Back in January I wrote up a post on what I believe to be a major problem in the study of consciousness. Now, with the introduction of Consciousness Online (started by the estimable R. Brown), I feel my dilemma should get some renewed attention.
Here’s the argument:
Assume someone knows what consciousness/mind is.
If someone knows something, then it is part of his or her consciousness.
If someone knows what consciousness is, then his or her consciousness has a part that contains consciousness.
Therefore someone has a consciousness that contains consciousness.
Up until this point I am willing to grant that all this is possible. Our consciousness may be able to contain itself within itself. But could we write it down?
We can only write or say finite things.
If someone’s consciousness contains consciousness, then their contained consciousness contains consciousness itself and so on ad infinitum; this person’s consciousness has a self referential infinite regression.
Writing down what consciousness is would require us to write something infinite.
Therefore we cannot write down/ say what the consciousness is.
One might think that we would still be able to figure out pieces and put them together to get the full picture, and use terms like ad infinitum to represent some infinite, but comprehensible, process. However this would require us to know that the picture that we were putting together was an accurate one. The only way to know that we were putting together an accurate picture would be to already have an overall theory of consciousness that we knew to be correct. Hence the piecemeal approach begs the question.
With no bottom up method possible, nor any top down method available, even if someone were to discover what consciousness is, she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. Therefore we will never have a full understanding of our consciousness.
So the dilemma is to come up with a story about philosophy of mind (and associated disciplines) while necessarily lacking a story about consciousness. Anyone have anything to say?
I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability.
What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns:
a measure of how likely it is that some event will occur; a number expressing the ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible …
So it’s a measure of likelihood. What’s likelihood? Google returns:
The probability of a specified outcome.
Awesome. So ‘probability as likelihood’ is non-explanatory. What about this ‘ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible’? I’m pretty wary about the word favorable. Let’s modify this definition to read:
a number expressing the ratio of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
Nor do I like ‘a number expressing…’ This refers to a particular probability, not probability at large, so let’s go back to using ‘measure’:
a measure of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
We need to be a bit more explicit about what we are measuring:
a measure of the frequency of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
OK. I think this isn’t that bad. When we flip a fair coin the probability is the frequency of landing on heads compared to the total cases possible, heads + tails, so 1 out of 2. Pretty good.
But notice the addition of the word fair. Where did it come from, what’s it doing there? Something is said to be fair if that thing shows no favoritism to any person or process. In terms of things that act randomly, this means that the thing acts in a consistently random way. Being consistently random means it is always random, not sometimes random and other times not random. This means that fairness has to do with the distribution of the instances of the cases we are studying. What governs this distribution?
In the case of of a coin, the shape of the coin and the conditions under which it is measured make all the difference in the distribution of heads and tails. The two sides, heads and tails, must be distinguishable, but the coin must be flipped in a way such that no one can know which side will land facing up. The shape of the coin, even with uniform mass distribution, cannot preclude this previous condition. Therefore the source of probability is the interdependence of physical conditions (shape and motion of the coin) and an epistemic notion (independence of knowledge of which side will land up). When the physical conditions and our knowledge of the conditions are dependent upon each other then the situation becomes probabilistic because the conditions preclude our knowing the exact outcome of the situation.
It is now time to recall that people cheat at gambling all the time. A trio of people in March 2004 used a computer and lasers to successfully predict the decaying orbit of a ball spinning on a roulette wheel (and walked out with £1.3 million). This indicates that after a certain point it is possible to predict the outcome of a coin flipping or a roulette ball spinning, so the dependence mentioned above is eventually broken. However this is only possible once the coin is flipping or the roulette ball is rolling, not before the person releases the roulette ball or flips the coin.
With the suggestion that it is the person that determines the outcome we can expand the physical-epistemic dependence to an physical-epistemic-performative one. If I know that I, nor anyone else, can predict the outcome until after I perform a task, then the knowledge of the outcome is dependent upon how I perform that task.
This makes sense because magicians and scam artists train themselves to be able to perform tasks like shuffling and dealing cards in ways that most of us think is random but are not. The rest of us believe that there is a dependence between the physical setup and the outcome that precludes knowing the results, but this is merely an illusion that is exploited.
What about instances in which special training or equipment is unavailable; can we guarantee everyone’s ability to measure the thing in question to be equal? We can: light. Anyone who can see at all sees light that is indistinguishable from the light everyone else sees: it has no haecceity.
This lack of distinguishability, lack of haecceity (thisness), is not merely a property of the photon but a physical characteristic of humans. We have no biology that can distinguish one photon from another of equivalent wavelength. To distinguish something we have to use a smaller feature of the thing to tell it apart from its compatriots. Since we cannot see anything smaller, this is impossible. Nor is there a technology that we could use to augment our abilities: for us to have a technology that would see something smaller than a photon would require us to know that the technology interacted at a deeper level with reality than photons do. But we cannot know that because we are physically limited to using the photon as our minimal measurement device. The act of sight is foundational: we cannot see anything smaller than a photon nor can anything smaller exist in our world.
The way we perceive photons will always be inherently distributed because of this too. We cannot uniquely identify a single photon, and hence we can’t come back and measure the properties of a photon we have previously studied. Therefore the best we will be able to accomplish when studying photons is to measure a group of photons and use a distribution of their properties, making photons inherently probabilistic. Since the act of seeing light is a biological feature of humans, we all have equal epistemological footing in this instance. This means that the epistemic dependence mentioned above can be ignored because it adds nothing to the current discussion. Therefore we can eliminate the epistemic notion from our above dependence, reducing it to a physical-performative interdependence.
Since it is a historical/ evolutionary accident that the photon is the smallest object we can perceive, the photon really is not fundamental to this discussion. Therefore, the interdependence of the physical properties of the smallest things we can perceive and our inherent inability to tell them apart is a source of probability in nature.
This is a source of natural randomness as well: once we know the probability of some property that we cannot measure directly, the lack of haecceity means that we will not be able to predict when we will measure an individual with said property. Therefore the order in which we measure the property will inherently be random. [Assume the contradiction: the order in which we measure the property is not random, but follows some pattern. Then there exists some underlying structure that governs the appearance of the property. However, since we are already at the limit of what can be measured, no such thing can exist. Hence the order in which we measure the property is random.]
————–
If I were Wittgenstein I might have said:
Consider a situation in which someone asks, “How much light could you see?” Perhaps a detective is asking a hostage about where he was held. But then the answer is, “I didn’t look.” —— And this would make no sense.
hmmmm…. I did really mean to get back to gambling.
Ever have the experience of sitting in traffic and believe that you are moving in reverse, only to realize a second later that you were fooled by the vehicle next to you moving forward? You were sitting still, but because you saw something moving away, you mistakenly thought you started to move in the opposite direction.
Two different senses may be at work here: your sight and your balance. Lets assume that your balance did not play any role in this little experiment (you would have been moving too slowly to feel a jolt). Your sight told you that you were moving in a certain direction (backwards) because of something you saw, say a bus pulling forward. Then you saw something other than the bus, say the ground, and you realized that your initial appraisal of the situation was incorrect.
At the point when you look away from the bus, you believe that you are moving backwards. Then when you see the ground, you believe that you are not moving backwards. You reconcile these two contradictory beliefs by deciding that it was not you who were moving backwards but the bus that was moving forwards.
What this illustrates is that objects require something other than themselves to be considered in motion. Without the ability to reference a ’stationary’ system (the ground), it is impossible to make a determination who is moving and who is staying still.
Now imagine this situation was taking place in a very gray place. The only things visible are yourself and the bus on a gray background. Then you notice that the bus is getting smaller. There is nothing for you to use as a reference (no stars, no ground, no nothing) to decide if it is you who is moving away from the bus or if it is the bus moving away from you, or both*. The only thing you have is the information that you and the bus are moving away from each other.
I refer to the statement that you and the bus are moving away from each other as information and not a belief because it is much more certain than what I called beliefs above, namely that you were in a certain kind of motion, which quickly turned out to be questionable.
The information that you and the bus are moving away from each other is not your everyday sort of information. It would be inaccurate to reduce this statement to a conjunction (you and the bus are moving), which is incorrect, or a disjunction (you or the bus is moving) because you are only moving with regard to the bus. By claiming that either you or the bus is moving, it makes it seem that the motion of one has nothing to do with the other. The motion of you and the bus need to be mutually dependent upon each other, and a mutual interdependence is not reducible.
If we return to the everyday, we can say that you have the information that you and the bus are moving away from each other and you and the bit of ground you are on are not moving away from each other. Since the bit of ground we initially selected was arbitrary (we could have chosen anything, like another bus) it is subject to the same issues as the bus; we merely take the ground to be stationary for most purposes, but this is a pragmatic concern. Hence all determinations of motion (or non-motion) are instances of informational interdependence.
The result that relativity is part of a larger class of mutually interdependent structures is non-trivial. Minimally this formalism will allow us to specify exactly when the use of relativity is warranted, but more importantly it will allow us to identify and provide insight into other situations of informational interdependence. Cases of mutual interdependence are relatively rare as far instances of logic go (they can’t even be described in first order logic) and having such a well studied example gives us a head start on this phenomenon.
—————————————- * or if the bus is shrinking, or you are growing, or all of the above, but lets assume no Alice in Wonderland scenarios.
“What sort of person subjects children as young as 12 to beatings and a life of prostitution? An evidence list submitted in the case of Corey Davis, a Queens man who billed himself as “Magnificent,” might provide some insight. Mr. Davis, 36, is facing a minimum of 23 years in prison after pleading guilty in March to a federal charge of sex trafficking involving a 12-year-old runaway.
“… But then things went dark, weird, and creepy: one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another.
After exposure, the incubation period from nothing to hysteria was short, from a few hours to a couple of days. There was no fever, no physical symptoms, just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent…”
This is a video of a reporter being waterboarded in order to investigate torture and ‘agressive’ interrogation… It is weird stuff. Be sure to check out the accompanying article.
“This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers.”
(they’re all out of free posters now, but the file is available so you can print one for yourself)
Check out this video describing the technology that is going to be used in the new Nintendo Wii Motion Plus. General relativity needs to be accounted for to accurately measure motion in 3D space (true 6 degrees of freedom) by using both accelerometers and gyroscopes. But perhaps the most interesting part of the site is the disclaimer at the bottom (my emphasis):
“InvenSense sensors should not be used or sold in the development, storing, production and utilization of any conventional or mass-destructive weapons or any other weapons or life-threatening applications as well as in any other life-critical applications including but not limited to medical equipment, transportation, aerospace and nuclear instruments, undersea equipment, power plant equipment, disaster prevention and crime prevention equipment.”
Culture
Nadia Comaneci, Montreal 1976 TEN!!! [1:06] (via plump plum)
Last but not least this is what I consider to be a throwback to vintage internet. We are talking a space background repeating image here people; I don’t think I’ve seen that since ‘97. Plus something for nearly everyone: lots of links, e.g. useful information like an up to date guide to SEO, and Women Chess Grandmasters.
“But Ms. Roche told the audience here that her inspiration for the book came not from those women, but from the feminine-product aisle of her local store. Peeking out at the audience from under dark brown bangs, speaking in a childish voice that accentuated her transgressions against propriety, Ms. Roche explained, to howls of laughter, how the lemon-scented products called out to her in uncensored terms that she was, as the commercials put it, not so fresh, or at least not fresh enough.”
The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds
A small red berry called miracle fruit temporarily rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.
A study conducted by Britain’s First Research Group for Breast Health attached to the University of Portsmouth could throw some light on the little understood causes of ‘Breast Pain’
… you know there was some lucky male lab assistant required to measure breast motion
Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil
One of South America’s few remaining uncontacted tribes is photographed from the air on the Peru-Brazil border.
Aesthetics, Etc.
19 Artists You Can’t Afford To Miss Out On
“From half-naked pink girls to Isometric grinning trees, these artists are sure to satisfy the sucrose cravings in your eyeballs. Check them out before they get too famous and start making stuff nobody gets.”
I wrote out an example playing of the Monty Hall Problem in Independence Friendly Logic as a game of incomplete information and appended it to my post here.
I also left an extended comment on Dependence Logic vs. Independence Friendly Logic about some of the tribulations encountered as a non-academic trying to get my grubby little hands on obscure logic papers.
The Monty Hall Problem illustrates an unusual phenomenon of changing probabilities based upon someone else’s knowledge. On the game-show Let’s Make a Dealthe host, Monty Hall, asks the contestant to choose one of three possibilities - Door One, Two or Three - with one door leading to a prize and the other two leading to goats. After the contestant selects a door, another door is opened, one with a goat behind it. At this point the contestant is allowed to switch the previously selected door with the remaining (unopened) door.
Common intuition is that this choice does not present any advantage because the probability of selecting the correct door is set at 1/3 at the beginning. Each door has this 1 out of 3 chance of having a prize behind it, so changing which door you select has no effect on the outcome.
In hindsight, this intuition is wrong. If you initially selected the first goat and then switch when you get a chance, you win. If you selected the second goat and switch, you win. If you selected the prize and switch, you lose. Therefore if you switch, you win 2 out of 3, whereas if you do not switch you win only 1/3 of the time.
So what has gone horribly wrong here:
Why is most everyone’s intuition faulty in this situation?
How does switching doors make any difference?
When did the 1/3 probability turn into a 2/3 probability?
At the beginning of the game you have a 2 out of 3 chance of losing. Likewise the game show has a 2 out of 3 chance of winning (not giving you a prize) at the beginning of the game. Both of these probabilities do not depend upon which door the prize is behind, but only upon the set-up of a prize behind only one of three doors. For instance, an outside service (not the game show) could have set everything up such that both you and the game show would be kept in the dark: there would still be 2 goats and a prize, but neither you nor the game show would know which door led to the prize.
Now imagine that it is the game show that is playing the game. The game show is trying to win by selecting a goat. From this perspective, whichever door that was chosen is good: this door has a 2 out of 3 probability of being a winner (being a goat). Therefore when given the opportunity to change (after the outside service opens a door and shows a goat), there is no reason to do so.
Of course you, the contestant, are the one making the selection, and you do not want a goat. However, if you imagined yourself in the position of the game show at the beginning, as trying to select a goat, you would reasonably assume that, just as the game show did, you were successful in choosing a goat. When given the choice to switch, now that the other goat has been removed, it seemingly makes sense to change your selection.
In this case the easiest way to view the situation is in terms of how to lose, or by considering all the possible outcomes (as mentioned above). Though this is a guess, it seems that our first blush reaction to this problem is always to view it in terms of winning and this is the reason we do not immediately recognize the benefit in switching. We start out with a 1/3 chance of winning and switching doors doesn’t immediately seem to increase this percentage.
To answer how switching doors makes a difference we need to look more closely at the doors. The door that was initially selected has a 1 out of 3 chance of being a prize, and this does not change. If you were to play many times and ignore changing doors, then you would win 33.3% of the time. At the outset the other two doors each have the exact same chance of being a winner, 1 out of 3. So the other two doors combined have a 2 out of 3 chance of containing a winning door.
Now the game show changes the number of doors available from 3 to 2, with one door guaranteed to contain a prize. If you were presented this situation without knowledge of the previous process, then you would rightly put the chance of selecting the prize at 1 out of 2, 50%.
However, you know something about the setup: The door that was initially selected had a probability of having a prize behind it set at 1 out of 3. The thing behind the other door, though, has been selected from a stacked deck: Whatever is behind the door was selected from a group of objects with a 2 out of 3 chance of containing a prize (1/3 + 1/3). You know that the odds on this door are stacked in your favor because the game show knowingly reveals the goat: In the 2/3 case in which you have previously selected a goat, the prize is behind one of the other two doors. When the game-show reveals (and removes) a goat, it guarantees that the prize is behind the last door. Therefore switching doors at the end is equivalent to combining and selecting the probability associated with the two doors not initially selected.
If the game show did not knowingly reveal the goat, you would not be able to take advantage of the stacked deck. Imagine that you select the first door and then another door is opened randomly, revealing a goat. By randomly eliminating this door (and not looking behind the unselected doors) the door that was initially selected becomes unrelated to the present choice: Only by looking behind the unselected doors does the initial selection become fixed in reference to the other doors. Since no one looked behind the doors, some bored, but not malicious, demon could have come and switched whatever was behind the selected and remaining door and neither you nor the game-show would be able to tell. Therefore switching doors when a goat is randomly revealed provides no advantage because the initial selection cannot be related to the probable location of the prize.
Only when the contestant can fix the probable locations of the prize because the location of the prize is known by the game-show, is it possible to assign interdependent probabilities on the location of the prize and the previous selection made. The odds are then tilted in the contestant’s favor by switching away from the low probability initial selection to the door that has the combination of remaining probabilities.
The logic of this needs to be represented game-theoretically with the different quantifiers representing different players of a game of incomplete information. The game would run* like this:
Domain={prize, goat, goat}
Contestant
Game Show
1.
-
∃x∃y∃z∀a/x,y,z∃b∀c/x,y,z(a=x & b=y & c=z)
2.
-
∃y∃z∀a/x,y,z∃b∀c/x,y,z(a=g & b=y & c=z)
3.
-
∃z∀a/x,y,z∃b∀c/x,y,z(a=g & b=g & c=z)
4.
∀a/x,y,z∃b∀c/x,y,z(a=g & b=g & c=p)
-
5.
-
∃b∀c/x,y,z(p=g & b=g & c=p)
6.
∀c/x,y,z(p=g & g=g & c=p)
-
7.
∀d∀c/x,y,z(d=g & g=g & c=p)
-
8.
∀c/x,y,z(g=g & g=g & c=p)
-
9.
(g=g & g=g & p=p)
-
Line 1 is the initial setup of the prize game: the goal is for the contestant to make his or her placement of the prize and goats match the game show’s placement. Whatever is on the left side of an = will be what the contestant thinks is behind a door and what is on the right of an = will be what the game show puts behind the door, such that each = represents a door. If the formula is satisfied then the contestant will have successfully guessed the location of the prize.
Lines 2, 3 and 4 represent the results of the Game Show placing the prize and goats. Line 5 is the result of the first move of the contestant choosing where he or she thinks the prize is: the ‘a/x,y,z’ means that whatever placed in spot a has to be done independently, i.e. without knowledge, of what x or y or z is. Then the game show reveals a goat behind one of the doors not selected by the contestant. Line 7 represents the choice that is given to the contestant to switch his or her initial placement of where the prize is. Line 8 is the important step: since the contestant does not know what is behind the doors (c/x,y,z) it looks as if there is no advantage to switching. However, the contestant does know that when making a choice to reveal a goat in line 6 that at this point the game show had to know what was behind every door. This means that c is dependent upon b which was depended upon x, y, and z. With this knowledge the contestant can figure out that there is an advantage to switching because the selection of b in line 6 fixed the locations of the prize & goats and in doing so fixed the odds. Since the odds were intially stacked against the contestant, switching to the only remaining door flips the odds in the contestant’s favor, and is done so in this example. Line 9 shows that all the contestant’s choices match up with what the game show has placed behind the doors and hence she or he has won the prize.
* To do a better representation would require keeping the gameshow from not placing a prize anywhere by using a line like ‘x≠y or x≠z’. For graphical brevity I left it out.
I was reading the philo-blogs and today (7 March) Richard Brown has taken issue with Richard Chappell’s Examples of Solved Philosophy. Brown holds that there is no such thing as solved philosophy (or problems are “only solved from a theoretical standpoint” and hence “involve substantial begging the question”), whereas Chappell happily provides examples that “are at least as well-established as most scientific results.”
Now there is something to be said for both sides: Brown is right when he says that all solutions are theory dependent and Chappell is right when says that we used to argue about certain things and now we don’t (don’t take this as my endorsement of his examples). However, this disagreement is just the two sides of one issue within philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigms.
Thomas Kuhn stated that science evolves by scientific paradigm, that science works under one major governing theory until it is overthrown by another. For instance everyone worked within Newton’s version of the universe until Einstein came along, and now we work under Einstein’s relativity theory. Eventually it is possible that there will be a further paradigm shift away from relativity theory.
Now Brown, I think, makes the claim that philosophical problems (of the sort Chappell indicates) are not solved without question begging. Well, if Chappell is going for the sort of consensus that happens in science - which he looks like he is - then this is not a problem: All problems and solutions are determined within and by the overarching theoretical framework, the paradigm. This is to specifically say that there is no such thing as an answer to a question outside of some theoretical framework: some meta-theory always determines what sort of thing counts as a solution. Therefore Brown has conflated being part of a paradigm with begging the question. Begging the question involves assuming what you set out to prove, whereas being part of a paradigm merely assumes the general rules about what determines a solution to a problem when answering.
However, philosophy is not science, and Brown has a point when he says, “all we can mean by ’solved’ is ‘generally agreed to be true by philosophers/philosopher X’”. Now the paradigm cuts the other way: philosophy does not work by paradigms and hence there is no background framework on which Chappell can base his solved philosophy. Even if all the top philosophers of the day agree to an extent about a good number of issues, it only takes a Kant or a Wittgenstein to turn philosophy on its head. Even simple issues, what might be seen as obvious mistakes made only by laymen, can take on new significance. For example, many people believe that everyone’s perceptions of color are their own, that each of us can’t know what other peoples’ perception of color are like. Perhaps this is true, but personally I believe that it makes no sense to say that you have something if you logically exclude other people from having it (Philosophical Investigations #398) and therefore if you have color perceptions then I can have the same color perception. By no means should my view be taken as correct, but it should illustrate that there is nothing so simple as to be considered solved if all it has is a consensus.
So what of solved philosophy? Is it all just us shifting our assumptions around? The logician De Morgan recognized that his logic (the logic of antiquity until the mid 1800s) was too weak to derive the statement “All heads of horses are heads of animals.” With the advent of modern logic, the statement was derivable. This is an example of solved philosophy: At a certain point we had a problem, were unable to do something, and then later we were able to do it. If we want to solve philosophical problems we have to first find problems, phenomena that no theory can explain, and then find a way to explain it using the unique tools available to philosophers. Taking down bad theories and clarifying issues is a worthwhile endeavor, progress is made, but nothing is solved.
If anyone asks me about solved philosophy, I’ll tell them about the life and world-changing ideas that make philosophy amazing, not about all the bunk theories we had to go through to get there.
This interview with Hubert Dreyfus (just the parts about computers: part 1, part 2. via Continental Philosophy) briefly outlines one of the major criticisms leveled against artificial intelligence: computers will never be intelligent because our intelligence is based upon our physical interactions in and with the world. Very briefly, our intelligence is fundamentally tied to our bodies because it is only through our bodies do we have any interaction with the world. If we separate our intelligence from the body, as in the case with computers, then whatever it is that the computer has, it is not intelligence because intelligence only refers to how to bodily interact with the world.
As Dreyfus says this problem is attributed to a Merleau-Ponty extension of Heidegger and the only proposed solution is to embody computers by providing them with a full representation of world and body. I don’t think there is generally much faith in this solution; I certainly don’t have much faith in it.
However, this bodily criticism is a straw man. Computers have ‘bodies,’ they are definitely physical things in the world. But what of the physical interactions required for intelligence? Computers interact with the world: computers are affected by heat, moisture, dirt, vibration, etcetera. The only differences are the actual interactions that computers have as compared to humans: we experience humidity one way and they experience it differently. So yes, computers will have different interactions and hence they will never have the same intelligence that we have, but that does not imply that computers cannot have an embodied intelligence. It only means that computer embodied intelligence will be significantly different than our own intelligence. Therefore the above argument against computer intelligence only applies to those people who are trying to replicate perfect human intelligence and does nothing against people trying to create intelligence in computers.
For example, light-skinned and dark-skinned people have very slightly different physiologies. Now I see the above argument as saying that someone of different skin color cannot have the same sort of intelligence that you have because their interactions with the world are inherently different. Sure, everyone experiences things slightly differently due to having different bodies, but to claim that this creates incompatible intelligences is obviously wrong: No one on the face of the earth would be able to communicate with each other due to everyone being physically unique. Computers may be physically different to a greater extent, but this does not impact intelligence.
The criticism of computer intelligence based upon the need for a body is no more than subtle techno-racism.
I have written an article entitled “Occlumency.” Occlumency, for those of us without intimate knowledge of the world of Harry Potter, is the skill that seals the mind against magical intrusion and influence. No, I have no magical ability, but thanks to my metaphysics some skills not previously included in the human repertoire can now be accessed and explained: The paper’s aim is to teach the reader how to metaphysically seal the mind against certain kinds of intrusion and influence.
I have had some very positive feedback from the few I’ve already shown it to, and more is welcome. No special knowledge required, though I suggest reading the Harry Potter books anyway.
Welcome. I'm interested by metaphysics, relativity, philosophy of science & language and women philosophically inclined or not. But there will probably be a bit of everything here, kind of like me.
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One might think that we would still be able to figure out pieces and put them together to get the full picture, and use terms like ad infinitum to represent some infinite, but comprehensible, process. However this would require us to know that the picture that we were putting together was an accurate one. The only way to know that we were putting together an accurate picture would be to already have an overall theory of consciousness that we knew to be correct. Hence the piecemeal approach begs the question.
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