notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #210

He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I've heard that AI might be able to become "conscious" or "alive."

whyisthisinteresting

The Consciousness Edition

Von Neumann's conclusion, reached not as a mystic but as the most rigorous mathematician of his century, was that the break must happen outside the physical. Consciousness is what collapses the wavefunction. Consciousness is what turns the possible into the real.

noahpinion.blog

The moderately easy problem of consciousness

The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you'll never know whether other people are really conscious, you'll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they're conscious.

themarginalian.org

The Intelligence of Emotions: Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How Storytelling Rewires Us and Why Befriending Our Neediness Is Essential for Happiness

Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself.

3quarksdaily.com

Why I am still an atheist

If there can be no physicalist explanation of subjective mental experiences, then the project of physicalism falls apart. "If we acknowledge that reality surpasses our comprehension [...] then we are back to mystery".