Are the cells swapping their mitochondria, or are the mitochondria shopping for new digs?
Observer on the world, trying to keep things straight.
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Are the cells swapping their mitochondria, or are the mitochondria shopping for new digs?
I see your influences. [have to get to the bottom] existentialcomics.com/comic/618
Optimism for interstellar exploration There's been some attention lately to a contest on designing an interstellar generation ship, a large scale ship that humans live in for generations while it crosses interstellar space to another solar system. As Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams notes,…
zombies open.substack.com/pub/petemand...
Yeah, I’ve been marinating for like, 14 years now, or so. But I’m seeing signs that some are catching on. Google “Minimal unifying model.” Let me know if you have questions.
Actually, “communication” (as I define it) implies a goal, and “staying alive” is the original, natural goal. But other (artificial) goals, like keeping the body (or room) at temperature X, also work. Re: zombies, you’re thinking at human level, self awareness, recogn of recogn’s (nested hierarchy).
Human C. has nested hierarchical mech’s (forgot “nested” above), including Ruth Millikan’s unitrackers (recognition) and Eliasmith’s semantic pointers (communication medium) to generate various output (feed forward, feedback/prediction, motor action, etc.). BTW, I can point at neuro mechs for these.
If you want to go panpsychic (instead of proto-panpsychic) you can just say “pattern recognition” (stretching the cognition a bit). The “communication” part adds necessity of goals/information, which gets you to aboutness and intention. 1/2
The (digital) thermostat and bacteria have the degenerate form of consciousness. Human consciousness has the most complex form extant, involving reiterative hierarchical units, but still just different variations of the same base unit process.
Re: water, I’m saying there is a minimal unit of consciousness (communication of pattern recognition) like there is a minimal unit of water (H2O molecule). The single unit is a degenerate form which does not resemble the complex form we intuit, but the complex form is made of units. 1/2(?)
Mary knows every physical fact about peas that you can learn from books. Mary does not know which cup the pea is under. Therefore physicalism is false.
I liked the article because it supports my (psychule) theory, by which a thermostat is conscious in the same way a molecule of H2O is “water” (or “rain” or “iceberg”). Affect and emotion can be put into this context, but it’s pretty involved. What are some other good arguments against functionalism?
Dang. Can’t find the original post that provided this link, so I’m just putting it here. This is the best, well written, easiest to understand, brief explanation of why consciousness is computationally functional. Now gotta pickup the book. longnow.org/ideas/life-i...
BREAKING: Big moment as CDC staff stage a mass walkout. They have lined the street outside its HQ to greet and salute the four top officials who have resigned in protest at RFK Jr’s attack on the agency’s science base. (🎥 AP)
Having just read this, I was struck how “sub space coding” seems to be exactly what is described by Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture. Is it related?
[typo, the 3rd: “… move parts of the skeleton (called skeletomotor). no sensory information).” — something missing in that end part.]
[typo, the 2nd: “Mappings increasing reflect semantic or conceptual similarity(Binder & Desai, 2011; Binderet al., 2009).” — I’m guessing “increasing” should be “increasingly”, else I don’t understand the sentence.]
[typo, the first: intro., 2nd paragraph — “The intrinsic architecture of the brain reduces the dimensionality of sensory inputs and allows feedback signals actively organize …” — missing a “to” after “signals”, as in, “allows … signals … to actively organize …”, yes?]
Can consciousness be vague? Is there a sharp cutoff between the conscious and the non-conscious? Sharp Sherry says consciousness cannot be vague. Sharp Sherry says “link in thread” 🧵
[not sure if I count as the #consciousness community, but …] I pretty much define an agent as a system with more than one goal that has to choose among potential actions based on expected value returned. This decision necessarily depends on info gathered from environment, so requires consciousness.
Sister Alice Multiple people have recommended Robert Reed's books over the years. I started to read his Greatship stories many years ago, but got distracted and never made it back. Recently I came across a recommendation for his book, Sister Alice, as an example of hard science fiction space…
But which visitors are putting you in a choke hold?
My roomba has all of those: subjectivity, interests, survival needs, body.
To restate my question, why is having interests not sufficient? I agree interests (goals) are necessary, and I can see why “living” supplies interests, but why are other (artificial) interests not sufficient?
I’m not a neuroscientist and am unfamiliar w/ Boden. Any chance you have a link to a paper? Alternatively, a short explanation of why metabolism is important for consciousness?
Got this far: “A subject is a living being with interests” What is “living” in this context?
Did you see the part (possibly separate article) where the AI translates the parts the patient did not intend to say. Hearing people’s inner dialogs could be … problematic?
I’m curious. Would it change anything to say that consciousness is inherent in processes, and a conscious “state” is just a dynamic state, the conscious process happening repeatedly?
[taking a shot here] If I have an artificial pattern recognizer for colors, and when it sees red, it puts a 1 on a screen, is that an experience? A report? What if I have another pattern recognizer looking for 1 on the screen and it reports “red” (part of the same system).Is that a conscious report?
[was thinking “A Fish Called Wanda” …]
What happens when they compete for resources?
On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ
[Ack! Was gonna complain you mention “semantic pointers” w/o referencing Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture, but I see you referenced the Blouw paper, which was Eliasmith’s. BTW, you need to add a line space in front of that paper in the ref’s at bottom.] @wiringthebrain.bsky.social
Nit, the 2nd: Kevin [hope not too informal] uses the eg. of an internal signal generated by a cell surface receptor in chemotaxis as a signal that is not a representation. I suggest instead, this signal = degenerate (simplest) form of rep. It’s an arbitrary info. vehicle that can rep. only 1 thing
[possible typo for @wiringthebrain.bsky.social : Page 9 — “This view implies that is the meaning of neural patterns that forms the substrates of cognition and that guides behaviour.” I’m guessing you’re missing an “it”, as in “… implies that it is the meaning …”. Else the first “that” = vague ref.]
Finally got around to reading this excellent paper from Kevin Mitchell relating “representation”,”content”, and “meaning”: osf.io/preprints/ps... I do have a couple of nits to pick in comments below, the first of which is a possible typo for @wiringthebrain.bsky.social
A dramatic dilemma! vm.tiktok.com/ZNdCUfFXt/
[reads first line … “Oh no …”, looks at picture …. “Whew!”]
Schild’s Ladder It's been a while since I've read a Greg Egan book. I often love the ideas he explores, particularly in Diaspora. But I sometimes find his stories difficult to get through. That was definitely true of a previous book I read, Incandescence, which takes place in the setting of an…
I actually covered this comparison between Aristotle and Tinbergen in one of my posts about consciousness. www.evphil.com/blog/conscio... BTW, Tinbergen provides 4 lines of research into the evolution of consc, thus helping validate the hierarchy I developed for it. (Gradualism, not essentialism)
Is that a purple banana white black spots, or a white banana with gold spots?
I found this entirely too entertaining. I canna esplain.
New paper with Azenet Lopez in C&C: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #PhilMind #PhilConsc #Consciousness
Slightly diminish a band: Green Afternoon
Silicon chauvinism in my short story "What is it like to be a bot?" keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Fra... @petemandik.bsky.social
Have you been to Seattle? www.istockphoto.com/photo/a-mult...
[typo for @mjdramstead.bsky.social : Page 16: “… endowed with varying degrees of temporal depth, with heterarchically depeer (sensory-decoupled) SOHM …” — im assuming ‘deeper’, as I don’t know of the word ‘depeer’]
[can’t find a link to reply to re: this paper, so just posting here] Turns out Psychule Theory is a Minimal Unifying Model of consciousness which maps pretty nicely to @mjdramstead.bsky.social and Friston’s (et al.) “inner screen model”. See here: (and a typo in the reply) osf.io/preprints/ps...
Against the Fall of Night and its progeny When I was young I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke's books. With one of them, I remember having a strong sense of deja vu. It seemed like I knew the story already, sort of. It was very familiar, yet surprising in many details. I don't remember which one I…
Pretty sure he’s scoping out places for solar panels. * [it could happen]
Is it too late to fix the typo on the graphic? “The Came From Planet Happiness”
Er … um … uh … going with > 50% (enough to wager on?)
Where do I go to complain about the use of Boltzmann Brains? Given a baseline (heat death) universe, what is the probability of a spontaneous big bang vs. a Boltzmann brain? I’ll wager you get lots more brains from big bangs than from spontaneous brain formation.
iai.tv/articles/con... Seems to work for me.
I believe they’re working on the ai for this.
What physicists believe about quantum mechanics A few years ago David Bourget and David Chalmers did a follow up survey to the 2009 one polling philosophers on what they believe about various questions. One of them was quantum mechanics, particularly the measurement problem and its various…
[saw this and immediately went to : “Are these qualities in the room with us right now?”. Sorry, carry on]
Traditionally there are three kinds of Magic:The Gathering players: Timmies, Spikes, and Johnnies. Timmies want to use the biggest, baddest cards, even if they don’t win much. Spikes use whatever wins. Johnnies spend the time working out symmetries for the killer combos. * [definite Johnny]
Johnnies. If you need to know the reference, ask.
The Algebraist When I picked up Iain M. Banks' book The Algebraist, I thought I was starting a Culture novel overlooked until now. (The way Amazon listed the book encouraged this belief.) However, while it is space opera on a grand scale similar to a typical Culture novel, it takes place in a…
Motherfucking wind farms…
This is such a great story. If those of you who I have met are an accurately representational random sampling of all of you who choose to follow me, I suspect a lot of you will also love it.
My kids *memorized* the Elements song: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
Re: this paper, I note there is no ref. to Wolfram’s work, specifically, that a system (e.g., cellular automata w/ specific rules) can be determined but not be determinable by anything within the system. The system could have the equiv. of wave equation, uncert. principle, but still be determined.
when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet
I actually choked I laughed so hard at this
We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.
"In each civilization some men run wild. If we're lucky, we control them early. If not . . . ." Hoo boy. I'm reading James Michener's 1963 novel Caravans. This scene, which takes place in 1946, is between a former Nazi and an American diplomat. The Nazi calls it. 🧵
This is so cool. [pointing this at @aptshadow.bsky.social because “Alien Clay”]
The Left Hand of Darkness The other day I came across a video of Hank Green comparing Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen civilization to Iain Banks' Culture one. (I discussed the Culture a few weeks ago). It reminded me that I had never gotten around to reading Le Guin's classic Hugo Award winning book: The…
You have to be careful w/ “what-it’s-like-ness” because that really requires being able to compare pattern recognitions (this is more like that than this other) and that requires a higher order pattern recognition.
But how could you tell if exactly one of them had a clue?
Because I think that, properly understood, pattern recognition explains “aboutness”, “what it’s like”, qualia, and how they arise from physics, evolution, and neuroanotomy.
Interested in consciousness? The Landscape of Consciousness website has you covered. It has everything from science to not science. loc.closertotruth.com #neuroscience
Shroud I was initially leery of picking up Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest book Shroud. It seemed to have a space horror vibe, and while I've enjoyed a lot of Tchaikovsky's work, I'm not a horror fan. I don't mind if a story has elements of it, but usually don't enjoy straight horror. Thankfully,…
Repeating my answer here. LLM’s do pattern recognition (which is the fundamental basis of consciousness). The sun doesn’t.
Simple answer, nope. I don’t use it a lot, but when I do, I’m just asking it for information about something.
This is the way. Any chance anyone is working on stereoscopic vision?
Ah, thx. Seems to me that Many Worlds is what you get when you take the Schr. equation to be ontological instead of epistemic. That’s why you need something extra, like a “collapse”. Think I’m with Rovelli on this, so I reject both A and B. Sorry.
I disagree with A, but I haven’t heard B before. Is there a link to something that explains that we need to add something to the Schrödinger equation to get probability?
A reread of Consider Phlebas Iain Banks' Culture setting is probably the closest thing to outright paradise in science fiction. It's an interstellar post-scarcity techno-anarchist utopia, where sentient machines do all the work and the humans hang around engaging in hobbies or other hedonistic…
Wait … is this gonna give us … Snowcrash?
a man throws a glass apple at a concrete egg, causing it to shatter
The Forever War For some reason I had never read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and recently decided to remedy that. Like most classic sci-fi novels, it's a quick read, much shorter than most contemporary novels. It's often been called a Vietnam veteran's response to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship…
As soon as the robots build some nice hotels, I’m there.
[finger hovering over unfollow ….]
Hmmm … looking at the questions … I think I have a theory of consciousness. Ah well.
New post by @wiringthebrain.bsky.social Kevin J. Mitchell: "What questions should a comprehensive theory of consciousness consider?" doi.org/10.21428/8e6...
It was sunny in Seattle, so I went for a walk.
The Agent Cormac series A few weeks ago I reviewed Neal Asher's new book Dark Diamond. It takes place in his Polity universe, a future interstellar society ruled by AIs, where everyone is effectively immortal, but in a dangerous universe. That book featured Ian Cormac and other characters from his…
Mickey 7 A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the movie Mickey 17, which I found fairly intelligent. That movie is based on a book, Mickey 7, by Edward Ashton. The book turned out to be on Kindle Unlimited and didn't look long, and I needed a break from some of the other stuff I was reading, so it fit…
Green Hour
Is quantum immortality a real thing? In discussions about the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, one of the concerns I often see expressed is for the perverse low probability outcomes that would exist in the quantum multiverse. For example, if every quantum outcome is reality, then in…
#philosophy
Open access is awesome!
Today's blog post: Types and Degrees of Turing Indistinguishability -- and why the Turing test is unlikely to be a good test of machine consciousness: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/06/type...
House Republicans passed the single largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the HISTORY of our country. The GOP tax bill would deliver the largest cut to Medicaid and SNAP EVER. Repost and help me put a burning, bright spotlight on this awful disaster of a bill.
Hey! I posted a brief description of my theory of consciousness (Psychule Theory), and l had ChatGPT rewrite it. I like what the AI rewrote and made some small edits, but I could see using this process to write a full version. Would love to know what you think. jamesofseattle.com/2025/06/01/p...
The 5 stages of grieving, UK edition
