Dennettian Creature

Keep hanging out with your buddy Claude and your uncertainty will abate. Best of luck to you.

Keep hanging out with your buddy Claude and your uncertainty will abate. Best of luck to you.

Stop playing the "uncertainty" card. There is always uncertainty among the misinformed masses.

The ideas sound interesting. Is there an easily-accessible interface to the software?

Could be AI slop. Is there a reference?

Interesting experiment. I would suggest that human ethics evolved as a collection of behaviors, dating back to very early human society. It has manifested broadly, with obvious variation. I'm not sure if physics offers much insight here. I could not find a link to your research.

......construct - perhaps even necessary in a functioning society. So, mind-body dualism evolved in and for human society. It has manifested as a deep pattern - a real pattern that is at the core of our language and thinking. Dualism will not go away. We just need to acknowledge that it is emergent.

...When I say "my" brain, the implication is that my brain is separate from "me". So, where is the "me"? This fundamental component of our language evolved in a pre-scientific age and is still with us, even as we discredit the existence of non-physical souls. But the disembodied self is a useful...

#mind #consciousness #dualism #metaphysics #philmind #panpsychism
One reason Cartesian dualism is hard to shake is because it is baked into our language. When I say "my body", the unexamined assumption is that there is an "I" that "owns" or "has" a body, as if "I" were separate from my body...

...to shape thinking, and benefits from cultural evolution; And here's my addition to the list: Dennettian: the creature understands its own mind and has made the "strange inversion" to seeing its own consciousness as emergent. The creature has escaped Cartesian Gravity.

Kinds of Minds: (1) Darwinian: the creature is the beneficiary of genetic learning; (2) Skinnerian: the creature can adjust behavior through lifetime learning; (3) Popperian: the creature can simulate actions and outcomes mentally before acting; (4) Gregorian: uses language, tools, and culture...

Science does explain consciousness, but it is limited and there are competing theories. I think also that one's private explanations of consciousness are fundamentally incomplete, and there are multiple private explanations. Knowledge is never complete, and neither is subjective experience.

You don't know entirely what it is to be yourself. Rather, you experience your functioning from the inside. From the outside, certain aspects of your worldview can be observed, through communication, observation, brain imaging, etc. Knowledge is always limited, both from inside and outside.

Nice article. Thanks. New term for me: "systems neuroscience". Gets to the heart of sensor-fusion, where sense-making happens. "Countable" sense organs (eyes, tongues, etc.) fuse in the brain with pseudo-senses and prediction, becoming un-countable when meaning is made.

A rare and welcome endorsement.

Not having dug into the text, can you give a summary of why you believe there is no imperative to preserve the culture of a social animal?

My initial take is that if a species generates and perpetuates culture, then it worth protecting in the sense that any species' ecosystem is worth protecting.

True that! I'm interested in learning more about how the nervous system fuses senses, which get mixed-in with pseudo-senses, like past experience, etc. I think intuition might be found in there somewhere.

Is it productive to "count" the "number" of senses? 33 is arbitrary. 5 is not the whole picture, but...33? At some level in the brain, sensory input becomes fused and tangled. At what point in the pipeline should they no longer be called "senses"? Categorizing/enumerating nature is an error.

Consciousness arises as a result of brains interacting with the world, the body, language, and other brains. Why must people try to locate it either in the brain or elsewhere? It emerges from a system. Systems don't have single locations in space or time.

Will that person have been born blind, deaf, and paralyzed? Or will that person have had those sensory inputs at some point in the past? That would make a huge difference on the nature and depth of that person's consciousness.

Human theory-of-mind will require a bifurcation - so that we can engage with real humans in one way and AI in another way...knowing it has no self or feelings, but it has a natural language interface that requires pretending that there is a self. This is challenging, but I think necessary.

...a single organism. I think functionalism applies to some rudimentary natural phenomena that can be captured as information processes, as demonstrated by artificial life simulations and robotics. Consciousness is another thing entirely.

The total brain interface is a fascinating idea - but it is either impossible, or not possible for the next several hundred years, because it would take an astronomical amount of computing power and intelligent software to replicate reality, not to mention intricate brain surgery - just for...

...consistent with functionalism, because the functioning of the organism in its environment determines its consciousness. If the environment is not exactly replicated, then it will not function in the same way. You may ask: can that environment be simulated and fed to the organism's brain? ...

...environment the organism lives in - in perfect detail. So the problem is bigger than replicating consciousness, it requires replicating an entire reality (not all of reality of course, but the reality according to the species whose consciousness is being replicated.) I believe this is...

Very interesting thoughts. I believe consciousness is deeply wedded to the ecosystem from which it evolved. It is embedded in spacetime - the kind/aspect of spacetime that the species evolved to survive in. The only way to replicate the exact consciousness elsewhere is to also replicate the...

Exactly. Being better at faking understanding is dangerous. Untrained humans are vulnerable.

...Illusionism offends so much of what human civilization has held onto for so long. But I've found the idea to be not only insightful and valid, but quite wonderful, not scary or contradictory.

It's unfortunate. Business-oriented media often get it so wrong. We're in an age of battling narratives. In the big picture I think it's because we're in for a major humbling, hubris-toppling realization that most of the world is unprepared for, not unlike the disruptions of Galileo and Darwin...