🧠 computational neuroscience | neurophenomenology 2.0? 🤖
Science Writer, Kempner Institute for the study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University
(views here are my own)
Yohan J John
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Perhaps this is naively idealistic but I sometimes think that Robert Brandom's framing of rationality, reason and discourse could really be helpful with all... this.
* gestures in every direction where nerd attention is allocated *
"...Homo academicus is caught between two fields of power: on one side, the forces of money and politics; on the other, the “writers and artists” and “heretics” who produce cultural capital in the first place."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/acad...
One of the things that perplexes me most about human memory is how we can recall distant events with sustained effort. Sometimes it can take minutes, hours or several days of dwelling on episodes in the past before a vivid memory appears that was manifestly there all along. We don't seem to have
Is anyone else having a hard time figuring out how to feel given all this? [vaguely gestures around]
Last month Dawkins declared Claude conscious and was mocked. @garymarcus.bsky.social cleverly called it The Claude Delusion. My (and Nagel's?) take: Both are wrong for the same reason. Here's why the question of machine consciousness will never be settled scientifically. arxiv.org/abs/2606.00226
“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.”
Merleau-Ponty
We never meet raw facts first, then add meaning later. A door is already an exit, a face already a mood, a silence already a threat or invitation. To be conscious is to be caught in significance.
What would Wittgenstein* have said about LLMs?
* earlier or later, either will do :P
Perhaps the epistemological crisis induced by the use of LLMs will serve as a demonstration of the limits of subjective Bayesianism?
Only half joking here.
"The results were so divergent that one has to wonder: If we cannot agree on how to define a ripple, what else might we be getting wrong?"
🎶 Ripple in still water...
www.thetransmitter.org/reproducibil...
Great essay by Ted Chiang on consciousness. He nails the centrality of context.
"An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential."
www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
