At various times while reading Anil Seth’s engaging and accessible Being You, I was reminded of the people in Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable, the subject of a previous blog post. Thomson was documenting the distinct experiences of people whose perception of themselves and/or the world around them depart substantially from what is typical: people who think they are tigers or dead or who can have their orientation to the world flipped instantaneously. Seth is giving an account more generally of why perception works the way it does, and so I found myself regularly wondering if his model accounts for the full breadth of perceptual experience. That is a testament both to how memorable Thomson’s accounts were and to how compelling Seth’s writing is that I believed his model probably could.
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consciousness
Science Corner: We Can Remember It for You Wholesnail
“You’ll never understand because you weren’t there.” One frequently hears that sentiment in one form or another, ironically reminding us that at least some experiences are universal. Our constant connection to what others are doing breeds FoMO, or the fear of missing out. Of course, no one has the time to do everything. But what if you could have the memories of being there without the bother of actually having to be there?
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Science Corner: Who’s Wearing You?
Scientists are reasonably confident that they can describe and study and explain the biological stuff you’re walking around in. The you part–the self that feels like it inhabits or animates that body and looks out at the world from it–that part is where things get a lot trickier. There were a couple of items circulating this week on the topic of self: an editorial on whether self is an illusion, and a discussion of the proposal that consciousness is a state of matter (named perceptronium, presumably by James Cameron). The second piece conveniently summarizes what we currently know for sure on these deep and fundamental topics: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Random Notes on Doctor Bot Ed: Part II
Picking up from Random Notes on Doctor Bot Ed (5/10/2012) . . .
Back to Robots!! Personally, despite my earlier remonstration, I would be quite happy to learn all sorts of subjects from a robot. A robot is not going to rob us of our humanity and despoil our personhood – after all, we have less to fear from machines ‘wanting’ to behave like humans, as much as humans wanting to behave like machines (Hence, my prefatory diatribe against the social engineering of technocrats and their worrisome bedfellows in academic bureaucrats). A better version of my objections are to be found in William James’ prescient essay entitled “The Ph.D. Octopus†published in the Harvard Monthly in 1903, that anticipates much of the problems that arise when universities and colleges turn into a factory for credentialing. The bean counters have triumphed (by this I don’t mean the social sciences as a whole, but rather a narrow instrumentalist application of a particular philosophy).
Welcoming Dr. Bot Ed into Higher Ed can have all sorts of advantages in terms of research in planetary exploration beyond our solar system, learning foreign languages or even the behavioral sciences, insofar as exercises in situated cognition are concerned and not to mention, advanced mathematics. Even though the thought-Âprocesses in a human mathematician’s mind is distinct from the processes governing automated theorem proving, at the base, mathematics is not sui generis human as much as they are patterns for discovery – imaginary numbers, complex numbers, other forms of irrational numbers even while having no correlates in nature or grounding in empirical reality are still about mind-dependent patterns that are not necessarily confined to our species. As a thought-experiment, there is nothing to suggest that a hypothetical ‘alien’ (play along folks) from an exoplanet, a super earth perhaps, could not independently stumble upon esoteric concepts in mathematics not unlike their counterparts in carbon-based clade of Eutheria upon this kindred clod of Earth. Still, the known history of mathematics despite the obstreperous intrusion of computers and other calculating gadgets is a testament to the resilience, creativity, and genius of human mathematicians. How could anyone not be moved by the apocryphal final words uttered by Archimedes “Do not disturb my circles†as a churlish Roman soldier was incensed to intemperate wrath because our beloved mathematician refused to meet conquering Roman General Marcus Claudius Marcellus simply because he did not want to be interrupted from his study, libations and oblations to Urania, the muse of astronomy. The young scoundrel killed the genius-savant while the stolen planisphere made its way to Rome. Every major mathematical discovery does involve an element of either the sage or the heroic making its history humane and immediate even while its concepts are too arcane for the rest of us. [Read more…] about Random Notes on Doctor Bot Ed: Part II