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    Transhumanism: The Search for Human 2.0

    Age of Em is probably the most horrifying piece of futurist speculation I've heard of. I am glad that I find it completely implausible. An awful lot of transhumanist technologies could be turned in dystopian directions (and there may not be benevolent AI leaders around to help). In this case...
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    Rising Obesity in... Lab Animals?

    http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.html https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong An odd little biological puzzle. What seems like a fairly straightforward issue takes some strange turns. Marmosets, really?
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    Scientists 'switch off' self control using brain stimulation

    A few beers can have the same effects, I'm told. Well, I'm not too enthused about more of 'this brain region is correlated with this cognitive function'. It doesn't provide any immediate insight into the human mind.
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    Arouet's discussion about NDE's

    I would guess that mathematical objects and physical objects are (in some sense) both subsets of mental objects. Well, the typical argument against libertarian free will is that there's no 'space' between randomness and determinism. It would have to be indistinguishable from one or the other...
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    Arouet's discussion about NDE's

    I think a part of the 'shock factor' to annihilation, though, is that it is held to be inevitable, and yet the human mind can't quite make sense of it. To the dead, there is no universe at all. What does that mean? It is not blackness, an empty void, as you instinctively try to conceptualise it...
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    Arouet's discussion about NDE's

    I meant that IIT can be interpreted in terms of a conservative form of property dualism in which mind is an contingent aspect of physical systems, and physical events have causal power over mental events but not vice versa. It's not the only option, but I imagine if IIT became well-accepted this...
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    Arouet's discussion about NDE's

    I don't think anyone can fault IIT as a programme of scientific research, but as a metaphysical explanation? Nah. It's not sufficient to decode the neural correlates and relate them to phenomenology (the 'how'), though this is a very worthy goal. It's important to have the metaphysical...
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    Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception

    To be completely honest? I inserted 'fundamental' because it improved the look and cadence of the sentence it was in. I agree there's more to actual fundamental truth than, as you say, the structure of inputs and outputs.
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    Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception

    Well, it's supposed to be a general theory about perception. So it doesn't matter which organism and what kind of ground-truth we choose to illustrate the idea, as long as they're not 'humans' and 'naive realism as seen by humans' respectively. We can consider what an amoeba might get wrong...
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    New stuff in neuroscience

    On a related note... Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? Again there's this impressive capacity for living things to retain aspects of their organisation through radical changes.
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    Precognition/Presentiment experiences

    Have you ever looked at some words, or the numbers on a digital clock, and had the sensation that you 'read' them a moment before you 'saw' them? This appears to be a common experience. It may just be a kind of mnemonic confusion caused by the extreme closeness of the two events, but it's funny...
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    New stuff in neuroscience

    Well, synaptic plasticity. The mysterious part is how the properties of the synapse can be maintained when the proteins and lipids that make it up are constantly being turned over. Especially when you have to store up-to-date information pertaining to thousands of synapses. Cells are smarter...
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    Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception

    I think your intuitions about simple vs. complex organisms are leading you astray. An organism with a smaller brain, when hooked up to (say) a high-resolution camera, is not going to make decisions based on a less abstracted form of the raw pixel data. It's going to make a few basic judgements...
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    Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception

    It looks like the forum ate a couple of posts in this thread, including my own. Oh, well. I've been mulling over my own interpretation of Hoffman's work, and I don't think the implications are that bad. So, in any theory of perception, the basic problem is interpreting a stream of raw...
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    New stuff in neuroscience

    I'd judge that the compelling reports from neuroscience are anatomical facts and 'anecdotal' case studies, not statistical work with cognitive psychology and high-tech brain scanners. Luria, Sacks, Ramachandran. Can't argue when there's a brain lesion patient in front of you, right? Of course...
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    Techgnosis [Resources]

    Another beautiful example of digital philosophy as it self-destructs into Alice in Wonderland insanity. Am I for or against this brand of metaphysics? I really don't know, but it's fascinating to watch it play out. Well, my inner monistic idealist is more smugly secure in its beliefs than ever...
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    One of Sciborg

    A gap in Nisbett and Wilson’s findings? A first-person access to our cognitive processes.
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    Kent Forbes, Does the Simulation Hypothesis Defeat Materialism |323|

    Simulation, Consciousness, Existence. I linked this essay on Bernardo Kastrup's forum. My interpretation is that mathematical realism is the end-stage of reductionism, which can act as a stepping-stone to a future metaphysics based on idealism or neutral monism. Personally, I take the...
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    Discussion - Can we produce synthetic, non-organic sentience?

    I know that symbols are arbitrary and can be anything. I suppose you are saying there isn't really any intentionality, but that you don't need it to understand stuff. I agree in that there is a sense in which you can understand a meaningless string of symbols (e.g. WXYYXW) if you know the...
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    Discussion - Can we produce synthetic, non-organic sentience?

    Deep Learning's Deep Flaws. Deep Learning Adversarial Examples – Clarifying Misconceptions All these machine-learning system know how to do is carve up vector spaces into different categories and transform vectors into other vectors. This can have useful applications, but as these...
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