The Philosophy Discussion Thread

We are not computers :smiley: but I get the analogy.

I’m actually quite tickled by the fact that our own memories work a bit like DRAM. Or possibly like a Williams tube, for those people who might remember such things.

Not exactly like, because our brains are very analog. But a bit like.

I’m always impressed by music memory. Recently I heard an album I’m quite sure I hadn’t heard in nearly 40 years, and I had distinct memories of most of the songs. It suggests to me that something in my brain remained in a steady state for all that time.

Oh, it wasn’t an analogy. :sweat_smile: The psychological term was influenced by the popularity of information process theory in the 1950s. We use the same terms for cognitive and computer science, but nowadays, they refer to totally different processes.

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Not sure where else to put this - the discussion straddles philosophy and psychology - but IMO it’s an excellent exposition on the state we’re in (“we” being Western culture), particularly the elevation of science to a quasi-religion (and in the process, gutting it of its true power). Even if you dislike or disagree with the premise, McGilchrist is entertaining to listen to.

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So, I’ve started in on Saint Augustine, and I am looking at it from the perspective of “god” as he uses it as “human consciousness.”

He keeps talking about god, listening to god, denying god and returning to god and then listing the senses, and it makes me think he’s being euphemistic. It’s inconceivable to me that he didn’t understand human consciousness as he studied the Greeks and Cicero and trained in philosophy and rhetoric himself.

So, I’d like to throw a net out in the River Flob and see what you guys have to offer, link wise or your personal insight, wrt human consciousness. I didn’t know where to start so I started here.

:bowing:

I like the idea that consciousness is a hallucination. There are theories such as DMT being produced in the brain, or our ancestors ate magic muchrooms to get things kick started. All pretty speculative at this point

Have you thought about free will?

Why would I dream up other people who look like me? I mean, when I dream there are people for the most part, it’s not star wars bar. If I look in a mirror when I dream my features are all fucked up as well. Got a good link to that kind of thought?

I accept it. If I had to think about it, say, at 3 am during a rainstorm in a yurt, I’d say it has something to do with fear and the ability to move independently from one place to another. :whistle:

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Thanks!

Some interesting thoughts about and arguments against determinism here.

And examination of consciousness down through neurobiological reductionism.

Took me a week to work through this. I saw a tree today on my walk and told my wife that it was a sign for an oxygen making machine.

If you can’t leave the world batshit crazy, why bother?

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I’m 1/2 way into this. What a battle. The science is nearly easy enough to grasp, however the linguistic stuff is insectoid aliens scuttling over the hill, and me here with only a boot on my hand.

I’m thinking information overload and the demands we put on one another will lead us, well, most of humanity, to someplace not necessarily any better than what we have now. :grimacing:

But who knows really? Ants seem fairly placid until they get agitated and eat a sleeping elephant.

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“Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of tiny robots.”
A good summary of his life and (some of) his thoughts.

Nature, he argued, has its own unwitting reasons – “free-floating rationales” that are “independent of, and more fundamental than, consciousness”. The ability of organisms to respond appropriately, if unconsciously, to things in the environment is a “rudimentary intentionality”. And, over aeons, the “blind, foresightless, purposeless process of trial and error” has knitted “the mechanical responses of ‘stupid’ neurons” (in certain creatures’ brains) into a “reflective loop [that] creates the manifest illusion of consciousness,” he thought. “Mind is the effect, not the cause.” As spiders mindlessly spin webs, homo sapiens has spun “a narrative self”.

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I just finished this series of lectures. Man, TV was so much better in the sixties!

And there’s more that I’ll have to get to later on.