Silliest article of the new year

By -
The winner so far! The author writes things like:

"Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. The computer concludes that it has qualia because that serves as a useful, if simplified, self-model."

So, you don't actually see these very letters appearing on this very screen in front of you! Your brain just contains a "model" that "concludes" that you see them!

There, that should clear everything right up.

Comments

  1. Prateek7:46 AM

    I do not find it silly at all.

    I feel like "Argument by Appeal to Ridicule" is becoming too common in the internet these days.

    (This is quite similar to what internet atheists do to ridicule religious folk, btw)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:53 PM

      Well, Prateek, if an argument that says we are MISTAKEN in BELIEVING we are conscious is not silly, I don't know what the hell is, since mistakes and beliefs only apply to conscious entities!

      Delete
  2. Prateek4:47 AM

    Well, mistakes and beliefs also occur in the physical brain, and the physical brain is capable of deceiving the physical brain. No?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:02 AM

      Your assumption is unproved, but deception involves a consciousness being deceived, and thus cannot serve as evidence against its existence! (What would it mean to "deceive" a rock?)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more