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IAI - Consciousness and the world

Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2021 11:34 pm
by Simon Adams
This was a good discussion in terms of Bernardo and Annaka Harris at least ...

IAI - Consciousness and the world


Also for those interested in some of the quantum implications of Qbism, this chat with John Horgan and Amanda Gefter is good (and a chance to test the insert video function (which has YouTube as an option but not IAI TV);


Re: IAI - Consciousness and the world

Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2021 1:57 am
by Soul_of_Shu
Didn't notice that 'insert video' function before ... something else to play with :)

Re: IAI - Consciousness and the world

Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:29 am
by Brad Walker
Horgan is nauseating. Speaking as a prominent, specialized arch-skeptic, his dismissal of idealism as narcissism, a fallacy, demonstrates how poorly physicalism defends itself. Horgan, paraphrasing: "The mind-body problem has multiple per-individual solutions." :roll:

Re: IAI - Consciousness and the world

Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2021 3:59 am
by AshvinP
The first debate could have been much better if IAI did not try to do it with 4 people. I would have rather seen a few one-hour discussions/debates between any two of them.

That being said, BK's response to Annaka's "the self/Self is an illusion" argument was perfect - experiences entail experiencer. She claimed we can imagine qualia arising without any experiencer involved, but that seems to be precisely what we cannot imagine. Although Reza's opening comments seemed totally useless, he made a good point in that connection when he claimed 'being-in-the-world' is not a given that can be used to sidestep all of analytical philosophy.

The question of whether AI can provide insights into the nature of consciousness is a more difficult one. I would say that AI research certainly helped concretize "the frame problem", in so far as the development of AI was stymied until researchers realized the world cannot be usefully understood through "raw perception" which is not framed by goal-directed motivations and representational systems. That was on the back of the Heideggerian critique of AI by Hubert Dreyfus.

Re: IAI - Consciousness and the world

Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2021 8:05 pm
by AshvinP
In connection with BK's comments about Thomas Kuhn and that "most people did not understand Kuhn", I just came across this passage worth thinking about from Barfield:
"I have had to mention science, because science (I mean the causality-science which is all we yet have [1962]) is clearly the most impenetrable one of the prison walls we call "common sense". Indeed for the man of today common sense largely consists of what he has been told by science, either directly or by the way in which other subjects have been presented to him in the course of his education. How much of that is traceable to habit rather than to open-minded inquiry? Alas, I cannot deal with everything But read, if you have not already done so already, T.S. Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
...
You may have noticed that the Harvard Review article did not speak of imprisonment in our own minds as endangering us, it spoke of endangering "our planet". Why? We are brought back once more to the cardinal reflection of consciousness is not just the inside of us; it is the inside of the world. And you do not change the inside of a living organism without at the same time changing the outside. Thomas Kuhn had realized this, when he spoke in the book I have referred to, of transformations of "imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world".

on self being an illusion

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 12:01 pm
by mkrishna
I saw this interview as well. Anakka claims are on deep meditation where the self seems to merge with the cosmos and hence the self is an illusion. She also claimed neuroscience is close to getting to this point of view as well