david chalmers
intro’d to David via Nikola here:
@singularityblog
Philosopher David Chalmers on #Singularity 1on1: We Can Be Rigorous in Thinking about the #Future snglrty.co/1SPIoVK #Consciousness
29 min – hard to draw the line between brute force and creativity
32 min – pretty strong barrier when it comes to ai… ie: incredibly hard to come up with algo’s… some say.. years spent in ai can make you believe in god
34 min – this phenom for all techs – people who are experts working on it who have both: investment… selection effect
again – gray research law
36 min – hard problem of consciousness.. how do physical give rise to consciousness… we don’t right now have any terribly good answers to that.. any solution to that is going to have holes…
37 min – the question if computers/algo’s/upload could have consciousness… what happens over course of whole transfer of biology to silicon… could believe this process preserves consciousness.. this is a place where philosophy is going to have to be very important…
so.. the need for awake people – non zombie..
39 min – at some point it’s going to be every humans fundamental issue of existence.. back to ancient question of know thyself – what does it mean to be human – we haven’t been able to come up to a resolution to solve those questions.. – nikola
41 min – on how to determine if you’re human or zombie
42 min – ethics is our only framework to evaluate this – nikola
45 min – on kurzweil’s father.. and would his documentations really be him
46 min – what if we do it gradually.. – david – where do we get info for that – nikola.. really good brain scans..- david
and/or ie: self talk as data – hosting life bits.. et al
what we ought to be doing is saving as much info about ourselves as we can
document everything ness
48 min – one message: not only are these questions very practically important – huge effect on future of humanity/planet.. but are ones we can think about in rigorous/serious way… so trying to show you can apply same rigor…
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ted 2014 – how do we explain consciousness
5 min – why is there this inner subjective movie… we don’t really have a beat on that..
6 min – when it comes to consciousness.. questions about behavior is the easy part.. the hard part is why is it behavior is accompanied by all this subjective experience.. most don’t have that much to say about that .. yet
7 min – beyond how do we behave.. to why do we feel something..
8 min – i think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly.. one we need to integrate into our world.. but we don’t yet see how… radical idea may be needed.. we may need 1-2 ideas that may initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically
let’s do this first: free art-ists.
ie: dan denna – no hard problem of consciousness.. that’s the kind of radical idea we need to explore
9 min – 2 crazy ideas
1\ consciousness is fundamental
if you can’t explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals.. space, time, mass, charge.. then as a matter of logic.. you need to expand the list..
need to study fundamental laws the governing consciousness.. laws that connect it to other fundamentals… so simple we can write them on the front of a t shirt…
perhaps 2 needs w/in short – deep enough…via ie: self talk as data – hosting life bits.. et al
2\ consciousness might be universal
w/in photons even… comes from first crazy idea.. that it’s fundamental..
although idea seems counterintuitive to us.. not so much w some from other cultures.. where conscious seen so linked to nature…
phi – integrated info theory
17 min – i’m more confident about first crazy idea..
understanding consciousness is real key to understanding universe/selves.. may just take the right crazy idea..
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find/follow David:
David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃælmərz/; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
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He is the lead singer of the Zombie Blues band which performed at the Qualia Fest in 2012 in New York.
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Chalmers is best known for his formulation of the notion of a hard problem of consciousness in both his 1996 book and in the 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”. He makes a distinction between “easy” problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated “why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?” The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind: functionalism. Chalmers argues for an “explanatory gap” from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as “naturalistic dualism”: naturalistic because he believes mental states are caused by physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems.
In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, importantly, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies, although he was not the first to propose the thought experiment. These zombies, unlike the zombie of popular fiction, are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience.
be you. 