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Is Consciousness an Illusion?? Five Experts in Science, Religion & Technology Explain

Por Colin Marshall — 9 de Fevereiro de 2024, 09:00

Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”

Mitchell conceives of it as a continuum: “I’m more conscious when I’m awake,” for example, and “certain species are more conscious than other species.” And perhaps it could develop even in non-biological entities: “I don’t think that we have any machines that are conscious in any interesting sense yet,” Mitchell says, but “if we ever do, they’ll be part of that spectrum.”

The question of whether a machine can attain consciousness naturally arises in host Kmele Foster’s conversation with Hoffman, who’s made serious investments in artificial-intelligence research. As impressive as AI chatbots have lately become, few among us would be willing to deem them conscious; nevertheless, attempting to create not just intelligence but consciousness in machines may prove a fruitful way to learn about the workings of the “genuine articles” within us. Penrose’s theory holds that consciousness arises from as-yet-unpredictable quantum processes occurring in the microtubules of the brain. Perhaps, as Koch has suggested, it actually exists to one degree or another in all forms of matter. Or maybe — to quote from a song in heavy rotation on my childhood Walkman — it’s just what you make of yourself.

Related content:

The Neuronal Basis of Consciousness Course: A Free Online Course from Caltech

John Searle Makes A Forceful Case for Studying Consciousness, Where Everything Else Begins

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The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos

What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Plato’s Dialogue Gorgias Gets Adapted into a Short Avant-Garde Film

Por Colin Marshall — 31 de Janeiro de 2024, 09:00

The word sophisticated may sound like praise today, but it originated as more of an accusation. Trace its etymology back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itinerant lecturers in ancient Greece who taught subjects like philosophy, mathematics, music, and rhetoric — the last of which they mastered no matter their ostensible subject area. Their reputation has passed down to us our current understanding of the word sophistry as “subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation.” A sophist may or may not have known what he was talking about, but he knew how to talk about it in the way his audience wanted to hear.

It is in the company of sophists that Plato places Socrates in the dialogue Gorgias, a section of which has been adapted into the short film above. An “experimental video essay from Epoché magazine,” as Aeon describes it, it “combines somewhat cryptic archival visuals, a haunting, dissonant score, and text from an exchange between Socrates and the titular Gorgias on the nature of oratory.” The latter describes oratory as his “art,” which serves “to produce the kind of conviction needed in courts of law and other large masses of people” on the subject of “right and wrong.” Socrates, in his questioning way, leads Gorgias to hear his objection that oratory produces conviction without knowledge, making it a mere pseudo-art or form of “flattery” akin to baking pastries or beautifully adorning one’s own body.

“For someone with no knowledge of the objects involved,” writes Epoché’s co-editor John C. Brady, “the arts and the pseudo-arts appear perhaps indistinguishable. But, insofar as the pseudo-arts focus on generating belief first and foremost (as opposed to rational justification) they have an advantage. In front of an audience of children, the chef will beat the doctor when it comes to demonstrating prowess in preparing ‘wholesome’ foods.” To that extent, Socrates’ basic observation holds up still today, more than 2,400 years after Gorgias. The situation may even have worsened in that time: “far from us moderns having a more ‘scientific’ (i.e. ‘artful’) approach to our action,” haven’t the pseudo-arts just “added to their repertoire the language of ‘knowledge’?”

Such enlightened twenty-first century men and women “clip on a Fitbit to track the minutiae of movements, download a ‘Pomodoro’ system app to record the when and the what of their work through the day,” use “calorie-counted food diaries, budget apps, online trackers that tell them how much time they are spending on Twitter vs. e‑mail.” Their eyes are on the prize of a balcony, a work-life balance; there’s often a carafe of wine airing in there somewhere too.” We believe that, in order to realize this dream, “we need to be scientific, rational, collect the data, work smarter not harder etc., etc. But haven’t we just here fallen into the orators’ trap?” All this “better living through data” starts to look like simple perpetuation of “the ease and pleasure of being ‘convinced’ by the many pseudo-arts, rather than grappling with the real objects that constitute the concreteness of our lives.” Wanting is fun; knowing exactly what we want and why we want it is philosophy.

via Aeon

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncertainty

Por OC — 15 de Novembro de 2023, 09:00

On the strength of a few quotations and the popular lecture Why I am Not a Christian, philosopher Bertrand Russell has been characterized as a so-called “positive atheist,” a phrase that implies a high degree of certainty. While it is true that Russell saw “no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology” — he saw them, in fact, as positively harmful — it would be misleading to suggest that he rejected all forms of metaphysics, mysticism, and imaginative, even poetic, speculation.

Russell saw a way to greatness in the search for ultimate truth, by means of both hard science and pure speculation. In an essay entitled “Mysticism and Logic,” for example, Russell contrasts two “great men,” Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose “scientific impulse reigns quite unchecked,” and poet William Blake, in whom “a strong hostility to science co-exists with profound mystic insight.”

It’s interesting that Russell chooses Blake for an example. One of his oft-quoted aphorisms cribs a line from another mystical poet, William Butler Yeats, who wrote in “The Second Coming” (1920), “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Russell’s version of this, from his 1933 essay “The Triumph of Stupidity,” is a bit clunkier rhetorically speaking:

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

The quote has been significantly altered and streamlined over time, it seems, yet it still serves as a kind of motto for the skeptical philosophy Russell advocated, one he would partially define in the 1960 interview above as a way to “keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn’t knowledge.” On the other hand, philosophy pushes reticent intellectuals to “enlarge” their “imaginative purview of the world into the hypothetical realm,” allowing “speculations about matters where exact knowledge is not possible.”

Where the quotation above seems to pose an insoluble problem—similar to the cognitive bias known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”—it seems in Russell’s estimation a false dilemma. At the 9:15 mark, in answer to a direct question posed by interviewer Woodrow Wyatt about the “practical use of your sort of philosophy to a man who wants to know how to conduct himself,” Russell replies:

I think nobody should be certain of anything. If you’re certain, you’re certainly wrong because nothing deserves certainty. So one ought to hold all one’s beliefs with a certain element of doubt, and one ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt…. One has in practical life to act upon probabilities, and what I should look to philosophy to do is to encourage people to act with vigor without complete certainty.

Russell’s discussion of the uses of philosophy puts me in mind of another concept devised by a poet: John Keats’ “negative capability,” or what Maria Popova calls “the art of remaining in doubt…. The willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.” Perhaps Russell would not characterize it this way. He was, as you’ll see above, not much given to poetic examples. And indeed, Russell’s method relies a great deal more on logic and probability theory than Keats’. And yet the principle is strikingly similar.

For Russell, certainty stifles progress, and an inability to take imaginative risks consigns us to inaction. A middle way is required to live “vigorously,” that of philosophy, which requires both the mathematic and the poetic. In “Mysticism and Logic,” Russell sums up his position succinctly: “The greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need of science and of mysticism: the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.”

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Related Content:

What If We’re Wrong?: An Animated Video Challenges Our Most Deeply Held Beliefs–With the Help of a Ludwig Wittgenstein Thought Experiment

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Noam Chomsky Explains Why Nobody Is Really a Moral Relativist, Even Michel Foucault

Por Colin Marshall — 28 de Setembro de 2023, 08:00

Noam Chomsky made his name as a linguist, which is easy to forget amid the wide range of subjects he has addressed, and continues to address, in his long career as a public intellectual. But on a deeper level, his commentary on politics, society, media, and a host of other broad fields sounds not unlike a natural outgrowth of his specialized linguistic theories. Throughout the past five or six decades, he’s occasionally made the connection explicit, or nearly so, by drawing analogies between language and other domains of human activity. Take the panel-discussion clip above, in which Chomsky faces the question of why he doesn’t accept the notion of cultural relativism, which holds moral norms as not absolute but created wholly within particular cultural contexts.

“There are no skeptics,” Chomsky says. “You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar, but no human being can, in fact, be a skeptic. They wouldn’t survive for two minutes if they were. I think pretty much the same is true of moral relativism. There are no moral relativists: there are people who profess it, you can discuss it abstractly, but it doesn’t exist in ordinary life.” He identifies “a tendency to move from the uncontroversial concept of moral relativism” — that, say, certain cultures at certain times hold certain moral values, and other cultures at other times hold other ones — “to a concept that is, in fact, incoherent, and that is to say that moral values can range indefinitely,” tethered to no objective basis.

If morality is transmitted through culture, “how does a person acquire his or her culture? You don’t get it by taking a pill. You acquire your culture by observing a rather limited number of behaviors and actions, and from those, constructing, somehow, in your mind, the set of attitudes and beliefs that constitutes culture.” He draws a natural comparison between this process and that of language acquisition, which also depends on “having a rich built-in array of constraints that allow the leap from scattered data to whatever it is that you acquire. That’s virtually logic.” And so, “even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.” When he spoke of “the most extreme cultural relativist,” he was thinking of Michel Foucault?

Back in 1971, Chomsky engaged the French philosopher of power in a debate, broadcast on Dutch television, about human nature and the origin of morality. There he practically lead with linguistics: a child learning to talk starts “with the knowledge that he’s hearing a human language of a very narrow and explicit type that permits a very small range of variation.” This “highly organized and very restrictive schematism” allows him to “make the huge leap from scattered and degenerate data to highly organized knowledge.” This mechanism “is one fundamental constituent of human nature,” in not just language but “other domains of human intelligence and other domains of human cognition and even behavior” as well. Perhaps we do have the freedom to speak, think, and act however we wish — but that very freedom, if Chomsky is correct, emerges only within strict, absolute, wholly un-relative natural boundaries.

Related content:

Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV (1971)

An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power”

A Brief Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Linguistic Theory, Narrated by The X-Files‘ Gillian Anderson

Michel Foucault Offers a Clear, Compelling Introduction to His Philosophical Project (1966)

Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting

Moralities of Everyday Life: A Free Online Course from Yale University

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Stoic Wisdom of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: An Introduction in Six Short Videos

Por Colin Marshall — 31 de Agosto de 2023, 09:00

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Though it enjoys a particular popularity here in the twenty-first century, the rigorously equanimous Stoic worldview comes to us through the work of three figures from antiquity: Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus was born and raised a slave. Seneca, the son of rhetorician Seneca the Elder, became an advisor to Nero (a position that ultimately forced him to take his own life). Marcus Aurelius, the most exalted of the three, actually did the top job himself, ruling the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD. He also left behind a text, the Meditations, that stands alongside Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Seneca’s many essays and letters as a pillar of the canon of Stoicism.

It is from the Meditations that this series of six videos from Youtube channel Einzelgänger draws its wisdom. Each of them introduces different aspects of Marcus Aurelius’ interpretation of Stoicism and applies them to our everyday life here in modernity, presenting strategies for staying calm, not feeling harm, accepting what comes our way, and not being troubled by the actions of others.

Though the importance of these aims can be illustrated any number of ways, their achievement depends on accepting the notion central to all Stoic thought: “the dichotomy of control,” which dictates that “some things are in our control and others aren’t.” When life hurts, “it often means that we care about things we have no control over, and by doing so, we let them control us.”

All the Stoics understood this, but for Marcus Aurelius, “being unperturbed by things outside of his control allowed him to cope with the many responsibilities and challenges he faced as an emperor, and to focus on the task he believed he was given by the gods.” He knew that “it’s not the outside world and the events that take place in it, our bodies included, that hurt us, but our thoughts, memories, and fantasies regarding them.” To indulge those fantasies means to live in perpetual conflict with reality, and thus in perpetual, and futile, grievance against it. The stronger our judgments about what happens, “the more vulnerable we become to the whims of Fortuna, the unpredictable goddess of luck, chance, and fate,” forces that eventually get the better of us all — even if we happen to have the world’s mightiest empire at our command.

Related content:

An Animated Introduction to Stoicism, the Ancient Greek Philosophy That Lets You Lead a Happy, Fulfilling Life

Every Roman Emperor: A Video Timeline Moving from Augustus to the Byzantine Empire’s Last Ruler, Constantine XI

How to Be a Stoic in Your Everyday Life: Philosophy Professor Massimo Pigliucci Explains

Three Huge Volumes of Stoic Writings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Ferriss

350 Animated Videos That Will Teach You Philosophy, from Ancient to Post-Modern

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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