrait of the rather quirky Julian James can be found here . Jaynes was somewhat obsessed loner -- a "one book wonder" -- who spent his life chasing a rather off-beat idea of what it is to be conscious. As his title indicates, Jaynes tackles the issue of consciousness. The "Hard" problem of Consciousness is, Why does it feel the way it does? How can a lump of "stuff", no matter how complex its structure and function feel anything? I agree with the general consensus that Jaynes doesn't solve or even address the hard problem but, like the others, comes closer by helping to understand what consciousness is in the first place. His book is fu...

\ Quick and dirty definitions, to be clarified as we go along: R Refers to the "real world" . Accepted wisdom is that we have no direct access to R.  It turns out that we actually do have quite a good access to the R domain - the M/R interface, also known as "Science". For the individual, the I domain is tiny compared to the vastness of both M and R. However, with effort and training, it is possible for the individual to open a tiny peephole into R - at least so far as to put to rest the notion that R does not exist at all - that it's all an illusion. M refers to "meme space" or the entire set of ideas, actual and possible. For example, all of Science exists in M, uncomfortably with all religions, past, present and future. It is everything we know, could know, or think we know, possibly including all those things that may be conceivable by some alien intelligence or even "God." M happily accommodates all the wrong ideas and the opposite of ev...