Connectionism
Topic: Mind
In Cognitive Science, the main competitor to theories based on LOTH is connectionism. Connectionism tries to come up with a more biological-like hardware model for how the brain functions. The brain is just a mass of interconnected neurons, so maybe there is a way to model this in a more life-like way on a physical level. The computer science that later has become the study of "neural nets" is called parallel distributed processing. For a great introduction, see here. Essentially, you have we'll call, a lower level layer of neurons that bring in physical data, or inputs. Then a series of internal neurons that decide what to do, e.g., "fire", depending on whether a certain predefined criteria is met. Rather than being programmed by a formal language, nets must be "trained" and therefore any rules they follow are implicit in that they are distributed accross the entire network. Neural nets are therefore innately holistic. Training a net would consist of something like, feeding a net a picture of a face and now try to get it to pick out similar pictures. This kind of pattern recognition is something neural nets do very well, better than conventional computers. It would seem, that such recognition is more lifelike - how the eyes and brain would actually function. Another advantage of nets that make them seem more like a real brain is the way they naturally degrade as nodes are removed wheras, cut into the silicon on a conventional computer, and the whole thing falls apart.

But nets don't do everyting better. In fact, the key failure of nets is the attraction of LOTH and the classical model, nets don't model higher cognitive functions very well. This is what Fodor calls the systemics problem. A real mind it appears learns the formulas for things like sentences, it gets a system down, so to speak. Recall from my last post I said that LOTH is brilliant because of the insight that representation would have to go beyond just pictures, pictures alone aren't complex enough to model thinking. A net then, would naturally be very good at coming up with the picture part of a representation but not good at coming up with the sentential component. And at this point is where the controversy comes in.

A neural net can actually be trained to do sentential representation LOTH style. Maybe it's harder than in conventional computing, but hey, maybe in the future we'll figure out ways to do it better. In this case, however, a net isn't much of a departure from the classic model, rather it's a way to implement the classical model on a different hardware scheme, one that seems more brainlike on a physical level. Those who take this road are called implementationalists. The interesting school of connectionism though would be radical connectionism. They would say forget about LOTH. But under that option, what then, could be the alternative for explaining intentions, which seem naturally, very sentence like? The alternative is eliminativism. Just do away with intentions. Of course, that's a pretty radical position to hold as folk psychology can no longer be said to be useful. In such a view talking about "John wanting ice cream" has as much to do with the mind as humors have to do with health.

LOTH & Computation
Topic: Mind

Jerry Fodor is one of the most important figures in the philosophy of mind and cogvitive science. In the 70's he came up with this idea to put a "language of thought" or "mentalese" in between spoken language and things in the world. This is both a realist and atomistic theory. Normal words reference thought language, and the thought language references the actual things in reality, representation. At rock bottom then there is a collection of atomistic thoughts that discretely link to actual things in reality.  Atomic thoughts would somehow be combined to form molecular thoughts and ultimately, intentionality. Key to mentalese, is that thought works on the same principles as sentential logic and computation. As I've said before, phil mind usually breaks down to two things, the study of qualia, and of intentions. Fodor's theories laid the groundwork for what's now called cognitive science. The task at hand here ignores qualia and focuses on the problems related to intentions and how thinking actually happens. It's trying to explain intentionality.

LOT gives a good starting point for taking a crack at the mind for a number of reasons. Since I'm not an encylopedia, I'll just list a couple things that impress me as highly important. For one, computation gives us at least a stab at a reasonable idea of what thinking is, and how a mechanical device, such as a brain can think. We can simply view thinking as computation, or recursively manipulating symbols which are representations of reality. Second, Fodor justifies the importance of manipulation by the rules of logic within thought langauge brilliantly. Take a basic first stab at mental representation to be some kind of a vague picture. The problem then, is that mental pictures could never be articulate enough to express complex intentions. Only something that's like a formal language could do that. Further, recursion is the only known process by which we could indefinitely make sentences out of words that are meaningful but that we've never heard before. Rules built in to the mind could be worth millions of pictures.

Fodor has always been cautious in the extent to which he believes his theories can explain the mind. Consciousness is no less mysterious and the kind of thinking that is most typical of humans, abduction, is difficult to explain. He's become enemies with some of the more outspoken and AI hopeful cognitive scientists like Pinker and Dennett.

I think there almost has to be at least at a low level, some kind of a connection between the brain/nerveous system and a computer. When catching a baseball there just has to be some kind of computation involved.  But at higher levels, like consciously working through a math problem, how does that happen? There even seems to me, to be a tension between straightforward computation and what we call "thinking" or maybe "consciousness" in ordinary language. For instance, I seem to be thinking very little when I'm driving home. But if I'm working out a hard math problem, I'm trying to remember rules, figure out different ways I can tackle the issue, and by the time I'm done I might be very hungry - I'm really thinking hard. Where as my friend Tarski from the boards would probably look at the same problem and the answer just might automatically pop into his head, any working out of steps being in retrospect as a means of explanation to someone like me.

 

 

23 Minutes in Hell
Mood:  on fire
Topic: Lectures On Doubt
I was stuck in Walmart last night with the fam. I'm not a big shopper, so I tried to find something in their book section and the most interesting publication I found was called "23 minutes in Hell" by some cross-eyed praiser of the Lord. But OMG, there are 40+ reviews of it on Amazon. 23 Minutes

It's one of these books where you can tell at the outset that the subject matter can be condensed into two pages but somehow they've got to stretch it out long enough to make it a book. So you can skip the lay preaching and his call to the ministry and all that and read the actual account of hell which takes five or ten minutes. First thing that's funny about this account is it's heavily annotated. Virtually every sentence he utters references some Bible scripture or another moron's NDE. Ron Livingston did the same thing with his "Sealed Portion." Some advice for up and coming prophets: follow Joseph Smith's example. Make up your story, publish it, and let others be the scholars and unravel the intricities. Don't show us all the stuff you read prior to your bad dream or episode of sleep paralysis. So what happens. He is taken from his bed, the knowledge that he's a Christian is stripped from him, and he is put in a 10x15x15 brick dungeon with two or three grotesque demons pacing about angry, smelly, and ready to hurt him. They beat him up, tear apart his flesh, throw him against the wall. Then from this enclosed space, he somehow can see outward a mile wide pit of fire. Inside the pit there are stone segregations so each person has their own individual fireplace. It's very important not to let the immates have any communication with each other - they have to be completely alone. I'll admit I was reading fast so I missed whether he was actually thrown in or just about to be thrown in and then Jesus came, gave him his memory back, and sent him away with the ole, "you had to experience this to warn the world" message. Some xtians are luckier than others I suppose. Some get to experience a lot of money, power, and sex and then repent, but had to go through all that stuff to warn the world about it.

The author goes on and on about how deformed the demons were, but I wonder what his standard of comparison was. The demons were faster, stronger, and endlessly superior to humans particularily in physical feats so it sounds to me like their design was rather sophisticated. The author also complains about how thirsty he was and there not being a drop of water anywhere in hell. Of course, human bodies are, as the sand entities in Star Trek put it, "bags of mostly water". And the demons were obviously constituted of water as well. If for no other reason, we know this because their flesh was hanging down, rotting, and smelling. Things don't rot without moisture, sorry. In heaven I suppose, he'd be drinking glacier water all the time and enjoying it with his wife - as he did on earth. Would he also be eating and having sex? Finally, he knows all this stuff about hell "intuitively" as he says, he doesn't know how he knows it, he just does. Like the demons are 1,000 times stronger than humans. That there is no water. That there are endlessly more pits like that one he described was a mile wide, and so on. Let me help you Mr. Wiess. You know these things because you're making up the story. The author of the story knows the answers about the story the characters inside don't.

Dennett's Qualia Arguments
Now Playing: Edited
Topic: Mind

See here for some of Dennett's arguments against qualia. He holds a pretty unique position in that he claims there are no "raw feels" as such, no basic, ineffible apprehensions. He argues by manipulating some of the well-known thought experiments to demonstrate that they don't really work. He then introduces some of his own, to convince us that talk about qualia is inconsistent and confused. Thought experiments according to him leave something to be desired because they don't open the door to the obvious conclusion we're suppose to draw. For instance, in the neurosurgical prank, a scientist re-wires your brain to invert your color spectrum. So you wake up, and apples look blue (or something).¹ According to Dennett, the qualia shift would justify us to conclude qualia neurons have been tampered with, hence supporting their existence. But he argues that the optic nerve (qualia) could be to blame or the memory centers (not qualia) for the 'perceived' mixup, since there's no way to decisively tell, such a scenerio loses its force because our "immediat apprehension" doesn't decide. He also gives an example of two coffee testers who grow tired of coffee, one whose "tastes have changed" (matured preferences) and another whose "sense of taste" has changed (qualia input centers). How to decide which? Again, the difference can either be with the input, "raw feel" or qualia, or within the memory centers. His scenarios all turn on this same possible undecidability. Another example inverts taste so sweet is salty and salty sweet. If the subject compensates, have the qualia themselves changed or have the memories? It seems like a stretch to buy into the plausibility of such a scenario but there might be something to it.

 I remember when I lost my old glasses, and got new ones - with the little lenses as opposed to the big ones - the whole world seemed crazy. I almost felt like I was going to pass out, the optometrist looked like a flat cartoon, the world seemed like it was very, very small. In fact, for weeks afterwords, I miscalculated food portions. I kept thinking I was getting less than I really was. But now, everything seems exactly the same with or without my glasses save the clarity. So if I'm understanding Dennett I have to ask, did my eyes in their ability to directly instill a "raw feel" adjust or did some other facet of my brain kick in to "figure it out" (as my optometrist said would happen) and make me think that the new world I was seeing is the same as the old one? It doesn't matter what the answer is, the point is that my apprehension of the supposed "qualia" is useless in deciding. And that goes against the thought experiments which attempt to show the immediate apprehension making all the difference - telling us something we couldn't have known otherwise. It seems to me, the structure of the argument is along the same lines of other philosophical investigations which cast doubt on the primacy of "facts" as independent of "interpretation" or "evidence" having a primacy above "theory." I'm not saying I completely buy into Dennett here, but I have to say given my leanings towards confirmation holism and the like that it's difficult to dismiss.

¹ I was thrown off here because I think the Wikipedia entry on Qualia is wrong in their explanation. They say regarding the 'prank', "it follows that we are imagining a change in a property which determines the way things look to us, but which has no physical basis." Yet Dennett says regarding the same, "and we later discover, if you like, just how the evil neurophysiologists tampered with your neurons to accomplish this." So how can the prank have no physical basis if neurons are being tampered with - why in fact call it the "neurosurgical prank?" I think the SEP entry on qualia answers this. Color inversion arguments have been apparently offered with varying strength, and lining up Dennett's quote, "It seems to us that the standard verificationist.." with the SEP quotation of the same it would follow from SEP that Block and Fodor were arguing aginst functionalism, not physicalism with the "prank" even though a color inversion argument could (impractically) be made against physicalism. Maybe I'll try to edit it and see what happens. heh.

Bad Theology or Just Bad Manners?
Topic: Lectures On Doubt

Adam Corolla inverviewed Shirley Phelps today on his radio show. She's the daughter, I think, of Fred.  What she wanted to tell the world in this instance was, that the recent Amish girls who were murdered were perfectly deserving of the 'crime' and that there is no difference between the Amish and the Taliban. As outrageous as her position sounds, the difference between Shirley and most Christians (and otherwise religious folks) who understand their own theology is mostly a matter of social grace.  Virtually every incarnation of God damns the greater portion of humanity with a lot of misery and pain and retribution for, ultimately, incorrectly placed beliefs. If religious belief were like the contents of an irritable bowel, then the governing criteria for social acceptability isn't so much the precise constitution of that content, but whether those contents are released publically or privately.

That I believe, is a very real, serious distinction that needs to go into the evaluation of religious rationality. Civilized professionals with a degree of self-reflection typically try to nuance the manifistation of God's hand in the real world and blurr the lines on who might be taking it hard in the end. Even if they have secret hopes or beliefs, or are constrained when pressed to logically commit to a God who's damnation is way overdone and mostly arbitrary, our evaluation of that theology should ultimately take such public resistance into consideration.

 I remember pushing a wealthy and very nice Calvinist once on my mission into admitting that God is going to damn babies, and that the attitude one takes toward that situation is simply, "Well, that's tough for them, isn't it?" If reduced to it's ultimate logical implications alone, this man's doctrine was most likely as despicable as Shirley's. But, "this man's doctrine" was clearly superior in its community expression. When that's taken into account, the victory I felt during the encounter in retrospect should have been deflated a great deal. On the one hand, it might be said that I provoked his thought, yet on the other, perhaps all I did was akin to badgering a well-adjusted non-theist into admitting he has (inappropriate) sexual fantasies.

 

Three Degrees of Physicalism
Now Playing: Edited
Topic: Mind

Why the word "physicalism" anyway? Apprently the move to talk about "physicalism" rather than "materialism" (SEP) is rooted in the need to distinguish between the basic position of monism, in this case what the kind science today or in the future should be able to explain by reference to "things", from other kinds of materialism. Of course, what constitutes physicalism or even the various suggested kinds of physicalism is debatable but for those of us just getting our feet wet, there are three main distinctions.

The strongest thesis of physicalism is Type Physicalism, usually associated with identity theory. For every type of mental event, there must be a type of physical event. The familiar pain = 'C fibre' event holds here. I noted a few days ago that this thesis is probably too strong because of the fact that it's difficult to talk about an animal being in pain that has different neurological structures than a human (multiple realizibility).

Supervenience Physicalism is in the middle - actually, it's a little bit of a different way of talking about physicalism. SP is usually considered "minimal" physicalism, or the very weakest thesis that can qualify as physicalism.  SP asserts that all mental properties necessarily change with an underlying change in the physical, and vice versa. Hence, as discussed in an earlier post, we can't define a zombie with 1-1 physical correspondence that has any kind of a different mental life. Mental properties must pace physical properties. Type physicalism guarantees supervenience.

Finally, there is token physicalism which says that for every actual instance of something, there must be a physical something.  Property dualists are token physicalists. The mind can't exist without the brain, but mental properties can change independent of it - that is, the mental doesn't supervene on the physical. Because dualism is permitted, TP can't be considered minimal physicalism. So for instance, David Chalmers who is a property dualist argues that physicalism is false, and that's perfectly consistent with token physicalism. Functionalists are also token physicalists. Whether or not functionalism meets the criteria for minimal physicalism as defined by supervenience is debatable.

Type/token relate to each other also in the following way. A type is like a dollar. A token is like a particular dollar bill, or a quarter. A token physicalist can get a dollar by a couple of quarters and fifty pennies. Maybe a gold standard analogy applies here. A type physicalist will define a dollar as x amount of gold. A paper dollar or four quarters are worthless, or at least they ultimately aren't actually a dollar.

 

 

quick note

Just got back from a short vacation. Stayed in the Marriott. Man, I've never been pushed so hard in my life to drink alcohol. Everytime I called up room service there was a plea to try some special wine or other kind of alcohol.  The main floor was beautiful, all centered around a bar - I stopped and had a couple shots of Jager. It was the only place I could find where I could get a bottle of water. The top floor had a cool rotating bar also. If you partake of the Marriott ammendities as the Hotel guides you, by the time you get to the little blue book in the top drawer you'll be too drunk to turn the pages.

Another note, since I sometimes plug continental phil here. On the plane back, the woman in the seat in front of me looked like she was correcting college papers. My eyes, bored, found themselves scanning down the pages as she turned them (she held them up high, I didn't have to work for it) and I saw references to foucault and Lyotard. So, ok, I had to read a section here and there. The theme of the three or four papers I got glimpses of seemed to be globalization. Good Lord, it was like "paradigm this" and "paradigm that". There's a very big downside to that tradition. 

 

Comments

I've turned on comments. Should be interesting to see if anyone is reading this. Funny thing, the day I checked this blog after a couple months of letting it sit, it had quite a bit a traffic (my standards are low, btw) and I was surprised. Since I've started posting again, it's dropped considerably. haha. Anyway, I'm sure it's 99% bot traffic anyway, search engines crawling and little link-maker programs running around trying to slip in a solicitation. My number 1 reason for not wanting comments enabled is that spam. This interface Tripod has is pretty slow an no fun to use. I know I should have just built my own but at the time I was building other experimental websites and didn't have the time, now that I'm married I really, really don't have the time. I also generally liked the default format tripod had. Unfortunately, they've "upgraded" and it's slower than ever. So we'll see what kind of work the comments turn out to be. Going in and and changing code etc., that kind of work isn't too bad. But waiting for an interface to load, canceling and starting over just to manage content is a real pain. Heck, for all I know the bots may not even be interested in posting on my blog.

The number 2 reason why I didn't want comments is that I originally wanted it more content oriented than day-to-day random thoughts, somewhere between a blog and a website. And if I see a mistake then I'd correct it. But if comments are enabled, and someone calls you on a mistake, and then later all of a sudden it's corrected, it looks like you're cheating and not taking responsibility for being wrong. So I think I have a solution for that. First, it's moved closer to the blog side of the website/blog spectrum so I won't worry about it as much. Second, most of the errors that *I* catch are within the first couple times of reading over it after posting, and in that stage, there are usually lots of formatting errors (thanks tripod) too.  My time to post and make corrections and so on is limited so my plan is to put "to be revised" on a new post. Until that changes to "revised" I will feel free to change anything I want in that post without special comments. And then afterwards, if there is a major error that I find or someone else points out, I'll leave it and make the correction in the comments.

Painful Distinctions - Zombies
Now Playing: revised
Topic: Mind

I mentioned in my last post that sometimes bystanders on philosophical issues, in this case the philosophy of mind, can easily get flustered because often those who publish to the public are fed up with the entire institution and want to define the issues on their terms, leaving out a lot of the context that they understand but we don’t. There isn’t really, a standardized textbook introduction to phil mind the same way there are millions which regurgitate 95% of the same material when introducing economics or biology (or even ethics). I was thinking of this when I thumbed through that new Blackmore book on consciousness I posted about a couple weeks ago. Anyway, in wanting to follow up more on that book I ran across this blog entry:

zombies

I tried to respond but for some reason comments didn’t seem to be working right. Anyway, here’s a bright guy who’s published some articles, writes well and so on trying to get a handle on the Zombie problem. In a nutshell, David Chalmers, following others who’ve argued in a similar way, that if a Zombie is logically possible, then physicalism is false. Now that doesn’t mean that Chalmers believes there really is a possibility that a molecule for molecule replacement of yourself could lack consciousness in this world. He explicitly denies that. But he holds that it’s metaphysically possible, that is, the idea itself isn’t somehow self-contradictory – it’s logically possible (though metaphysical and logical possibility might demand some distinctions as well). It might hold in some other world. Dan’s gut reaction is (from above):

I'm still unclear on why logical possibility is so interesting. It seems that all sorts of possibility are logically coherent, but their conceivability doesn’t seem to provide a reason to explain the presence or absence of these imagined possibilities in our world, which is the one we're interested in explaining.

I don't think Dan’s alone on this position, in fact when I first began reading about qualia I also didn’t pick up on exactly what the argument was and I think this is a common sentiment. One thing to note, is that philosophers like Churchland and Dennett don’t seem to deny that the possibility of zombies would refute physicalism but they either deny that zombies are really logically possible or that conceivability doesn’t lend to possibility and so on. It is, rather, a well accepted dogma of physicalism – as a philosophical position – that any “extra-physical” entities must supervene on – or be dependent upon – the physical, across all possible worlds. See SEP:

physicalism

So what Chalmers and others are arguing for is the rather trivial denial of the very definition of physicalism. Of course, the next question would be, why should physicalism be defined that way? Rather than trying to outline the evolution of the formal doctrine of supervenience physicalism, which I’d probably mess up anyway, let’s look at another example. As a reductio of the Zombie argument, Patricia Churchland cites Crick:

"As Francis Crick has observed, it might be like saying that one can imagine a possible world where gases do not get hot, even though their constituent molecules are moving at high velocity.”

Whether or not we accept that rebuttal, it’s instructive in the following way as an extreme example. Heat supervenes on the velocity of molecules. Or rather, talking about heat is nothing more than talking about the motion of molecules and the ... of molecules (talking about mind is no more than talking about molecules either). We don’t need anything else to explain heat other than to understand the velocity, and ... in this case, of molecules. But, let’s just pretend here, unfathomable as it is, that it were logically possible for heat to exist apart from molecular motion. No! the objection would be, that would violate the very definition of what heat is! Alternatively, we could say in that case, molecular velocity doesn’t and ... doesn't explain heat. In any case, this example should make it intuitive that if it were logically possible for molecular motion to exist apart from heat, then apparently the definition of heat is in error. And if a thought experiment could show – absurd as it sounds – that such a possibility exists, we’d all agree, intuitively, that the definition of heat must be wrong. Pretty underwhelming it might seem, but substitute heat for mind and that’s what you’ve got.

Some Main Positions
Topic: Mind


I wanted to give a quick run-down of some of the basic phil mind positions from the 20th century. This will be a huge oversimplification, of course. We’ll call the default position that everyone sort of reacts against as the Cartesian view of mind-body dualism. The body is an extending thing in space, the mind isn’t, but it is still something very real. So that gives us the problem that there are two things in the universe and the intuition war that I see, is between the logical parsimony of monism and the force of our common sense intuition of feelings and pains, which don’t intuitionally reduce descriptively. So which one will win out? Or, what will be the compromise?

The first reaction is to eliminate mind all together and talk about outward life only. Behaviorism. A famous “intuition pump” in this direction would be Ryle’s example of the university. A student walks onto campus looking for “X university” but only finds building Y, building Z, Professor P and so on. Talking about the mind seems to read in something extra that on closer inspection isn’t really there. The “mind” is generally considered constituted of one or two general entities, feelings (qualia) and intentions. A feeling would be pain or redness, an intention would be something like, “I wish to raise my arm now.” Against behaviorism would be the standard qualia argument that pain seems to real to be reduced descriptively, but equally important that behavior can be explained by various intentions. For instance, anti-socials on the outside can seem very normal but what’s going on inside is radically different from the rest of us.

A main departure from behaviorism that maintained a scientific POV was Identity Theory. This kept intentions and qualia intact, but as identities to some kind of physical process. Here is where the “c-fiber” talk you’ll see originates. In other words, any time you feel a pain, the one-day-to-be-discovered “c-fibers” are activating. So mental states are reduced to specific neurological brain features. The behaviorist in contrast, has no interest in what’s going on inside. The best rough analogy I’ve see would put a behaviorist as interested only in the hands on the clock, and Identity Theory as interested only in the gears. Some of the typical qualia type of objections still might hold, but the most devastating objection is the “multiple realizability” thesis from Hilary Putnam. Essentially, we can talk about both a snail and a human being in pain but the neuro-features are very different.

Multiple realizability along with explorations in computer science gave rise to Functionalism which to my knowledge was the last big-school theory in phil mind. Functionalism doesn’t care about the “hardware” as long as the causal relations, the “software” running is the same. Functionalism allows the possibility of mind to be extended to computers as well, which of course makes it a popular position for AI buffs and computer geeks generally.

One current running along simultaneously with identity theory and functionalism but less formalized were insights to phil mind from the philosophy of language. Two big contributors here would be Quine and Davidson. Quine’s position was radical in the sense that he approached meaning holistically. This parallels a lot of what was popular on “the Continent”. Basically, the story goes that thoughts can’t be reduced to atomic entities and therefore talk about qualia and intentions is itself meaningless and confused. This holistic position is the inspiration for so-called eliminative materialism. The basic idea is that any thought requires the understanding of another thought. Thoughts exist in a chain rather than a hierarchal structure. Dennett, who was a student of Quine’s, is probably the most well known figure to generally follow this line of thinking. This position flies in the face of conventional behaviorism, identity theory, and functionalism alike. See for instance, Ned Block’s (functionalist) attacks on semantic holism.

Davidson explored the language of mind and came up with a very brainy solution I can’t summarize at all in a couple of lines, but from what I can tell, his most important contribution brought to the table the concept of supervenience which explores all the subtle ways things can relate to each other. When you need a knife that cuts cleaner than clumsy notions like “causality,” you can talk about how A supervenes on B and all the subtle and distinct ways that can happen. Insights from Davidson mature in non-reductive physicalism, see in particular Jaegwon Kim who is probably one of the most technical and detail-oriented philosophers of mind ever.

Some of the most well-known philosophers of mind who write popular publications are hard to peg for various reasons. Either because of non-philosophical background or disdain for philosophical language. The Churchlands are more science oriented and their eliminativism is less philosophically rooted and dismiss folk psychology on the grounds that it’s simply too inadequate to count as any kind of explanation at all. Dennett doesn’t like tech talk so doesn’t self-identify in the usual ways, relying on common sense examples to raise all the issues he’s interested in. Searle also doesn’t like philosophical language. His take makes consciousness essentially qualia only, and that seems to be what makes a mind for him. Strictly, the what-it’s-like-to-be-a line of thinking. He’s not a dualist but maintains there is a “first person” and “third person” way to look at things. And third-personism is somehow an artifact of biology. He’s supposedly a dualist but he hates those kinds of distinctions, from what I gather. Finally, there’s David Chalmers who is kind of an odd duck for different reasons, he’s an actual self-avowed property dualist. Matter has a mind aspect and a material aspect. So, therefore, on a very low level the universe is conscious to a limited extent. Particular arrangements bring out mind in varying degrees. This kind of stuff puts him in kind of a “mystic” category with many other philosophers. Like Searle, the “what-it’s-like-to-be-a” line of thinking is very important to his position. But he differs in important ways. For instance, Chalmers would probably agree that a machine could be conscious like a human, something Searle would die before agreeing to. But he’d argue that the reasons would be different from a functionalist’s doctrine and could never be reflected in machine tables, etc.

Anyway, one of the reasons I wrote this is because the gurus often cited in popular publications while being highly respected in the community (those in the last paragraph), don’t necessarily reflect the main lines of debate on the subject and aren’t specifically helpful for understanding the subject generally.