A Medley of Potpourri

Monday, July 28, 2014

“Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time,” or so says Michio Kaku in his new book, The Future of the Mind. Only thing I can add to that is, then by this definition there are probably more species on Earth than we like to believe that could be called "human".

http://consciousresonance.net/?p=3655

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Michio Kaku: Can Physics Solve the Mysteries of Consciousness?

consciousresonance.net

I had been posting "Repeal 2" comments around, perhaps a little overzealously, but with a strict purpose: the 2'nd Amendment needs to be upgraded to meet modern technology, and that need is only getting is growing greater every year. I do not propose an outright ban on private arms ownership, however.
There are several problems with the 2'nd as written. First, it speaks in terms of "well regulated militia" securing "free state[s]"; second, the word "infringe" (rather than "deny", e.g.) suggests that no restriction on private arms ownership is allowed at all, for to infringe is to even gently step on toes, albeit unintentionally. A Supreme Court could throw out All gun laws, state or federal, in this nation based on that word alone, one suspects.
The notion that our country is little more than a alliance of free states has always been false, as the events from 1865-1965 demonstrate. Though still retaining considerable autonomy, federalism has come to mean, for good or bad, states' subservience to Washington, Congress, and the President. For good or bad, I'm going to take this as a given. As to militia, whether they should play a role should be the subject of debate.
Full private access to any and all "arms", particularly in the nuclear age, is, I hope, beyond debate. It would be madness to allow individuals, or random collectives, to own tanks, jets, machine guns, WMDs, or weapons of such magnitude. At the same time, if we do have "... the Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" as the DOI proclaims, then we have the rights derived therein -- such as the Right to Self Defense, the Right to Sufficient Medical Care, the Right to Basic Needs such as clean air, water, food, etc. Bear in mind, government must provide for the defense of all these rights, whether in the form of police, courts, Obamacare, the DOD, etc. At the same time, as we correctly recognize that provision by government alone, especially centralized government, is suspect; for governments, like all human institutions, are subject to human corruptibility and so must be guarded against (why we have the federal system of course, with its separation of powers, state and local rights, again etc.).
This could, and probably should, be expanded into a full thesis, which cannot be done in a forum like this. So I'll simply state my Revised Edition (first cut!) of the 2'nd Amendment, and leave it up for feedback. Here goes:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free nation, the right of the people to self defense by necessary means shall not be denied. Congress and the states will cooperate to regulate and support such militia and their facilities."

(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

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

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

A special class of tiny gold particles can easily slip through cell membranes, making them good candidates to deliver drugs directly to target cells.

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/gold-nanoparticles-may-be-useful-for-delivering-drugs-0721#.U9EzQvmpmi0.google_plusone_share

More than glitter

newsoffice.mit.edu

Scientists explain how gold nanoparticles easily penetrate cells, making them useful for delivering drugs.

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.Show 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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