"
The modern and contemporary philosophical tradition, which has emphasized the specialness and security of self-knowledge, especially self-knowledge of the stream of conscious experience, and in comparison the relative insecurity or derivativeness of our knowledge of the physical world around us, has the epistemic situation
upside-down" - Eric
Schwitzgebel (Previously)
posted by Gyan
on Sep 1, 2011 -
32 comments
Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up of "
soul dust": "a kind of theatre... an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads." But just as that theatre is directed by the relationship between language and matter,
it is also undermined by it. It all depends how you think it.
posted by 0bvious
on Feb 4, 2011 -
17 comments
First Person Plural. "An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?"
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Oct 25, 2008 -
27 comments
Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, claims to have defined what it means to divide by zero. It's so simple, he claims, that he's even
taught it to high school students [via Digg]. You just have to work with a new number he calls
Nullity (RealPlayer video). According to Anderson's site
The Book of Paragon, the creation, innovation, or discovery of nullity is a step toward describing a "perspective simplex, or perspex [ . . . ] a simple physical thing that is both a mind and a body." Anderson claims that Nullity permits the definition of
transreal arithmetic (pdf), a "total arithmetic . . . with no arithmetical exceptions," thus removing what the fictional dialogue
No Zombies, Only Feelies? identifies as the "homunculus problem" in mathematics: the need for human intervention to sort out "corner cases" which are not defined.
posted by treepour
on Dec 7, 2006 -
63 comments
Douglas Hofstadter
says, "
What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.". That was prompted by his reception to the
output of David Cope's project
Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
posted by Gyan
on Apr 11, 2006 -
22 comments
Clay Shirky smacks syllogism around. Nice criticism of the
semantic web and the present (and increasing) hype of the
"semantic web revolution". The most damning part of the essay is the part about languages and categories being deeply intertwined with worldview and with culture—if there's no good definition for the word
"bachelor" (
see), how can there be an encoding of
"friend",
"lover" (see article for the classic AI example of
"John loves Mary") or anything else that isn't zipcode?
posted by zpousman
on Nov 8, 2003 -
62 comments
I Feel, Therefore I Am. Consider the work of
Dr. Antonio Damasio, humanist and neuroscientist, who has turned the
Mind and Body debate between
René Descartes and
Benedictus de Spinoza upon its head--or at least the heads of
Phineas Gage and one
Elliott--via his research and writings such as
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness,
Descartes' Error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain and
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. He's influenced writers like
Ian McEwan and
David Lodge, and via his thoughts on the
perception of music, inspired
a composition.
(More Inside)
posted by y2karl
on Apr 19, 2003 -
21 comments
