Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

I shouldn't be too dismissive, it's easy to be scornful of scientists doing philosophy but there there is actually some interesting and useful science in that article, and in this particular subject I don't think you can say that philosophers are any better informed or their theories less wildly speculative.

otm

ITT seems intriguing, borderline panpsychist plus this prediction: a sophisticated simulation of a human brain running on a digital computer cannot be conscious - I think they mean at a very high level - even if it can speak in a manner indistinguishable from a human being. And it puts Fela Kuti in my head.

Peter Watts, sci fi author and Biology PhD:

http
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

Trying again:

Peter Watts, sci fi author and biology PhD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

starts really well, ending is perhaps slightly disappointing

mind-blowing as the "Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect" study sounds, it seems it's been hard to replicate the findings

anyone read his books?

I enjoyed that, especially the ending! He was suitably sceptical about current theories & informative of the current state of the art in actual neural augmentation. Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious. Not remembering being conscious doesn't mean you were unconscious.

I have read blindsight, I don't recall anything about it. Does that mean I wasn't conscious when I read it?

Blindsight is really good

Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious.

lol yeah I guess I was unconscious during several lunches last week then

hope it wasn't soup or a big plate of spaghetti

Wow- thanks for posting that video. I thought it started well and ended well (the part where Elon Musk made a surprise cameo as the advance guard of the cyber-borg was a real-life lol).

Yo consciousness is wild shit

on the whole it's a great tool, but it's sneaky as hell and tells a lot of lies

O Tru Mind

enjoyed that Peter Watts talk, however terrifying

Good, sceptical, pessimistic piece about understanding the brain in general:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness

Reverse engineering a computer is often used as a thought experiment to show how, in principle, we might understand the brain. Inevitably, these thought experiments are successful, encouraging us to pursue this way of understanding the squishy organs in our heads. But in 2017, a pair of neuroscientists decided to actually do the experiment on a real computer chip, which had a real logic and real components with clearly designed functions. Things did not go as expected. [...] Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording – employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in [the Atari 2600] [...] As Jonas and Kording put it, the techniques fell short of producing "a meaningful understanding"

That’s an awesome paper, they do recordings and try to correlate the activity with what’s happening onscreen in Donkey Kong

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268

The Visual6502 team reverse-engineered the 6507 from physical integrated circuits [11] by chemically removing the epoxy layer and imaging the silicon die with a light microscope. Much like with current connectomics work [12, 13], a combination of algorithmic and human-based approaches were used to label regions, identify circuit structures, and ultimately produce a transistor-accurate netlist (a full connectome) for this processor consisting of 3510 enhancement-mode transistors. Several other support chips, including the Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) were also reverse-engineered and a cycle-accurate simulator was written that can simulate the voltage on every wire and the state of every transistor. The reconstruction has sufficient fidelity to run a variety of classic video games

I find this pretty amazing in itself!

They’ve done that with a few CPUs outside of this context - I think there is an online Intel 4004 simulator showing voltage changes on every line as it runs.

Ledge that Guardian book excerpt is so fucking otm, thank you for linking it