Dennettian Creature

Yes, Pong! - great example. I vaguely remember seeing an article once about an animal experiment using Pong? Also, what is tau-value?

The dog is [not] doing math equations, and neither is the frisbee-catching human. Rather, a perceived future trajectory of the frisbee is rapidly-updated and acted upon. I believe Andy Clark describes a kind of fused sensing/action-planning process along these lines.

Watching a dog catch a frisbee is a fun way to think about this. Dogs are not affected by human verbal language on how to achieve the task. They are motivated by reward and nonverbal interaction. A skilled frisbee-catching dog is a beautiful thing. I believe so-called "dog math" is just prediction.

I've always gotten an icky feeling when visiting the iai.

Collective social structure became a huge evolutionary fitness advantage. As a result, humans are devoted to big ideas about social structure, religion, and other belief structures. Our species is ideological to the point of killing or dying for it, contradicting the selfish gene basis of fitness.

#philmind #consciousness #evolution The unsavory way to say it is that humans are apes with brains infected by memes. Another way to say it is that our ape ancestors experienced rapid genetic evolution of brains and bodies, correlated with cultural evolution, technology and language...

You shouldn't post numbers like this without citing the source.

...a prediction of the recent past, as well as the distant past: our genes hold deep predictive memory and shape our species-specific predictive talents.

I see. I should have aimed my ire at the iai.

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.

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.