Tag: consciousness

The Painting That Recognizes Us

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez

What gives art its power? There are as many answers as there are powerful works of art, but most seem to fall into a few broad categories. A great deal of art is representational. It is intended to depict or show us something, whether natural or abstract. It succeeds by faithfully capturing its subject. Other art may be intended to express an inner state, feeling, intuition, or vision. In both cases, the creative act is a one-sided process of mimesis or self-expression. Appreciation of the artwork is also somewhat unidirectional. What does this show me? How does it make me feel?

Authenticity of expression and fidelity of representation are important aspects of art’s power, but neither can explain the uncanny phenomenon that occurs when a work seems to look back at the viewer, drawing them into a relationship with it. What happens is more than the recognition of a represented object or an expressed feeling. It is a mutual recognition mediated by the painting, poem, or musical composition in an intersubjective space co-created by the artist, the viewer, and their shared culture.

The neuroscience of active inference proposes that the mind meets the world not directly but through a guessing game. The brain builds models of reality, predictions, and structured hunches, and tests them against incoming experience, updating them when they don’t fit. You don’t see the world as it is. You see your best guess, corrected in real time.

This works beautifully for the world out there. But how does a guessing machine guess about itself? Try to model your own consciousness, and you hit a strange loop: the modeler is the thing being modeled. 

Since Hegel, philosophers have argued that self-consciousness depends on recognition. The self becomes itself not by staring inward, but by encountering itself in another’s response.

Nature’s solution is elegant and inescapably social. Read more »

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Consciousness, Memory, and the Relational Self in Yoko Ogawa and Michael Pollan

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

Every morning, the mathematician wakes up not knowing who he is.

Or rather, he knows exactly who he is. He knows his theorems, his love of prime numbers, the way a perfect equation can feel like something close to grace. What he cannot recall, however, is who slept in his house last night, who cooked his breakfast, whose child left muddy shoes by the door. His memory, damaged by a long-ago accident, resets every eighty minutes.

And yet it seems that no one who encounters him — not the housekeeper who tends to him, not her young son whom he names Root for the shape of his head, not even his sister-in-law who knew him before — would say he is not himself. He is achingly, luminously present in every moment. He simply cannot remember things happening before.

Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Housekeeper and the Professor has haunted me since I first read it, but it returned with new insistence when I recently opened Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

Before reading Pollan’s book, I struggled to think of Ogawa’s Professor as truly conscious, in the same way I am truly conscious, mainly I had always assumed that consciousness was inseparable from something called the continuous self. When I tried to imagine, for example: what I myself am beyond the sum total of my life experiences and my story of being “me,” I struggled.  We have all heard families of Alzheimer’s sufferers describe how a light went out in the sufferer’s mind or how “mom was gone.”

If I put myself in the fictional professor’s shoes, for example, while I can imagine my love of reading and writing still being there even after a catastrophic loss of memory, I wonder what “me” would I be if I couldn’t recognize my son or my husband? How much can I lose and keep “feeling myself?”

Or more interesting, how much can I really lose and keep being myself?

Philosophers sometimes invoke the concept of a “philosophical zombie,” which is a being that imitates consciousness perfectly but has no inner subjective experience, no sense of what it is like to be itself. The Professor is the uncanny reverse: a being whose inner life is unmistakably rich, whose subjective experience of each eighty minutes is vivid and complete, but who cannot stitch those moments into a continuous story. Read more »

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

AI and Consciousness

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

The question of whether AI is capable of having conscious experiences is not an abstract philosophical debate. It has real consequences and getting the wrong answer is dangerous. If AI is conscious then we will experience substantial pressure to confer human and individual rights on AI entities, especially if they report experiencing pain or suffering. If AI is not conscious and thus cannot experience pain and suffering, that pressure will be relieved at least up to a point.

It strikes me as extraordinarily dangerous to give super-human intelligence the robust autonomy entailed by human rights. On the other hand, if we deny such rights to AI and it turns out to be conscious, we incur the substantial moral risk of treating a conscious being as a labor-saving device. A fully sentient, super-human intelligence poorly treated will not be happy.

I hear and read a good deal of discussion coming out of Silicon Valley about whether AI is at least potentially conscious. The problem is that—and I mean this quite literally—no one knows what they’re talking about. Because no one knows what consciousness is. This is an enormously complex question with a very long history of debate in philosophy and the sciences. And we are not close to resolving it. There are at least eight main theories of consciousness and countless others striving to get attention. We are unlikely to settle this question quickly so it’s important not to make unwarranted assumptions about such a consequential issue.

This is not the place to articulate all the nuances of that debate and its implications for AI, but I think there is a way of bringing some focus to the question by organizing these various theories as competing views on the status of subjective experience, or to use the more or less technical term, the status of “qualia.” Read more »

Monday, February 9, 2026

Jackasses in Jackboots: When Ice Met Minnesota Nice

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

ICE Agent, Photo by Betto Rodrigues

The biggest hazard on my one trip to Minneapolis was being invited to too many family picnics and possibly dying from an overdose of mayonnaise. You have to go to Minnesota to really experience what’s known in the vernacular as Minnesota Nice. The term springs from the sincere desire those northern people have that you’ll take a second helping of bratwurst and potato salad, then get home safely, and call your host or your family when you do. It’s kind of wonderful and kind of smothering, akin to having one too many comforters on your bed.

So I don’t think too many of us were expecting Minnesota to be our modern-day Gettysburg, when all those nice people came out onto the streets to fight Trump’s reviled brand of fascism. Minnesota was largely out of my news feed until these past few weeks when the jackbooted thugs from ICE began to tear apart the famously neighborly city of Minneapolis. Occasionally I’d hear about a brutal cold front coming down from the arctic or an exceptional year for the Vikings, but there just weren’t that many sensational stories coming down from the Land-O-Lakes.

Before Trump and Kristi Noem sent their band of thugs up to Minnesota, the people there were busy carrying on what appeared to be, on the whole, enviable lives. Statistics never tell the whole story, but when it comes to quality of life, Minnesota consistently ranks in the top five US States based on metrics like poverty levels, health care, safety, education, and fiscal stability. Its consistently high safety ranking—factors like crime rates, quality of hospitals, quality of roads, and speed of emergency medical services—certainly took a blow when the masked goons dispatched to “make cities safe again,” showed up and wiped their boots on the Constitution.

We all saw the grotesque murders of Renee Good, a young mother, and Alex Pretti, a young ICU nurse, by trigger-happy ICE agents just weeks apart from each other. Even with all the other violence going on in the world—Ukraine, Gaza, and the rest—those murders were hard to watch. Whether it was the stuffed animals in Good’s car or the mournful version of Taps played as co-workers wheeled Pretti’s coffin down the hall of the Vets’ Hospital where he worked, there were poignant emblems and imagery reminding us that those two never should have been shot dead. Read more »

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

Self and No Self

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

No Selfie

Many years ago, I began a meditation practice, sparked by curiosity and vague, middle-aged worries about stress and blood pressure. To my surprise, it quickly became a regular part of my life. I restlessly explored many forms of meditation and meditation groups, eventually coming to the San Francisco Zen Center. Before long, I found myself seated on a black cushion in the meditation hall each morning at 5:30. Twenty years later, and 2,500 miles away, I have a much more relaxed schedule, but I am still at it.

What is it like to meditate? This is a question I am constantly asked. Would a philosopher or scientist say there’s a distinct state of consciousness with its own special qualia? I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong, but meditation has never given me an experience that I would call altered consciousness. I’ve come to think the more interesting question is not what meditation feels like moment to moment, but what it is like to be a meditator, to live a life punctuated by these quiet, unremarkable moments of sitting still.

There are many ways our minds can store the details of our experience. We put facts and figures in one place, sensory experiences in another, and skills and procedures in yet another. There is a special kind of memory, called episodic memory, that holds not just the information about an event, but also a sense of our being there. Recalling episodic memories gives us a faint sense of time travel. These are the memories we can reinhabit. We remember a beach vacation as if we can feel the warm sand between our toes, hear the gulls above, and sense the light breeze on our skin. They have a lived-through quality, a presence that feels like “me.”

I have a torrent of episodic memories from my time in San Francisco, where I had just started a new job. I felt like a tourist; every street, every café, every meeting at the new company introduced a parade of unfamiliar faces. My memory was overloaded with experiences and sensations. It felt like my life had entered a new incarnation, complete with a new cast of characters I had to learn. As I stepped into a new role, I became, to some extent, a different person as I adapted to meet new duties and responsibilities. I was surrounded by people who each had hopes and expectations that I would be a good employee, a respectable colleague, and a friend. These hopes and expectations exerted palpable influences on my sense of self.

In the meditation hall, expectations were few. Read more »

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

An Embodied Mathematics

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

The Stepped Reckoner, a calculating machine invented by philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1674

Is mathematics created or discovered? For over two thousand years, that question has puzzled philosophers and mathematicians alike. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates encourages an uneducated boy to “discover” a geometrical truth simply by answering a series of guided questions. To Plato, this demonstrated that mathematical knowledge is innate, that the soul recalls truths it has always known. The intuitionists of the early twentieth century, however, rejected this idea of eternal forms. For thinkers like Poincaré and Brouwer, mathematics was not revelation but construction: an activity of the human mind unfolding in time.

The debate continues today in an unexpected new arena. As artificial intelligences start to generate proofs, conjectures, and even entire branches of formal reasoning, we are prompted to ask again: what does it mean to do mathematics? Current systems excel at symbol manipulation and pattern matching, but are they truly thinking in any meaningful way, or just rearranging signs? The deeper question is how humans do mathematics. What happens in the brain when a mathematician recognizes a pattern, intuitively sees a relation, or invents a new kind of number?

In what follows, I’ll trace that question from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and then to the newest foundations of mathematics. We’ll see that mathematical invention may be the natural expression of the brain’s recursive, embodied intelligence, and that this perspective could transform how we think about both mathematics and AI. Read more »

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

The Alien Mirror: Humanizing Artificial Intelligence

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

Humanistic AI

Artificial intelligence has emerged not as a single technology but as a civilization-transforming event. Our collective response has predictably polarized between apocalyptic fears of extinction and utopian dreams of abundance. The existential risks are real. As AI systems become increasingly powerful, their inner workings become increasingly opaque to their creators. This raises very reasonable fears about our ability to control them and avoid potentially catastrophic outcomes. However, between apocalypse and utopia, there may be a subtler and perhaps equally profound danger. Even if we navigate the many doomsday scenarios that confront us, the same opacity that makes AI potentially dangerous also threatens to undermine the foundations of humanism itself.

The dangers of AI are often perceived as disruptions and displacements that will temporarily shake up the workforce and the economy. These changes are significant losses, but we have overcome greater challenges in the past. Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe; Darwin took away our biological uniqueness; Freud showed we are not masters of our own minds. Each revolution has both humbled and enriched humanity, opening new ways to understand what it means to be human.

People will still exist, but who will we be when machines surpass doctors, teachers, artists, and philosophers, not in some distant future, but within our lifetimes? AI tutors already offer more personalized instruction than most classrooms. Diagnostic models outperform radiologists on complex scans. Generative systems produce vast amounts of art, music, and text that are indistinguishable from human work. None of this is inherently harmful. Students might learn more, patients might be diagnosed earlier, and art could thrive in abundance. However, the roles that once carried social meaning and usefulness risk becoming merely decorative. Dehumanization does not necessarily mean extinction; it can mean the loss of purpose and self-worth. Read more »

Thursday, August 14, 2025

The Social Origin of Free Will

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

In 2023, Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s bestseller ‘Determined’ declared free will to be a complete illusion. Sapolsky gathered a wealth of data from neuroscience to quantum mechanics in an effort to deliver a final knockout blow to our intuitive ideas of freedom. He then explores a wide range of ethical and social issues where our questionable notions of freedom have led to misguided and often inhumane policies and practices. Since its publication, the book continues to attract criticism for its deterministic stance. Experts from many fields have engaged in this lively discussion.

Watching the debate unfold shows that while we have strong ideas about what free will isn’t, we lack a clear understanding of what freedom actually could be. We agree that whatever it is, it would be incompatible with both mechanical determinism and total randomness. We also think that free will is connected to that vaguely self-conscious feeling that we are the originators of our actions. If free will exists, it probably exists in a middle ground that isn’t too deterministic nor too random. But what exactly is it?

Neuroscience may not be as conclusive about the end of free will as Sapolsky suggests, but it has not been particularly effective in producing alternative explanations. Science generally depends on deterministic approaches — such as reproducible experiments — to test hypotheses that can be proven false. It might be, as critics like Jessica Riskin argue, that science is the wrong place to seek an understanding of free will. However, a potential way forward could come from an unexpected source. In the early nineteenth century, philosopher G.W.F. Hegel developed a theory of freedom, defining it as a result of human social interactions. Read more »

Friday, November 22, 2024

Make Art Dangerous Again

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed umbrellas, and battered car parts. These strange and playful conglomerations looked as though the bric-a-brac and refuse had been plucked together by some invisible furious force to house a spirit or daemon. They were, of course, carefully composed works by the late African-American artist Curtis Cuffie, one of the many ephemeral assemblages he created in the streets of downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

Cuffie installed his improvised ensembles of found objects on fences, window grilles, sidewalks, and traffic signs in Cooper Square, the Bowery, and elsewhere; they were always temporary, and only a few of his works have survived. Cuffie periodically lived on the streets around Cooper Square and his homelessness must have made his emotional tie to the treasures he found and wheeled around in shopping carts all the more urgent. Most of the works he created from this repertoire of materials were abstract, shrines that seemed to grow out of the flotsam and jetsam of a city in constant transformation; seen from a passing car, they flashed in the sideview mirror like otherworldly apparitions. But there were also figurative sculptures: ragged garments strung on wire and string and adorned with hats or wigs became animated spirits on a secret mission. Today, the few remaining works by Cuffie that were not taken down and destroyed by the police or street cleaners are shown and sold in the pristine white spaces of uptown Manhattan galleries, stripped of their context and also, perhaps, a good deal of their meaning. Read more »

Monday, February 5, 2024

The How Of Why: Not Quite A Review (Part II)

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Is the cosmos conscious, or is it all just in our heads?In the previous column, I took Philip Goff’s latest offering Why? The Purpose of the Universe as a jumping-off point to present some of my own rumination on life, the universe, and what it all means. While that prior installment was mainly concerned with looking outward, into the wider cosmos, here, I’ll turn my gaze inward, to riff on Goff’s case that the reality of conscious experience implies a larger purpose to, well, everything.

Goff’s ultimate conclusion should be attractive to many: rather than being thrown by mere random chance into the cold and uncaring void of the universe, to live out a brief, confused existence and then wink out into the nothingness whence we came, the existence of complex life in the world is due to a larger purpose, an overall arc that bends into the direction of greater objective value. Moreover, rather than going the traditional route and appealing to some omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent creator God that sees to it that everything unfolds according to His divine (and commonly, unfathomable) design, he proposes a way to reap those benefits without all the boring Sunday prayer sessions!

Thus, he breaks largely untrodden ground: proposing a middle way between a scientific, materialist, but ultimately uncaring cosmos, and a world unfolding according to a divine, but irreducibly mysterious, purpose. Just as evolution can give us design without a designer, he proposes meaning without a meaner. If this were a religion, I could well see myself signing up for it—but since it’s not, I don’t even have to do that! However, as also hinted at in the last column, the more alluring the conclusion, the more we have to critically examine the arguments leading up to it. Read more »

Monday, January 8, 2024

The How Of Why: Not Quite A Review (Part I)

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Is there mind and purpose even at the base level of reality? Philip Goff thinks for anything to matter, there has to be.

I’m inherently suspicious of overt declarations of having arrived at a certain position only through the strength of the arguments in its favor, even against one’s own prior commitments. If that were typically how things happen, then either there ought to be much more agreement than there is, or the vast majority of people are just irredeemably irrational.

There are several junctures in Philip Goff’s most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, at which we are treated to a description of the author’s intellectual journey, detailing how the force of argument necessitated course corrections. Now, changing your mind in the face of new information is generally a good thing: nobody gets it right on the first try, so everybody who’s held fast to their views probably just hasn’t examined them deeply. But still, very few people arrive at their position solely thanks to rational forces.

Luckily, most of the arguments in Goff’s book really are good ones. And what’s more, they’re presented in a way that’s accessible, without overly sacrificing detail, which he achieves by presenting them in a first pass, and then including a ‘Digging Deeper’-section devoted to clarifying various points and defending against some possible objections. That way, you can first get the gist, and perhaps return later to engage with the subject more deeply. Would that more philosophers, when writing for a non-specialist audience, showed that much consideration towards their audience!

Goff’s main contention is that the best available evidence, filtered through the understanding bestowed to us by our best current theories, does not paint a picture of a meaningless cosmos, as is usually claimed. (In the words of physicist Steven Weinberg, in his account of the creation of the universe, The First Three Minutes: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”) That may have been true in the days of the mechanical cosmos of Laplace, but, Goff holds, is no longer the case.

He marshals two main arguments in support of his conclusion. Read more »

Monday, August 21, 2023

Surfing the Ocean in My Sixties

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

(l to r) Jennifer and Barbara Get Ready to Surf 
Photo by Bob Arkow

Deep Water Background

For an opus on surfing, I recommend Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I am humbled each time I pick up this book. Four summers ago, at 64, I decided to try to surf. People who do not surf, and even some who do, are impressed when I mention this, as if any day now I will be gliding upright over sky-high waves and onto the shore. The truth: For me this is a very minor undertaking and would not even qualify as a hobby. In other words: It is something to sneeze at. I have yet to stand up on a surfboard.

I can get on two knees, briefly and occasionally crouch on one foot while supported by the other knee. Then splash, I fall backwards into the water. Backwards is the correct way to fall. You can see the board before it bangs you in the head. With any luck you can then grab its rim or use the leash—presumably still attached around your ankle—to pull the board towards you and safely away from other surfers. I congratulate myself for, at the least, being able to fall off a surfboard well.

Finnegan writes that if you want to be an accomplished surfer, you must start by the time you are fourteen, at the latest. The exact quote: “People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit. It was possible to have fun, though, under supervision, in the right conditions…”

I agree, with some caveats. Read more »

Monday, September 19, 2022

Never Mind: Straw Arguments Against Panpsychism

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

The only thing worse than a good argument contrary to a conviction you hold is a bad argument in its favor. Overcoming a good argument can strengthen your position, while failing to may prompt you to reevaluate it. In either case, you’ve learned something—if perhaps at the expense of a cherished belief.

But with a bad argument, you’re put in an awkward situation. Since you agree with its conclusion, to the extent that you’re interested in spreading belief in this position, engaging it would not seem to be in your best interest. On the other hand, such arguments always carry the necessary raw materials for the construction of future strawmen within them: bundled together, they only need to then be knocked down with great aplomb to try and dissuade belief in the conclusion they purport to further. Hence, I call such arguments ‘straw arguments’.

Take the case of Ernst Haeckel’s supposed ‘biogenetic law’, which posits that the creation of the individual retraces the evolutionary history of the entire species—‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. Thus, that evolutionary history is manifest in the developmental stages of an individual history, giving direct evidence (of a sort) of this history. The only trouble is, it’s wrong; individual stages of embryonic development do not resemble adult stages of phylogenetic ancestors. Read more »

Monday, June 20, 2022

Exorcising a New Machine

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

A.I.-generated image (from DALL-E Mini), given the text prompt, “computer with a halo, an angel, but digital”

Here’s a brief story about two friends of mine. Let’s call them A. Sociologist and A. Mathematician, pseudonyms that reflect both their professions and their roles in the story. A few years ago, A.S. and A.M. worked together on a research project. Naturally, A.S. developed the sociological theories for their project, and A.M. developed the mathematical models. Yet as the months passed, they found it difficult to agree on the basics. Each time A.M. showed A.S. his calculations, A.S. would immediately generate stories about them, spinning them as illustrations of social concepts he had just now developed. From A.S.’s point of view, of course, this was entirely justified, as the models existed to illustrate his sociological ideas. But from A.M.’s point of view, this pushed out far past science, into philosophy. Unable to agree on the meaning or purpose of their shared efforts, they eventually broke up.

This story was not newsworthy (it’d be more newsworthy if these emissaries of the “two cultures” had actually managed to get along), but I thought of it last week while I read another news story—that of the Google engineer who convinced himself a company chatbot was sentient.

Like the story of my two friends, this story was mostly about differing meanings and purposes. The subject of said meanings and purposes was a particular version of LaMDA (Language Models for Dialog Applications), which, to quote Google’s technical report, is a family of “language models specialized for dialog, which have up to 137 [billion] parameters and are pre-trained on 1.56 [trillion] words of public dialog data and web text.”

To put this another way, LaMDA models respond to text in a human-seeming way because they are created by feeding literal human conversations from online sources into a complex algorithm. The problem with such a training method is that humans online interact with various degrees of irony and/or contempt, which has required Google engineers to further train their models not to be assholes. Read more »

Monday, May 2, 2022

The Mind and the Quantum: Complementary Perspectives

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: Result of asking the NightCafe-AI to draw ‘quantum consciousness’: all of the bits and pieces seem evocative and intriguing, but fail to assemble into a coherent whole. A taste of things to come?

Reading the words ‘mind’ and ‘quantum’ in close proximity on the internet rarely inspires great confidence. Indeed, all too often, all this indicates is that you’re about a click away from learning about life-changing techniques of ‘Quantum Jumping’ to a parallel reality where all your wishes come true, using ‘Quantum Healing’ to ‘holistically’ heal the ‘bodymind’, and other What the Bleep Do We Know!?-esque nonsense. Therefore, in writing about the fraught intersection of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness, one is faced first with the challenge of convincing the reader that there is actually something of value to be gained from investing their attentional resources. So let me first consider arguments against the relevance of quantum mechanics for consciousness.

First, of course, mere woo-by-association does not make a good argument. That people have misused the buzzwords of ‘quantum’, ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’ and the like to promote shoddy self-help strategies does not entail that they can’t be combined in a sensible, and ideally even illuminating, way. But there are commonly-cited objections that deserve serious consideration.

The most common is the ‘large, warm, and wet’-argument. Quantum mechanics is often (if somewhat misleadingly) considered to be the ‘science of the small’, whose effects are typically observed at length scales far removed from everyday sizes, and thus, from brains. Furthermore, quantum effects typically requires systems to be well-isolated from the environment, to not fall prey to decoherence effects. But brains aren’t generally thus isolated—indeed, in a sense, it’s the very point of a brain to interact with the environment. Finally, quantum systems, to limit interaction, often have to be cooled down to a few degrees above absolute zero, something that again isn’t conducive to the proper functioning of a brain. Read more »

Monday, November 15, 2021

The Problem Of The Inner: On The Subject-Ladenness Of Objectivity

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: Cutting into a cake does not reveal the interior, but simply creates more—delicious—surface. Image credit: Caitlyn de Wild on Unsplash

Children, they say, are natural scientists (although opinion on what it is that makes them so appears divided). Each of us has probably been stumped by a question asked, out of the blue, that gives a sudden glimpse into the workings of a mind encountering the world for the first time, faced with the impossible task of making sense of it. While there may be an element of romanticisation at play, such moments also, on occasion, show us the world from a point of view where the assumptions that frame the adult world have not yet calcified into comforting certainties.

The questions I asked, as a child, where probably mostly of the ‘neverending chain of why’-sort (a habit I still haven’t entirely shed). But there was one idea that kept creeping up on me with an almost compulsive quality: how do I know what’s inside things? Is there anything, or is there just a dark nothing behind their flimsy outer skin? Granted, I probably didn’t phrase it in these terms, but there was a sort of vaguely realized worry that things might just suddenly go pop like an unsuspecting balloon pricked by a prankster’s needle, exposing themselves as ultimately hollow, mere shells.

It’s not such an easily dismissed idea. All we ever see of things are surfaces reflecting light. All we ever touch are exteriors. Even the tasting tongue, a favorite instrument of probing for the curious child, tastes nothing but what’s on the outside (incidentally, here’s something I always found sort of creepy: look at anything around you—your tongue knows exactly what it feels like).

You might think it’s a simple enough exercise to discover the inner nature of things—faced with, say, the deliciously decorated exterior of a cake, in the best analytic tradition, heed your inner lobster, whip out a knife and cut right into it to expose the sweet interior. But are you then truly faced with the cake’s inner nature? No—rather, you’re presented with the surface of the piece you cut out, and the rest remaining on the cake platter.

The act of cutting, rather than revealing the inner, just creates new exterior, by separating the cut object—you can’t cut your cake and leave it whole. Whenever threatened with exposure, the inner retreats behind fresh surface. Read more »

Monday, September 20, 2021

Incoherent Incoherence: Freedom In A Physical World II

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: Statue of Ibn Rushd, author of the Incoherence of the Incoherence, in Córdoba, Spain. Image credit: Saleemzohaib, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahâfut al-falâsifa) is an attempt by 11th century Sunni theologian and mystic al-Ghazâlî to refute the doctrines of philosophers such as Ibn Sina (often latinized Avicenna) or al-Fârâbî (Alpharabius), which he viewed as heretical for favoring Greek philosophy over the tenets of Islam. Al-Ghazâlî’s methodological principle was that in order to refute the assertions of the philosophers, one must first be well versed in their ideas; indeed, another work of his, Doctrines of the Philosophers (Maqāsid al-Falāsifa), gives a comprehensive survey of the Neoplatonic philosophy he sought to refute in the Incoherence.

The Incoherence, besides its other qualities, is noteworthy in that it is now regarded as a landmark work in philosophy itself. Ibn Rushd (Averroes), in response, penned the Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), a turning point away from Neoplatonism to Aristotelianism.

In modern times, most allegations of ‘incoherence’ levied against philosophy come not from the direction of religion, but rather, from scientists’ allegations that their discipline has made philosophy redundant, supplanting it by a better set of tools to investigate the world. The perhaps most well-known example of this is Stephen Hawking’s infamous assertion that ‘philosophy is dead’, but similar sentiments are readily found. While the proponents of such allegations have not always shown shown al-Ghazâlî’s methodological scrupulousness in engaging with the body of thought they seek to refute, these are still weighty charges by some of the leading intellectuals of the day. Read more »

Monday, May 31, 2021

To See A World In A Grain Of Silicon: Why Minds Aren’t Programs

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: The IBM 5150 Personal Computer, introduced August 1981. Image credit: wikipedia.

The year 2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of IBM’s first Personal Computer (PC), the IBM 5150. Since then, computers have risen from a novelty to a ubiquitous fixture of modern life, with a transformative impact on nearly all aspects of work and leisure alike.

It is perhaps this ubiquity that prevents us from stopping to ponder the essentially mysterious powers of the computer, the same way a fish might not ponder the nature of the water it is immersed in.

By ‘mysterious powers’, I don’t mean the impressive capabilities modern computers offer, in terms of, say, data storage and manipulation—while it is no doubt remarkable that even consumer grade devices today are able to beat the best human players at chess, and the engineering behind such feats is miraculous, there is nothing mysterious about this ability.

No, what is mysterious is instead the feat of computation itself: a computer is, after all, a physical object; while a computation, say something straightforward like calculating the sum of two numbers, operates on abstract objects. Therefore, the question arises: how does the computer qua physical system connect to abstract objects, like numbers? Does it reach, somehow, into the Platonic realm itself? To the extend that computers can use the result of computations to drive machinery, they seem to present a bridge by which the abstract can have concrete physical effects. Read more »

Monday, March 15, 2021

“The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness” By Mark Solms

Posted on by Joan Harvey

by Joan Harvey

For several years I enjoyed discussions about neuroscience with a friend (now deceased) who was a top rock climber. He and his buddies, when not performing solo climbs with torn shoulder muscles and sleeping on cliffside bivouacs, would listen to Sam Harris and talk neuroscience. We have conquered mountains, was their creed; now we will take on the mind. Because of this, and despite the fact that many top neuroscientists are women, and that many neuroscientists come across as gentle and balanced individuals, I got the idea of neuroscience as a slightly competitive macho sport. I grew up among mountains and as a young person I was fond of the Hopkins lines:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed…

Men and women are now fathoming these mind cliffs and, here and there, claiming first ascents.

In the middle of his new book The Hidden Spring, Mark Solms quotes Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” This could describe the thinking behind The Hidden Spring: to make the complex theory within as simple as possible, without dumbing it down so much as to be meaningless. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking—on the one hand Solms is addressing the “hard problem” of consciousness with his own relatively controversial theory; on the other hand he’s trying to explain general concepts of science (falsifiability, Bayesian theory, the free energy principle, Markov blankets, etc.) to a reader who might not know them, so as to guide them through his thinking.

Solms is successful, to my mind, but there remains the question: Who is the general reader (I salute you, General Reader) to whom he says the book is addressed, and whom he advises to ignore the endnotes aimed at academics? I suppose I qualify as a General Reader, as I have neither a math nor a science background, though I did compulsively read all the endnotes. One needn’t be familiar with the arguments of Nagel and Chalmers or Andy Clark’s predictive processing, as Solms summarizes their arguments clearly; on the other hand it probably doesn’t hurt to have some background, and I suspect the “general” reader who comes to this book will do better with at least an acquaintance with these things. Read more »

Monday, April 1, 2019

Translating Descartes

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1. The philosopher and the translator

It was probably the most interesting translation job I ever had. Hired directly by the philosopher himself, my task was to translate into English a series of talks and papers he would be delivering in the US and Europe in the coming year. Philosophy being what I studied as an undergraduate, I had high hopes for the job. But my Japanese philosopher quickly became frustrated with me.

Leanne-san, is it possible for you to forget Descartes while you translate my papers? He wrote superciliously in a style of Japanese designed to be condescending beyond belief.

Well, this took me by surprise! Was it possible that I was guilty of an unconscious Cartesianism? Surely, he must be joking; for had I not studied at the feet of the great Heidegger scholar, Hubert Dreyfus, who had made it his mission to demolish Descartes in front of our very eyes –before turning to Heidegger? In all my philosophy classes, in fact, Descartes (always referred to as “the father of modern philosophy”) came up again and again–mainly in the form of other philosophers’ reactions to some aspect of his work.

So much so, that sometimes I think my understanding of Descartes is itself a rejection of Descartes.

And so, I informed my philosopher that not only had I forgotten Descartes long ago, but that I had no plans to ever remember him again.

He was not convinced and pressed his point. Read more »