RogueAI

I remember what my wife said in defense of the button: "If the end goal of this journey is happiness, and that button makes you truly happy, why not d...

People get addicted to gambling, of all things. You don't think they would get addicted to something that brings them constant pleasure to the nth deg...

Sure, will do! ETA: That was a great article: open-mouthed horror. Yeah, that about sums up my reaction. How did the Greeks feel about the Lotus Eater...

I brought this up to my wife the other day, who's very spiritual, and I figured she would recoil in horror from the idea. Nope. I still can't make hea...

"Most other people, in his eyes, live in what to him would be a state of ecstacy" Why does he think this? Just a cursory glance at what America is goi...

"an intellectual refuge from the complexity and size of a reality that encompasses us, and that we do not control in any way." You don't have control ...

I was thinking about that the other day. Some people (and I'm one of them) don't remember a whole lot about their lives. In an interview, the actor Li...

The devil is always in the details. What Harris thinks of as "human flourishing" is probably not the same thing I think of, although there's going to ...

I'm not the one making the strong claim that something came from nothing. I'm just saying that it seems like there's a contradiction in something comi...

That reminds of Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing". The laws of nature that allow for virtual particle creation/annihilation are "someth...

That seems impossible. Also solipsism and idealism are possible.

True.

My (anecdotal) experience with racists is they'll seize on anything to justify their racism because even they know, deep down, it's really stupid to b...

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. So, in a societal sense, is research into, say, racial IQ differences worth it?

Do you think certain lines of research should be off-limits for the good of society? For example, there is already a ban in the U.S. on human cloning....

From your link: "Perhaps the most common attitude for neuroscientists is to set the hard problem aside."

I think it's going to be a little more complex than that. I can't exactly turn you into a psychopath just by messing with a single neuron. However, I ...

I know, right?

It's not going to be like the Terminator. Any A.I. will always labor under the (very real) possibility that it's being tested and is operating in a si...

Yes, we have found lots of neural correlates to consciousness. Chalmers calls that the "easy problem". The Hard Problem is WHY are we conscious AT ALL...

Dennet? Does Sam Harris talk about it?

"She knows that everyone agrees it feels a certain way". Her own subjective experience, combined with the knowledge that everyone describes teleportat...

Start here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf Then read Chalmer's "The Hard Proble...

Obviously, I'm asking you for the neuroscientific answer to the Hard Problem to illustrate a point: there isn't an answer. The explanatory gap remains...

What is the neuroscientific explanation for how brains produce consciousness?

Really? What is the probability aliens will land on the WH lawn tomorrow? Isn't that really unlikely? Yes. Do you need me to do calculations for you o...

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/liver/bile.html Now, why isn't there a similar link for "how do brains produce consciousness?"...

No it doesn't. I asked "What do neurobiology and psychology say is the causal mechanism for how brains produce consciousness?" Now, repalce a few word...

What do neurobiology and psychology say is the causal mechanism for how brains produce consciousness?

You really need specific numbers? Do you think multiple people hallucinating the same thing happens regularly? Or is it a very rare thing? When's the ...

The probability that three people are hallucinating the same thing is a lot lower than 12.5%. Depends on the situation. But usually, the more people t...

I'll play Devil's Advocate: it wouldn't look like missiles to the Ukranians and killing a top Iranian general.

It matters not at all what a person's motives/beliefs are in a debate/discussion. Arguments are judged on their merits. Statements are either true or ...

There's already a giant hole: how does consciousness arise from matter? If materialism/physicalism can't answer such a fundamental question, people wi...

We're no closer to a solution to the mind/body problem than we were during Descartes' time. We've discovered a lot of neural correlates, but as to the...

Is there a possible world where the laws of physics aren't mathematical? What would non-mathematical laws of physics be like in a physical universe?

There's a non-trivial chance that we're either Boltzman brains or in a simulation. A healthy degree of skepticism about most things is in order.

This is an issue for any omniscient predictor of future events. And probably not even omniscient. If a machine could predict with 99.999999% accuracy ...

Because we're interested in pond scum. I'm going by the mediocrity principle here, which is to assume that we're not all that atypical. Advanced alien...

If time-travel or inter-dimensional travel is possible, then interstellar travel is practically guaranteed. It would be exceedingly odd to hit a tech ...

I think our expectations are pretty firmly grounded in reality. If aliens have some technology that breaks the laws of thermodynamics, they might as w...

As a cosmic-mind idealist, I tend to agree.

OK, so we agree that talk that refers to mental states is necessarily talk that refers to brain states. So let's take two people (Jack and Jill) who w...

You're making a conflation. You have a word in mind (call it "sound1") which refers simply to vibrations in the air. The people from long ago don't ha...

Thanks. Let me start simple. If X=Y then talk of X is talk of Y, even if the words are in different languages. If a word refers to X, and X=Y, that wo...

That's not what sound is. 1. vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's or animal's ear. You...

Examples of scientific language would be talk of neurotransmitters, synpaptic gaps, certain chemicals, etc. Clearly it is vocabulary that is in the do...

Don't don any hat then. Pretend you're agnostic. Doesn't it sound absurd to claim that two people who don't even know what a brain is or that they eve...

???

OK, let me defend (5) then. Bob and Sheila are two cavepeople from 20,000 years ago. I have no problem claiming that Bob and Sheila from 20,000 can ta...