Instead of being expected to believe that human consciousness is an illusion, we may believe it exists — along with the cabbage mind and the electron mind.
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If strategy is more important than ideology for accelerationists, that is probably because their aims are incoherent and their groups fragment easily.
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Lê’s essay offers a much more sober assessment of transhumanism, the war on human exceptionalism, and the idea that machines think like people.
Read More ›Michael Egnor comments that academics often hold such beliefs because they make them sound clever, not because they make sense.
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We don’t have a reason to expect the eliminative materialism Carlo Rovelli recommends, which has not helped in the past, to be more help in the future.
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Where exactly is a popular song located? It lives in memory, human and recorded, in many forms. But it occupies no spatial location.
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The main concern with glacier rights is the inevitable erosion of what human rights mean. Ungrounded in reality, they come to mean everything, anything, and ultimately, nothing.
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Neuroplasticity is a very interesting and important area of research. But the careless and casual attribution of unexpected mental states to it is junk science.
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Technology has a history but the human mind does not. We see it where we see it.
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Unfortunately, some of them spend a lot of time trying to discredit people who are willing to look at these questions.
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Some of the Neanderthals’ practices around skulls suggest that they followed a belief system.
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The simpler explanation, he says, is that percepts, perceptions travel through axons. Conceptions don’t travel through axons because they’re not material.
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A misguided article in Popular Mechanics gave neurosurgeon Michael Egnor a chance to shed light on a unique fact about people with split brains here.
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There’s nothing there. Look, maybe we are alone in the universe. Or maybe not. But real space exploration is the only way we can hope to find out.
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Some of the theories of animal mind are interesting but no one really has any idea how consciousness originated.
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The good news is that better educators are recognizing that physical literacy skills are important too. We are minds and bodies, not digital programs.
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On Saturday, I looked at Matt Johnson’s thoughts on George Orwell’s vital but comparatively unknown 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature.” Orwell, famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), wanted to “make political writing into an art.” He was well aware that most competitors for public attention simply wanted to make political writing a reliable form of mass brainwashing. He hoped to find a public that sought an alternative. He published “Prevention” (longish, at 5500 words) in Polemic, a short-lived British intellectual magazine (1945–47), which featured work by such notables as Henry Miller, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Dylan Thomas. Intellectual freedom as “violence” Intellectual freedom, as we have always been told, is only ever one generation Read More ›
Automated writing leads to a decline in intellectual skills for the same reasons as automated walking would lead to a decline in motor skills.
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We struggle with the pencil or pen until our bodies begin to express what our minds are learning and thinking. Or … we don’t — and the results show.
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Most of what we had to say, based on neuroscience and similar topics, could fit nicely into a Buddhist universe where the mind is real but there isn’t a God.
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