Marchesk

Yeah, I just listened to his podcast with Ned Hall on laws of nature and possible worlds. Sean identified as a Humean in challenging the anti-humean p...

What human has been tricked by Siri into thinking it was a person? I find Siri to be a useful assistant for certain things, but a lousy conversational...

Awareness of colored objects which make sounds and have smells/tastes. But also can be painful when you mishandle them. Those objects don't have those...

Desktops don't feel pain, and the data computers store about images is encoded. The encoding only has meaning as an image, because that's how we've pr...

Makes me wonder how Tegmark thinks the mind fits into math. He's fond of arguing that everything that exist is mathematical, and all mathematical obje...

Even if we say this is the case for vision, it doesn't work for pain and other conscious sensations. The massive focus on vision in these discussions ...

Not everything, but he agreed with Tegmark on our universe being mathematical. Agreed that he's a good host. In Sara's podcast, Carol mentioned Bedau'...

But panspermia would just mean abiogeniss happened somewhere else. Maybe under different conditions than early Earth. Would make discovering the origi...

Makes sense to me, but strong emergence is still spooky. However, her explanation sounded like it was an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical o...

Yeah, but as Luke in this thread (and Chalmers elsewhere) have pointed out, it doesn't explain why any physical system would be conscious. Our underst...

Sure, that's an important problem. What about magnetic shields? A starship, yes. But we already do have a couple spacecraft leaving the solar system. ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ90_mX8qQk&ab_channel=AccuTrainCorporation

Do you think in images, then? Or is there just no internal conversation? Do you have to always use an external medium? I tend to work with people who ...

Yeah, it's a bit dense and obscure. I'll try to do more research as well. It sounds interesting, though.

That might be true. It's pretty much what the SETI researchers believe. Jill Tartar said there's no real threat from advanced aliens, because they hav...

So I think she argues that information is about conserving a small set of possibility space that's useful for life processes. We've taken that and dev...

If we successfully make it through this century with civilization reasonably intact, then we should have the resources and time to do things on a larg...

There is a field called astrobiology and SETI is staffed by scientists. It's not just fiction writers who imagine aliens or that we'll become advanced...

My understanding is that Dr. Walker is proposing an additional physics for what she calls information, but is open to it being something else. Basical...

I think that was basically Carl Sagan's view. In the movie version of Contact, Jody Foster's character is told by her alien-in-dad form that humanity ...

You just need a source of ongoing propulsion like a nuclear reactor, lasers from space mirrors, or ramjet. If you don't have to propel a massive colon...

Related topics and tangents tend to crop up in these discussions. I find the lion quote interesting, because we do have a shared world with other anim...

Sounds reasonable. Maybe the fact that we haven't succeeded in translating dolphin-talk is reason to be skeptical that they are using language. Humans...

Sean thinks the universe is mathematical (from the Tegmark podcast), so naturally he thinks emergentism is weak, since all macro properties could in p...

We agree on that. I don't understand what your position is, though. You think it's information all the way down. What sort of metaphysics is that? Als...

Because the explanations are just replacing phenomenological terms with statistical ones. That's not an explanation. It's equivocation. What I'm looki...

I listened to the podcast and he didn't say there was no hard problem, only presented a research program for approaching it. I don't know about the vi...

Here I'm going to say a hard no we can't. That's why behaviorism fell out of favor. Cognitive science has made more inroads on those, but I don't beli...

Similar question to panpsychism. I don't have certainty, but I doubt they do, since we can explain computer functionality just fine without consciousn...

It's a hard problem. But maybe we'll know in another century. Produced by minds, part of the makeup of minds, however you wish to phrase it. Mind bein...

Why would sensations be cognitive? Not everything the brain does is cognitive. A red sensation doesn't have cognitive content until it's put into lang...

I don't know. The exist in our minds, though, and arguably nowhere else.

Yep, images and sounds don't literally exist inside computers. They're encoded as information for output devices that create sound and light waves for...

@"Isaac"@"fdrake" I did start a thread a year or so ago where neuroscientists Anil Seth discussed in a podcast his research into consciousness and mar...

We do have this problem with dolphins. They are clearly communicating, but are they using language? Might we figure it out and be able to say somethin...

That's what makes me wonder about functionalism.

But one could say the same thing for using words like model for sensation.

That's not entirely true, since ancient skepticism and idealism proposed similar issues based on the problem of perception.

or at lest spooky emergentism. I recently listened to a podcast where a physicist explained why she thought information strongly emerged. But it was f...

An alternative one could take is that the model puts one in direct access with the hidden state. Not sure how tenable that is, but if you wanted to gr...

Alright, so does cognitive science have a proposal for how this model is generated?

I have a hard time believing that sensations being models is the majority view. What is red a model of? And what do neuroscientists have to say?

That color and pain are models?

To the stars?

I don't know what that means any more than Tegmark's mathematical universe. But then who knows what the hell fundamental reality is. I'm partial to qu...

It's shivering all the way down.

Stuff that doesn't shiver qualia. More seriously, the fundamental stuff of physics like fields, energy, matter, forces, spacetime and all the stuff th...

Is information physical?

For one thing, scientists don't mostly run the world. Politicians, lawyers, generals and the rich do. For another, technology is a double-edge sword. ...

Okay yeah, but it's not an experience of a world outside the body, so ... One could say the brain is generating a very immersive (but weird) VR-like e...