Category: Uncategorized
-
Our intuition is often spoken as the hidden part of the iceberg part of our mind, giving us wordless opinions and flash judgments. The fact is our entire mind is an experiential system – experiences and observations (yours or hearing about someone else’s), expand this system and its bounds and even its scope. Any extractable…
-
There is a group of people construing human intelligence as an ethereal phenomena. They will criticize any potential attempts at artificial intelligence by arguing that a ‘ghost in the machine’ will still be missing from the most sophisticated machine intelligences we could ever make. I bring this up not because I’m that interested in artificial…
-
I’m not a philosopher. Well at least not by degree. I might have a philosophical nature. Oh, also, I once took a philosophy of physics class and dropped it after being frustrated by it. Great story, right? How to quit against a small amount of odds? Let me paint you a picture before you levy…
-
‘How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?’ The smiling-faced spirituals, new almost manic positivity thinking types, as well as the liberal forms of monotheism reinventing themselves now in the way of the eastern traditions place high priority on the goal of eliciting the subjective state of happiness or even…
-
“Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.” Your intuition can fail you on what is genius and what is asinine. Good thinking strives, almost as its prime directive, to clarify. It doesn’t mean a discussion you have with someone else on a…
-
I distrust wonder implicitly. It is not meant to survive or have permanence. It is held up as a virtue in modern society. It shouldn’t be. Wonder has a purpose in your brain but it isn’t to be sought for its own sake. To do so speaks to intellectually low-level addictive behavior. Like the mind…
-
Often lay people and philosophers talk about affecting change as a proof of free agency or the will to act. It’s a mess of interacting parts. Our brains. Our society. The atoms bashing around in our sun. Its unpredictable and none of us, even sitting right in the middle of it, know for sure what…
-
Is everything pointless? Of course it is. There is no point. The more we probe, the more we confirm that. There are grandiose debates going on about the ultimate sources of purpose. Science versus humanities versus religion, with each of them arguing that they can provide purpose. All of them jostling to tell us what…
-
‘If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.’ There are literally hundreds of these seemingly benign, brain-teasing quotes I could have picked. Thousands of pithy sounding wisdoms taking stabs at poorly unpacked concepts that are given transcendent reverence because of their ethereal nature. Quotes on the…
-
Explaining cognitive science, computational intelligence, and human language, from a psychological viewpoint. Also, an argument against bad ideas from modern scientists and philosophers, new-age mystics and religion, and as a potentially useful explanation to those who spent less time reading and thinking about why the human brain is the way it is. [Preface below] Table…
Omar Claflin 