Not a bad overview.  One problem, for me:  he points out Dennett's "consciousness is an illusion" approach, without asking the obvious question,  "But what's experiencing the illusion?"  He does make a postulate I agree with, however:  not consciousness per se, but the sentience which I call "the experiencer" exists as something fundamental in the universe, permeating all mass-energy (and probably space-time), but only "emerging" in situations where information content and processing (brains of any sort) is complex enough.Read moreShow less

Russ Abbott originally shared:

 

David Chalmers on consciousness.

This was a surprisingly disappointing talk. Chalmers created the notion of the "hard problem of consciousness" -- what subjective experience is and how it comes about.  In this talk, though, he goes off in strange directions. He starts by talking about consciousness as a movie playing in your head. But for a movie to be of any value, there must be a viewer of the movie. I'm sure Chalmers is not endorsing a homunculus theory of consciousness, but his analogy is. The problem, of course, is that if there were a homunculus watching the movie in your brain, what explains its experience of the movie.

Chalmers then went on to say that the real problem with the study of consciousness is that we don't know why it exists. Why aren't we all robots, he asked. That my be a useful question, but it's not the hard problem of consciousness, which is how consciousness comes about, not why it exists. He asks the "why" question again when he talks about the weakness of work studying the correlation between experience and brain components. Why does this component lead to this experience. Again, the question isn't why; it's how -- although in this case one might assume that that's what he meant.

Chalmers goes on to criticize the view that we may understand consciousness after more research, that it will be an "emergent phenomenon" like a traffic jam. His criticism is that all emergent phenomenon are about behavior and that consciousness is not about behavior. Problems with this argument are (a) emergence isn't just about behavior and (b) saying that something is "emergent" is saying much at all.  It's not clear to me that this digression on emergence amounted to anything. Chalmers then goes back to asking the "why" question, which again, is off track.

Chalmers says is a scientific materialist and that he spent a long time looking for a scientific explanation of consciousness. He has concluded that there will be no scientific explanation. He argues that this failure of science means requires that we must consider radical ideas. He then goes on to discuss what he calls two crazy ideas.

The two ideas are that consciousness is fundamental and that everything has some aspect of consciousness, i.e., panpsychism. I think this is worth considering. I wish he had something more informative to say about it though. His suggestion is that perhaps it's all related to information processing. Chalmers goes on to praise Tononi's phi theory, which has to do with the integration of information. For a discussion of Tononi, look at Aaronson's post here (http://goo.gl/ynW4xf), which also points to an earlier post.

Chalmers ends by suggesting a panpsychist perspective leads to questions about the ethics of turning off computer systems and whether groups such as countries are conscious. But then he backs away from those issues.

All-in-all a disappointing talk unless you've never heard of panpsychism. But in that case, it would have been better to make a stronger case for it or for consciousness being fundamental.

via +Lucas Glover 

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David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness?

 

Almost all dinosaurs were probably covered in feathers, Siberian fossils of a tufted, two-legged running dinosaur dating from roughly 160 million years ago suggest.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140724-feathered-siberia-dinosaur-scales-science/?utm_source=GooglePlus&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_gp20140724news-dinosaur-feathers&utm_campaign=Content

Siberian Discovery Suggests Almost All Dinosaurs Were Feathered

news.nationalgeographic.com

A Siberian fossil of a new dinosaur species suggests most were probably feathered.

A pastiche of cute kids:

 

Some 70,000 years or so ago, modern humans apparently made their pilgrimage out of Africa, eventually colonizing the entire world and becoming, well, us.  At about the same time, Mount Togo in the Philippines in a massive super-volcano eruption, perhaps reducing those modern humans to about 5000 survivors.  Or so the story goes.  Here's possible some real, direct evidence of what was happening at that time.

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/07/2014/70000-year-old-african-settlement-unearthed

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70,000 year-old African settlement unearthed

pasthorizonspr.com

During ongoing excavations in northern Sudan, Polish archaeologists have discovered the remains of a settlement estimated to 70,000 years old

 

People who object to Obamacare (I'm not one of them) are often challenged to come up with a better alternative.  I found this as just one alternative.  Judge for yourselves.

Abstract
Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs. True health care reform would empower individuals, with their doctors, to make their own health care decisions free from government interference. Therefore, Obamacare should be stopped and fully repealed. Then Congress and the states should enact patient-centered, market-based reforms that better serve Americans.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/after-repeal-of-obamacare-moving-to-patient-centered-market-based-health-care

(From Michael Shermer on Facebook):

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of nonliberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

As a Hymenopteran lover, I've delighted this week to find honey, sweat, and bumble bees in our backyard, cicada killer wasps looking for mates, and especially this bald-faced hornet (they're really wasps) nest hanging from the porch.  What a summer!

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