Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Hardness is an emergent property of molecules when they join together to form a solid. But it is comprehensible how it emerges: the individual molecules bind to each other with a strength sufficient to prevent the easy incursion of an exterior object into the solid. But we have nothing at all like that with mind: no one has the least idea, or even the hint of an idea, really, as to how neurons might interact to produce consciousness. Sure, many people have forwarded all sorts of theories as to how neurons form networks that handle inputs in various ways to produce some new output: Hayek's theory of the sensory order is just one example. One or more of these theories may be completely true; that is not the issue. The problem is, all of them just describe how some electro-chemical impulses are transformed into other electro-chemical impulses. We might achieve an extremely detailed map of just how a photon hitting the eye is transformed into something happening in the brain. But t...

"It's true. I am well on my way. I can show you." (You come to my house.) "OK, Gene, let's see." "There you go!" "But you didn't rise at all: what are you talking about?" "Well, I have to start somewhere! The first step is "zero levitation": where else did you expect me to start? But now that I've made the first step, we can see how the process will proceed." "That's ridiculous! No levitation is not the 'first step' on the way to levitating: it's not a step at all." "No, my man, it's you who are being ridiculous. I just learned from a famous philosopher that building a machine 'without the least smidgen of understanding' is an important first step in showing how understanding arose. You see, even though that step didn't get anywhere at all towards artificially creating understanding, it was still a very important step! So I admit, my first step to l...

Daniel Dennett and I are kicking back, watching game seven of the Heat-Thunder series (I am in denial) and I say to him, "My thermostat must be feeling chilly." "What are you talking about?" he asks. "Well, it just turned the furnace on: it does that whenever it feels chilly." "That's ridiculous! It's a totally unfeeling machine. Its turning the furnace on is just a mechanical response to the thermometer moving." "OK, then, how do you explain how humans feel hot and cold?" "Ah," he responds, "that is trivial: all you have to do is wire together a whole bunch of mechanisms like your thermostat into a very complex network." Now, there is a pretty obvious logical difficulty here: If the thermostat has zero feeling, how is putting a whole bunch of them together result in a non-zero amount of feeling? As I recall, even trillions of zeroes added together still amount to zero. Now, there is at least o...

You don't believe me? Well, I put up a scarecrow in my field, and some birds thought it was a person. We could even say it is "sorta" a person, couldn't we? At the very least, we are well on our way to constructing a person from sticks, straw, and old clothing, aren't we? And we certainly have shown that it is feasible, even if we can't quite do it yet, right? What is the point of an argument so obviously silly? I'm not sure, but here is what is essentially the same argument , presented by a "philosopher"! Dennett notes, quite correctly, that "Turing realized that [understanding] was just not necessary: you could take the tasks [human "computers"] performed and squeeze out the last tiny smidgens of understanding, leaving nothing but brute, mechanical actions. In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is." But Dennett goes on to claim that these machines, withou...