Interesting stuff

Picture: correspondent. Have you seen Kar Lee’s book Where are the zombies? I don’t quite agree with his conclusions, but I really like the way he sets out the problem.

Array tomography has revealed that the brain is even more staggeringly complex than we thought. I must confess that I understand the huge numbers involved about as well as a dog understands algebra, but this would seem to be bad news for brain simulation projects.

There’s an interesting video of Alva Noë on Edge.

You can now hear John Searle’s philosophy of mind lectures from Berkeley on iTunes (via). I’m afraid they haven’t been edited, so you can also hear Searle dealing with a lot of routine admin and bitching about the size of the room.

Interesting Stuff – July 2010

Picture: correspondent. Paul Almond’s Attempt to Generalize AI has reached part 13 (pdf), which introduces the idea of reflexive outputs.  Earlier pieces in the series and non-pdf versions are on the same site.

Gilbert Wesley Purdey has produced the T=0 Complexity Theory of Consciousness, which is based on a new attempt to tackle the surprisingly durable problem of defining consciousness, and is grounded in ‘a reformed-Macleanian overview of the evolution of the brain’. The idea that ‘Consciousness is an emergent property of the grey matter of the neo-cortex’ is one which many will accept fairly readily, but there are some unusual and interesting conclusions developed in the course of the discussion.

Carey R Carlson, whose views I briefly discussed a while ago has produced a new paper Causal Set Theory and the Origin of Mass-ratio.

Huping Hu has added a forum to the JCER site.

Interesting stuff – March 2010

Picture: correspondent. Aspro Potamos has drawn my attention to the emerging series of YouTube videos, somewhat polemical in tone, on the War against Neuroscience.   If you prefer something less forensic, you may like this series of podcasts on music and the brain from the Library of Congress.

Huping Hu, whose research has been mentioned here in the past, has started the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research: the inaugural issue is available online.

Ayad Gharbawi says:

I have been doing my own studies and research for thirty years now on three concepts: Mind, Vision and Reality. I felt it necessary to create novel notations, just as others, like Boole, did, because of the inadequacies of language as per this subject. I believe that I have come to an entirely new methodology when we seek to understand two fundamental issues when we study Mind, Vision and Reality and that is – both their Structure and the Function.

I have been deeply, fundamentally and existentially affected by Quantum Physics as a human being and in my own pattern of thinking and analyzing problems before me.  I obviously understand full well that my work is unorthodox because I am not just presenting a study in one particular niche in these studies – although, of course, I have studied specific issues – but, I am at this stage in my life, in a position to say that I have come to a general theory that comprises an understanding of Mind, Vision and Reality.

That is why, when I have presented one study/manuscript it is often difficult to make any sense from it, and the reason here is because, those single manuscripts that I have been submitting, do not, in and of themselves alone, explain fully my general theory on Mind, Vision and Reality.  I also know full well, that the history of science, shows far too many times, that when one researcher submits an entirely, unorthodox novel methodology in his thinking, he is quite likely to be rejected by the general established body of scientists and philosophers.

But, I still do try.

A sample is here; he particularly asks for views on two pieces here and here.

Interesting Stuff: December 2009

Picture: correspondent. One of the nice things about doing Conscious Entities is that from time to time people send me links to interesting things; new papers,  lectures, or ideas of their own.  I regret that I have generally kept this stuff to myself in the past, although it often deserves a mention, so I’ve been thinking about how best to deal with it. I would welcome suggestions, but as an experiment I’ve decided to try occasional round-up posts: so here goes.

Jesús Olmo, to whom many thanks, recently drew my attention to this review of  The Ego Tunnel; to PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness, and to the site Conscious Robots.

M.E. Tson has a Brief Explanation of Consciousness.

Mark Muhlestein has a thought experiment Consciousness and 2D Computation: a Curious Conundrum, and has been corresponding with David Chalmers. My own view is as follows.

I think causal relations are the crux of the matter. A computation essentially consists of a series of states of a Turing machine, doesn’t it? Normally each state is caused by the preceding state. Is that an essential feature? I think in the final analysis we’d say no, because the existence of a computation is really a matter of interpretation on the part of the observer. If the different states in the sequence are just written down on sheets of paper, we’d probably still be willing to call it a computation, or at least, we would in one sense. There’s another sense in which I personally wouldn’t: if we read ‘computation’ as meaning an actual run of a given algorithm, or an instantiation of the computation, I think the causal relationships have to be in place.

Now this would be even truer in the case of mental operations leading to consciousness. The causal relations in a Turing machine are to some degree artificial: the fact that we can program them in is really the point. In the human brain, by contrast, the causal relations are direct and arise from the physical constitution of the brain. To exhibit the relevant series of states (even if we assume consciousness in the brain is a matter of discrete states, which actually seems rather unlikely)would not be enough – they have to have caused each other directly in the right way for this to be an actual ‘run’ of the consciousness faculty.

It follows that your projected lights don’t give rise to a consciousness, or perhaps even to a computation. Does this mean I think zombies of some kind are possible? No, because the interesting kind of zombie is physically identical with a real person, and the projected lights are significantly different from the occurrence of the actual run of the computation. Real zombies remain impossible, and all we’re left with is a kind of puppet.

Readers of my post earlier this year about Sam Coleman’s views may be interested to see the nice comments he has provided.

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