In my last post, I was trying to unpack a bit of what we mean when we use the term conscious. My expectation was that this follow up post would be about an active, purposeful processes focussed and driven by emotion. Upon further consideration I’ve also come to the position …
Aka How important is it that our thought experiments plausibly reflect the developmental paths implicitly necessary for their postulates to hold? I was kicked into this train of thought after reading Berit Brogaard’s The status of consciousness in nature, which discusses the Mary in a room thought experiment and has …
I recently discovered Sally Applin’s work, having been vectored there by Rethink Robotics blog posts. I’m intrigued by her ideas on blended/augmented reality experiences, and want to capture some thoughts on them. Her papers posit that we’re at the cusp of an inflection point of how our experience of reality …
When I was writing about Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, I was struck by the question is it possible that impairments that we think of as impairments of consciousness, are actually impairments in some of these necessary preconditions which occur via preconscious/subliminal processes This is of special concern …
Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Lots of interesting stuff here — what I found most intriguing were his descriptions of tests involving borderline cases in which the subject switches from paying conscious attention to one thing to paying conscious attention to another thing. In brain imaging studies, this …
I usually use this blog to capture my evolving thoughts on consciousness, cues and human activity. I don’t have any expectation that people are reading it, but I make it public since that encourages me to tighten up the writing and thinking. For this post, I want to pivot a …
This was prompted by David Rose’s Enchanted Objects — he breaks what I’d loosely characterize as computational assistance into four categories: Terminal World — slabs (phones, tablets), and more conventional computers. You come to them in their world, they don’t genuinely inhabit yours. This becomes clearer when contrasted with the …
Zynep Tufekci had a recent post up on medium in which she strongly argues against the assumptions underlying a NYT op ed by Louise Aronson. Aronson’s argument revolved around both the cost of elder care and the emotional burden placed upon family members who are tasked with caring for elder relatives. …
This book is a pretty thorough takedown of our subjective feelings of conscious control. Using figure 1.3 as a reference: Figure 1.3: Conditions of human action. “ The upper left quadrant shows the expected correspondence of action and the feeling of doing—the case when we do something and feel also …
Things and Places by Zenon Pylyshyn In keeping with my current goal of pushing the requirements for “conscious thought” down to an absolute minimum, I picked up (downloaded) a copy of Pylyshyn’s Things and Places. Pylyshyn is a long time vision researcher and this book serves as summary of his …