amarte

I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment".

I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas.

When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.

"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve."

I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.

This is such a monumental subject lol. I keep returning to this trying to come up with some kind of adequate response but it's like I'm standing at the base of a mountain and I can't find much to grab hold of that doesn't just crumble away after I apply a little pressure.

I definitely follow you up to your last paragraph and it all rings true to me, however I don't quite understand, "It is my opinion that the answer is of the form 'consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints." Maybe the rest of what I have to say is just because I don't understand the fundamental component or constrains very well.

To me mathematics is the limit of description. I can assign a word to some observable thing and distinguish it from all other observable things. I can draw a picture of it to distinguish it even more precisely. I can use various mathematical techniques to describe it even better, perhaps even to arbitrary degrees of precision. But I fail to see how any mathematical technique can capture --the feeling of-- happiness, pain, etc.. These embodiments can not be fully realized by description alone. They can be pointed to, hinted at, and I think great artists can stir echos of them in other people, but actually experiencing them is beyond the capacity of description. That's why I wonder if experience/consciousness is something fundamental. A subsequent worldview would have as its central concern 'beings' instead of 'objects'; it would not exclude any current or future science, it would just shift it's focus away from abstractions and toward experiential beings -- with conscious beings, which we are, perhaps a special case of a much larger set. The gains would not be material, but perhaps there would be some improvements in the ways we interact with ourselves, each other, and our surroundings.

In your first comment you proposed that, "Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing."

Sometimes I try to imagine the later case, and it really flips reality on its head. The limit and most extreme case is that reality is fundamentally experiential -- that is, what comes first is "being", "feeling", "embodiment", and through this lens is found structure, objects, form, etc. Obviously this is just the reverse of the idea that consciousness emerges from an underlying physical substrate performing complex processes.

Either way, there is a definite correlation between the two -- feelings have their correlate molecular, biochemical basis, and molecules working together through processes have their transcendent embodiment as feelings experienced.

The question of "what is real?" can boil down to this: are things external to consciousness fundamentally real and consciousness an ephemeral, emergent flourish floating "on top", or is consciousness real and everything observed by it a kind of flourishing of it?

This is a bit of a rabbit hole with many different paths to fall down, as I'm sure you know. Scientific knowledge is rooted in observation and the dusting away of uncertainty to reveal an objective reality we all share. From this standpoint, the objective substrate being revealed and it's complex processes is taken as fundamental, and we have all the great successes of scientific knowledge to show as justification for this to be true. The only hole seems to be, why the hell am I embodied, then? -- why am I conscious at all? Life would probably be easier if I didn't see that hole and want to search for more satisfying answers!

I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.

The world's first synthetic plastic was invented in 1907, and the field has since expanded to include a wide range of variant materials that have permeated nearly every aspect of our lives. I think it's hard to understand the net quality of life benefits that plastics in general have brought to humanity because most of us alive today were born into a world where these great technical achievements have already suffused daily life, so it's easy to take them for granted, while we are only now beginning to discover some of their negative consequences. For example, single use plastics: largely unnecessary in most cases, although not all -- think medical applications. Non-renewable sourcing: the production of many of these materials is contributing to a carbon debt that we're only now beginning to understand the magnitude of. Etc etc... But don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater." I don't think the market economy failed with plastics. The scale of their production and myriad applications was and continues to be an incredible success with both positive and negative externalities. The market needs to adjust given society's new understanding that we've gone too far in some areas, and not far enough in others. As people become aware of the environmental persistence of materials like polystyrene (tradename Styrofoam) for example, and are offered biodegradable, price-competitive offsets, they'll stop buying polystyrene. Closed-loop recycling, carbon capture, renewable sourcing etc are all examples of course corrections that will hopefully gain steam in the market and point us in the right direction.

Imagine an interview with a great painter. The painter is asked about the nature of painting and he responds that when he sets out to work in his studio and his brush strokes a canvass, he is discovering the fundamental nature of reality. He doubles down and exclaims that, in fact, reality is actually JUST lines and curves and shades and colors, and his proof is, well, look at how accurate his paintings are! Let's pretend that he actually is a very skilled painter, and many critics have marveled at the extent to which his paintings are indistinguishable from his subject matter. Still though, the interviewer clears his throat after an awkward pause and continues on to the next question.

To me, math is a medium of description much like painting or writing. It's units are not colors or words but points. A point, or "that which has no part", is much finer and carries with it far less baggage than something like a word. Points can be assigned numerical values and played with in clever ways. You can even sprinkle a fine dust of them over anything observable and create a copy of it to arbitrary degrees of precision.

I know math is far more than just the study of points, but I'm not convinced that math is anything more than our capacity to distinguish and describe extended to its limit. I also don't mean to belittle the accomplishments of mathematicians and theoreticians, I just think it's more reasonable to say that math is JUST the limit of description than it is to say that reality is JUST math.

After reading through some of the comments, I think many of us are on the same page.

As a side note since this discussion is related to Russell and his brilliant contributions, I think a similar discussion can be had regarding Russell's contemporary and co-author Alfred North Whitehead (mentioned breifly in the article).

If Russell can be charged with "selling out" or directing his work toward a more general audience, Whitehead can be accused of the opposite, or perhaps even worse. If you read into his works post Principia (which he co-authored with Russell) you find a brilliant logician and philosopher begin to deviate from commonly held assumptions of Western thought and attempt to articulate a philosophy often at odds with "objective" ways of thinking. His works are interesting yet difficult because he is often so at odds with 20th century science and philosophy that he has to create his own terms to describe phenomena, which he builds upon with increasingly unfamiliar terminology until most readers feel completely alienated and give up.

Imo both Russell and Whitehead were great minds and deserve their fair share of consideration and contemplation, pre- and post- Principia.

This article is really interesting and I love the insight provided about pigment layering to achieve remarkable effects, however I think what the title says is totally wrong.

Paints are technically coatings and comprise a large and diverse industry of products for wide-ranging applications. Wall paint is very different than artist paint, which is very different than car paint, which is very different than the type of paint you might apply to pipes to prevent corrosion, etc..

Glue is an adhesive, and while the resins used to make adhesives may sometimes be the same resins used to make coatings (Gorilla glue is epoxy-based, and many floor coatings you walk over all day and never think about are epoxy-based as well), the actual products being used -- the can of paint or the stick of glue you buy at the store -- are formulated with resins, pigments, additives, binders, chain-extenders, fillers etc etc, that are specific to the product's unique application.

So basically, paint is not glue. Paints are coatings and glues are adhesives. Sure, paints have to adhere to their substrates, and adhesives must adhere to their sometimes very different substrates as well, but paint and glue are really totally different things. You could say that coatings and adhesives are both formulated polymeric systems, but you miss out on a lot of interesting subtlety that entire industries are based on when you say "paint is glue."

I'm surprised no one has mentioned China here.

I was recently able to travel to China for the first time and was fascinated to learn about their housing market. Apparently the Chinese government doesn't have a property tax.

For men in China, owning a home is already incredibly important. It's practically a requirement for getting married, to the point where a woman's family would almost certainly disapprove of a marriage if the man doesn't own a home (which, keep in mind, would be called an apartment in the US). So that coupled with China's huge population means there's already a major demand for owning a home.

China is also experiencing incredible economic growth. Local governments are pouring money into "economic development areas" where you can find modern shopping malls, skyscrapers for businesses, and lots and lots and lots of (what we would call) apartment buildings.

And this isn't just happening in Beijing or Shanghai. There are "tier 3" cities in China with populations the size of LA and NY where you see clusters of dozens and dozens of 40-50 story apartment buildings shooting up.

I was told that the value of homes in these economic development areas -- even in "tier 3" cities -- is going up by an absolute minimum of 10-15%/yr (that's being conservative). So if you have money in China, of course you invest in housing. There's no property tax.

When I see these clusters of apartment buildings popping up all over the country, I really wonder how many people are actually living in them, and how many are just getting turned around year after year for a profit. Chinese people have an unfathomable amount of trust in their government (from a westerner's perspective), so when I asked some friends about this, their response was basically, the government will take care of it. Regardless, very interesting place!

I loved reading this!

'Before the internet' pretty much coincides with 'when I was a kid' for me. I would love to hear 'before the internet' memories from people who were adults before the internet too.

Nature/the world is what is being described. QM, thermo, fluid dynamics, signal processing, information theory, probability, etc.. are descriptions which have been devised to depict and communicate nature/the world. We never say that da Vinci's painting of Mona Lisa is so good that the historic woman who was Mona Lisa was paint.

Interesting title, and I will have to dip into the book when I have some spare time, but statements like "the world is built on probability" always sound strange to me. Is it that chance and randomness are fundamental aspects of our world, or is it that our knowledge of the world is inherently limited, and the laws of probability that people have expressed over time are useful descriptive tools that help us choose or dismiss certain outcomes based on the knowledge we do have? If the latter is true, I would not say the world is "built" on probability, but that the way we perceive the world can be built on probability.

I really like this distinction between necessity and decision. It's a great philosophic contrast that inspires further thought, but to ascribe necessity or decision to something so complex as a human being seems extremely difficult to me.

Take for example a monk who has set himself on fire yet remains calmly seated on the ground. Out of necessity I would say that the average person would run around frantically while being engulfed by flames, however the monk has seemingly decided to ignore this instinctual response. But then one could counter that the monk is acting out of necessity born from years of cultivating emptiness within. Well then, did the monk decide to become a monk when he was a child, or did it happen due to the necessity of his circumstances?

I can't decide whether necessity or decision is necessarily true in a case like this. =P

Then sound is space that you can hear.

Both are interesting ways of framing space and the senses, but I'm not sure what you mean by "only". To reduce space to "only noise", in my understanding of your statement, is to imply that it is something extraneous, something to be ignored, or at least given less significance, instead of it being actual, existent, a fundamental aspect of reality that we can describe in useful ways. Either way is interesting imo.

I recently finished Galápagos and was blown away. A story about how a few people unknowingly manage to escape humanity's demise by getting stranded on the Galápagos Islands, and their descendents' subsequent evolution over the next million years, all told from the perspective of a ghost... CLASSIC Vonnegut.

John Oliver made it pretty clear in his street interviews that people were unanimously uncomfortable with the US government collecting and storing dick pics.

While I have not read the book you linked, I think the dick pic premise captures the extent of the NSA's programs quite well and frames the issue in a down-to-earth way. It lets people see the domestic side of the issue, which is the difference between "Edward Snowden is a traitor who has compromised our national security" to "holy shit, the NSA is invading my privacy wtf..."

I totally disagree that the tone of that comment sums up the article in the slightest.

While the article makes it clear that Powell now regrets authoring The Anarchist Cookbook, it is also made clear that the reasons for his regrets are far more interesting and nuanced than the quote above would have you think:

"When Powell was in his late twenties and teaching special-needs students in New York, he returned to White Plains High School. At the school he had struggled academically and socially, and looking through his results from two intelligence tests, he found what he took to be a clue to his unhappiness. “There was a huge discrepancy between my verbal and performance I.Q.,” he says. “That would have been a clear red flag in today’s world that something was going on. But at that point in time, nobody paid attention to it.” Powell thinks he likely had a learning disability of some sort, which contributed to his trouble in school, his alienation as a young adult, and his current work to support learning-disabled students."

Powell spent the rest of his life trying to help frustrated young people like his former self, which is far more profound and noble than an old hippie selling out.

This was a very fun story to go through! I wonder if this format could be used as an effective way of structuring lessons in school. Each juncture that requires a choice to be made would (ideally) encourage class participation and debate. After a period of discussion, a vote would be taken, a decision would then be made, and the next section of the lesson would begin.

I'm not a teacher, and I know from friends who are that being a good teacher is harder than what I can probably imagine, but I think kids would have fun working through these types of stories.

Gibbons' actions are extremely selfish in my opinion. I know someone who used to work behind the cash registers of gas stations in North Houston. He has been robbed and held at gun point multiple times. According to him, the experience is traumatic and made him fearful and stressed out at work. To put someone through that for no reason other than your own curiosity is intolerably inconsiderate.

Instead, Gibbons could have picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment or some other work of art if he wanted to acquire a sense of the desperation felt by "the disenfranchised of society." It is not a stretch to imagine that it probably sucks.

Great art can teach us about life without the burden of living through the worst it has to offer. Trying to force traumatic experiences on yourself at the expense of others is not art but stupidity.