Videos by topic: MIND

Realism Is False

Donald D. Hoffman
[1.27.20]

. . . I want to propose that realism is false, and what we're seeing is more like a user interface or a virtual reality headset. Think about a virtual reality game of tennis. You're playing VR tennis with a friend, you both have your headset and body suits on, you see your friend's avatar on a tennis court and you start playing. Your friend hits the tennis ball to you, and you hit the same tennis ball back to your friend, but is your friend seeing exactly the same tennis ball that you're seeing? Well, of course not. There's no public tennis ball. You have some photons being sprayed to your eye by your headset, and those photons are causing your visual system to create your own perception of what you would call a green tennis ball. Your friend has a headset on, which is spraying photons to his eye, and his visual system is creating his own green tennis ball perception.

It turns out that both of those perceptions are coordinated by something else, namely a supercomputer that's sending the photons to both headsets, causing both headsets to work in coordination. . . .

All the things that we would do to say that objects really exist even when they're not perceived hold here in virtual reality. . . . That doesn't mean that the tennis ball exists and has any physical properties when it's not perceived; it just means that there is some objective reality.

DONALD D. HOFFMAN is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, most recently, of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our EyesDonald D. Hoffman's Edge Bio Page

 


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The Paradox of Self-Consciousness

Markus Gabriel
[11.11.19]

I have been trying, under the banner of "new realism," to reconcile various philosophical and scientific traditions. I'm looking for a third way between various tensions. There's more to a human being than the fact that we are a bunch of cells that hang together in a certain way. Humans are not identical to any material energetic system, even though I also think that humans cannot exist without being, in part, grounded in a material energetic system. So, I am rejecting both brutal materialism, according to which we are nothing but an arrangement of cells, and brutal idealism, according to which our minds are transcendent affairs that peep into the universe in one way or another. Both are false, so there has to be a third way.

Similarly, between postmodernism, which denies objectivity, and various trends in cognitive science, which also threaten objectivity without fully undermining it, there has to be something in between. Similarly, for continental philosophy—European traditions, broadly construed—and analytic philosophy, which means philosophy at its best when practiced in Anglophone context; there has to be something in between. That space in between is what I call new realism. 

MARKUS GABRIEL holds the Chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn, where he is also Director of the International Center for Philosophy. Markus Gabriel's Edge Bio Page

 


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The Nature of Moral Motivation

Patricia S. Churchland
[10.16.19]

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A Post-Galilean Paradigm

Philip Goff
[9.24.19]

We're now going through a phase of history where people are so blown away at the success of physical science and the wonderful technology it's produced that they've forgotten its philosophical underpinnings. They've forgotten its inherent limitations. If we want a science of consciousness, we need to move beyond Galileo. We need to move to what I call a post-Galilean paradigm. We need to rethink what science is. That doesn't mean we stop doing physical science or we do physical science differently—I'm not here to tell physical scientists how to do their jobs. It does, however, mean that it's not the full story. We need physical science to encompass a more expansive conception of the scientific method. We need to adopt a worldview that can accommodate both the quantitative data of physical science and the qualitative reality of consciousness. That's essentially the problem.

Fortunately, there is a way forward. There is a framework that could allow us to make progress on this. It's inspired by certain writings from the 1920s of the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington, who is incidentally the first scientist to confirm general relativity after the First World War. I'm inclined to think that these guys did in the 1920s for the science of consciousness what Darwin did in the 19th century for the science of life. It's a tragedy of history that this was completely forgotten about for a long time for various historical reasons we could talk about. But, it's recently been rediscovered in the last five or ten years in academic philosophy, and it's causing a lot of excitement and interest.

PHILIP GOFF is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, UK, and author of Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (forthcoming, 2019). Philip Goff's Edge Bio Page


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Perception As Controlled Hallucination

Predictive Processing and the Nature of Conscious Experience
Andy Clark
[6.6.19]

Perception itself is a kind of controlled hallucination. . . . [T]he sensory information here acts as feedback on your expectations. It allows you to often correct them and to refine them. But the heavy lifting seems to be being done by the expectations. Does that mean that perception is a controlled hallucination? I sometimes think it would be good to flip that and just think that hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception. 

ANDY CLARK is professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex and author of Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied MindAndy Clark's Edge Bio Page


 

Alzheimer's Prevention

Lisa Mosconi
[2.11.19]

Right now, we don’t have therapies that regrow neurons. Alzheimer’s is a disease that kills your neurons over time, so once they’re gone they’re pretty much gone. There are things that one can do pharmaceutically to ameliorate the symptoms. For example, there are FDA-approved drugs such as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors or memantine, which do lessen or stabilize symptoms for a few years, but they can’t stop disease progression. What we’re interested in is disease modification, stopping it before it’s too severe or too advanced.

At the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic, we try to tell people what to do in a preventative way. There are a lot of other people and clinicians that are actively engaging in prevention as well. It’s new in my field, especially in the field of neurology. Until four years ago nobody would dare use the word “prevention” out loud because so many doctors and clinicians would just label you as a quack right away and you would lose credibility overnight. I find scientists are much more open to this now.

LISA MOSCONI is the director of the Women's Brain Initiative and the associate director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive PowerLisa Mosconi's Edge Bio Page

 


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The Future of the Mind

How AI Technology Could Reshape the Human Mind and Create Alternate Synthetic Minds
Susan Schneider
[1.28.19]

I see many misunderstandings in current discussions about the nature of mind, such as the assumption that if we create sophisticated AI, it will inevitably be conscious. There is also this idea that we should “merge with AI”—that in order for humans to keep up with developments in AI and not succumb to hostile superintelligent AIs or AI-based technological unemployment, we need to enhance our own brains with AI technology.

One thing that worries me about all this is that don't think AI companies should be settling issues involving the shape of the mind. The future of the mind should be a cultural decision and an individual decision. Many of the issues at stake here involve classic philosophical problems that have no easy solutions. I’m thinking, for example, of theories of the nature of the person in the field of metaphysics. Suppose that you add a microchip to enhance your working memory, and then years later you add another microchip to integrate yourself with the Internet, and you just keep adding enhancement after enhancement. At what point will you even be you? When you think about enhancing the brain, the idea is to improve your life—to make you smarter, or happier, maybe even to live longer, or have a sharper brain as you grow older—but what if those enhancements change us in such drastic ways that we’re no longer the same person?

SUSAN SCHNEIDER holds the Distinguished Scholar chair at the Library of Congress and is the director of the AI, Mind and Society (“AIMS”) Group at the University of Connecticut. Susan Schneider's Edge Bio Page


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Absolute Brain Size Matters

Brian Hare
[6.28.18]

The thing that stuck out was that self-control is simply a product of absolute brain size. It had more to do with your feeding ecology: How complex was your diet? How many things do you rely on to survive? That was a big surprise, because the idea that diet is shaping cognition has faded in many circles as the leading hypothesis for thinking about how psychology evolves. So, how do we move forward on testing ideas about the evolution of psychology? ... It's interesting to think about how this all came about. It all started in a bar.

BRIAN HARE is an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina and founder the Duke Canine Cognition Center. He is the co-author (with Vanessa Woods) of The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think. Brian Hare's Edge Bio Page


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"A Difference That Makes a Difference"

Daniel C. Dennett
[11.22.17]

Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like a picture? Is it iconic in some way? Does it resemble what it’s about, or is it like a word that refers to what it’s about without resembling it? Are there third, fourth, fifth alternatives? Looking at information in the brain and then trying to trace it back to information in the genes that must be responsible for providing the design of the brain that can then carry information in other senses, you gradually begin to realize that this does tie in with Shannon-Weaver information theory. There’s a way of seeing information as "a difference that makes a difference," to quote Donald MacKay and Bateson.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to articulate, with the help of Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig, just what meaning is, what content is, and ultimately, in terms of biological information and physical information, the information of Shannon and Weaver. There’s a chapter in my latest book called “What is Information?” I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.

DANIEL C. DENNETT is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author, most recently, of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Daniel C. Dennett's Edge Bio page

 


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Aerodynamics For Cognition

Tom Griffiths
[8.21.17]

It's very clear that in order to make progress in understanding some of the most challenging and important things about intelligence, studying the best example we have of an intelligent system is a way to do that. Often, people who argue against that make the analogy that if we were trying to understand how to build jet airplanes, then starting with birds is not necessarily a good way to do that.                                 

That analogy is pretty telling. The thing that's critical to both making jet airplanes work and making birds fly is the structure of the underlying problem that they're solving. That problem is keeping an object airborne, and the structure of that problem is constrained by aerodynamics. By studying how birds fly and the structure of their wings, you can learn something important about aerodynamics. And what you learn about aerodynamics is equally relevant to then being able to make jet engines.                                 

The kind of work that I do is focused on trying to identify the equivalent of aerodynamics for cognition. What are the real abstract mathematical principles that constrain intelligence? What can we learn about those principles by studying human beings? 

TOM GRIFFITHS is a professor of psychology and cognitive science and director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author (with Brian Christian) of Algorithms to Live By. Tom Griffiths's Edge Bio page


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