Ruthlessly reductionistic John Bickle has the website up for Churchlandpalooza, AKA the University of Cincinnati 44th Annual Philosophy Colloquium: The Churchlands (May 15-17, 2008). The website has links to abstracts of the talks and photographic evidence that I may have the largest head in all of neurophilosophy.
Gualtiero Piccinini @ Brains calls attention to this NYT article on finite will: “Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind“. Excerpt:
No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.
Here’s a little bit of fiction I wrote a few years ago about infinite will: “Desire Magnitudes“. Excerpt:
I tear open my package, and, as is typical for ET merchandise, the accompanying literature is indecipherable trash. Fuck it. I pop a pill and wash it down with some hot sludge. I’m not real sure what to expect, but I’m figuring on an ingestible analogue to my previous surgery. I’m figuring nanobots are going to modify my frontal lobes allowing for the simulation of an indefinite number of ersatz consciousnesses to deal with an indefinite number of annoying distractions. Wrong answer, dude. That is not what this pill does to me at all. Just a few seconds after swallowing, the pill establishes various interfaces with my brain, and I know my way around my cerebrum well enough to know what’s what. The first interface established between the nanoprocessors and my brain is through the visual areas of occipital cortex. A translucent blue rectangle pops into my field of view. White alphanumerics scroll from top to bottom. It’s extraterrestrial at first, but as the pill coordinates the visual processing with the semantic association networks in my left temporal cortex, the text writhes into recognizable English:
WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?
Sufficiently many people have written on neurosemantics in the past decade or so that it seems worthwhile to try to review the field as a whole. As preliminary work toward such an end, I’ve cooked up a bibliography containing abstracts and links to online works, linked here: [link]. It’s likely that I’ve accidentally left out relevant work, so recommendations for additions are highly appreciated.
Pete Mandik’s Philosophy of Mind MetaResource available here: [link].
Alex J. Champandard has compiled “Evolving Virtual Creatures: The Definitive Guide“. Excerpt:
AI research ties into games and simulations in many ways, but one of the most fascinating is the evolution of artificial life. Here’s a compilation of the best videos and white papers about applying genetic algorithms to generating the morphology and behavior of virtual embodied creatures in 3D worlds.
One of the cool things about the following video is it’s inclusion of an animation of the creature’s neural network:
Also supercool, this one:
Normally I’d think an article that satisfied the search string “zombie +computers +Mandik” would be a good thing. Google yourself too much, and this is what you get. From wired.com “Zombie Pfizer Computers Spew Viagra Spam“:
Pfizer’s computers appear to have been infected with malware that has transformed them into zombie computers sending spam at the behest of a hacker. Oddly enough, they are spamming the public’s inboxes with ads for the company’s own product.
[…]
Much of the spam originating from Pfizer’s machines pretends to be sent from Gmail accounts, says Wesson. Products hocked include penis-enlargement products with the names “Mandik” and “Manster,” as well as pharmaceuticals like Viagra, the sleep drug Ambien and the sedative Valium. The spam also includes ads for Cialis, a Viagra competitor made by Eli Lilly.
I’m changing my name to “Manster”.
Photos (c) 2005 by Pete Mandik
I’m working on my first draft of Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind, a book under contract with Continuum Books. From time to time I’ll be posting draft entries on Brain Hammer, especially for controversial or especially difficult to arrive at definitions. Here’s “modal argument”:
modal argument, an argument for property dualism (see DUALISM, PROPERTY) in which key roles are played by the modal concepts of necessity and possibility or contingency. The basic gist of the argument involves arguing from premises concerning the necessity of identities (if x=y then necessarily x=y) and the contingency of any relation between mental and physical properties. Since, allegedly, for any physical property, it is possible for it to be instantiated without any mental property to thereby be instantiated, no physical property is identical to any physical property. According to a version of the modal argument formulated by Saul Kripke, although all identities, if true, are necessarily true, some identities, such as the identities found in natural science (like “water is identical to H2O”) seem contingent. According to Kripke, the appearance of contingency for such identities can be explained away in the following manner: what is contingently related to H2O is the watery appearance to us of H2O. While H2O is necessarily water, H2O is not necessarily water-appearing to us. So, any apparently contingent identity, that is, any apparently possible non-identity, is not really a non-identity if the appearance of contingency can be explained away in terms of a contingent relation between the appearance and the reality of a phenomenon. Contrapositively, if some apparent possible non-identity cannot be explained away in such a manner, then it is a real non-identity. Kripke offers that the apparent contingent relation between PAIN and neurophysiological events (“c-fibers firing”) does not admit of any such explaining away. Since, according to Kripke, anything that appears to the mind as a pain just is a pain: there is no distinction between the appearance of pain and the reality of pain. In versions of the modal argument due to David Chalmers, the contingency of mental-physical relations is supposed to follow from the conceivability of hypothetical scenarios such as the INVERTED SPECTRUM and the ZOMBIE.
I’m no fan of panpsychism, but I’m not going to let that stop me from posting on it. I’d like to raise questions about theories of which panpsychism is but one instance. Call such theories “pan-x-isms”. My main question is whether there are any non-controversial examples in which a pan-x-ism turned out to be a good idea.
One of the main problems that any pan-x-ism runs into is to explain the apparent differences between x’s and non-x’s. Thales’s panhydrism invites the question of what’s the difference between water and the glass that contains it. Is glass merely slow water? Another is that once everything is alleged to be explainable in terms of x, you pretty much give up hope of explaining x.
But back to my main question. When has pan-x-ism been a good idea? Post-Aristotelian conceptions of space where there aren’t distinct spaces for distinct substances (“fire goes here”) I think are pretty clearly improved conceptions, but should they count as pan-x-isms?
Pancomputationalism gets kicked around now and again but it’s about as controversial as panpsychism.
When, if ever, has there been a pan-x-ism that obviously didn’t suck?