Blog - Space Time Mind

Watch the video of this discussion here: https://youtu.be/ASYDMgMfCtkAlex Kiefer's webpage http://alexbkiefer.netAlex Kiefer's music (as exileFakir): https://exilefaker.bandcamp.comWaPo story about Google engineer Blake Lemoine and LaMDA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/SpaceTimeMind Episode 28: Psychedelic Artificial Neural Networks: http://www.spacetimemind.com/blog/2015/6/30/episode-28-psychedelic-artificial-neural-networksBehold!: The Crungus: https://www.iflscience.com/nothing-to-worry-about-dall-e-has-created-a-new-cryptid-named-crungus-64118AI Can Now Generate DMT Visuals, Thanks To This Online Community: https://doubleblindmag.com/ai-can-now-generate-dmt-visuals/Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/intelligence-unbound-the-future-of-uploaded-and-machine-minds/Quiet Karate Reflex: https://quietkaratereflex.bandcamp.comAdditional info and credits:Intro narration: Rachelle Mandik rachellemandik.comMovie clip quote from: Space Men - Assignment Outer Space Space (1960):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-MenSpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Intro Version: Richard Brown on Drums and Pete Mandik on everything else.Mid-episode break music: Ockham's Chainsaw by Alex Kiefer (as exileFakir): https://exilefaker.bandcamp.com/track/ockhams-chainsaw-2SpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Outro Version: Pete Mandik

Video discussion from which this episode's audio is taken: https://youtu.be/HI7OsUfPzHITarik LaCour on twitter: https://twitter.com/realscientisticTarik's conversation with Emerson Green: https://youtu.be/M3ShG06vJ2AAdditional info and credits:Intro narration: Rachelle Mandik rachellemandik.comMovie clip quote from: The Creation of the Humanoids (1962): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_the_Humanoids)SpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Intro Version: Richard Brown on Drums and Pete Mandik on everything else.Mid-episode break music: Diesel by Pete MandikSpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Outro Version: Pete Mandik

Video discussion from which this episode's audio is taken: https://youtu.be/b_oRS7nIujgWebpage for the Spirit of the Senses Salon: http://spiritofthesenses.org/moreaboutus.htmAdditional info and credits:Intro narration: Rachelle Mandik rachellemandik.comMovie clip quote from: War of the Satellites (1958) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_SatellitesSpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Intro Version: Richard Brown on Drums and Pete Mandik on everything else.Mid-episode break music: Spring Theory by Pete MandikSpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Outro Version: Pete Mandik

Video discussion from which this episode's audio is taken: https://youtu.be/I1p2MnXnvzcJake's webpage: https://jfberger.wixsite.com/homeJacob Berger & Richard Brown (2021) Conceptualizing consciousness, Philosophical Psychology, 34:5, 637-659. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2021.1914326Berger 2 A Defense of Holistic Representationalism, Mind & Language 33(2): 161-176. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mila.12163David Rosenthal, There's Nothing about Mary. https://www.davidrosenthal.org/DR-Mary.pdfAdditional info and credits:Intro narration: Rachelle Mandik rachellemandik.comMovie clip quote from: Star Odyssey (1979) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_OdysseySpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Intro Version: Richard Brown on Drums and Pete Mandik on everything else.Mid-episode break music: Diesel by Pete MandikSpaceTimeMind Theme Song, Outro Version: Pete Mandik

Video discussion from which this episode's audio is taken: https://youtu.be/8e847S4uGWoBryce's webpage: https://brycehuebner.weebly.comGold, Jonathan C., "Vasubandhu", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/vasubandhu/

In order to account for consciousness in terms of representational content, how FUNKY does the content need to be? Along the way we discuss the representation of inexistents and whether mathematical structuralism can shed light on the conceivability of undetectable qualia inversions. Is there any real difference (as opposed to a merely notational difference) between the square root of negative one and the negative square root of negative one? If so, what would that tell us about the question of whether intersubjectively undetectable qualia inversions are conceivable?

ATTENTION! Richard Brown and Pete Mandik shine their spotlights on the philosophy of mind of attention and awareness. Many philosophers of mind endorse the Transitivity Principle, the view that if you have a conscious state, you must be aware of that state. But what is the best account of the relevant notion of awareness? Is attending a kind of awareness? Further, is it a kind of awareness that is distinct from the awareness one has in virtue of perceiving, thinking about, or sensing something? Does it suffice for being aware of something that information about it is globally accessible to an embedding system? Would global availability suffice for a higher-order awareness of one’s own mental states, or would it only suffice for a first-order awareness of environmental or bodily items? Along the way we also get into some methodology and metaphilosophy, especially as regards the question of to what degree philosophical and scientific theorizing should be constrained by folk theory.

Prof. David Pereplyotchik once again joins Pete Mandik to tackle pain in the philosophy of mind. Can there be a scientific reductive explanation of pain. Can robots feel pain? Will this hurt? We here continue the conversation we started in SpaceTimeMind Episode 27.

Richard Brown and Pete Mandik debate the following proposal: The worst thing you can imagine happening to you is an event that has a non-zero probability of occurring at any given moment, and the longer you stay alive, the greater the chances become of that thing happening at some point in your lifetime. Would literally infinitely-lived immortals necessarily run into their own worst imaginable hell? Would even finite, but long-lived transhuman lifespans increase their chances of suffering by increasing their time alive? Would any amount of possible pleasure make it worth risking the worst imaginable suffering? Along the way we talk a little physics and a little Buddhism. Are interpretations of quantum mechanics the place where explanations go to bottom out? What are the physical prospects of the universe itself not dying? If you can achieve, in a single moment, a conscious experience of eternity, what’s the point of having more than one such experience?

Get in the Delorean, Marty! It’s time for the future of philosophy and the philosophy of the future. Philosophers and chrononauts Richard Brown and Pete Mandik overclock their flux capacitors to see if philosophy has a chance of surviving into the deep future of the human race. In the first half of the episode, they discuss the future of life itself. Along the way they hit Nick Bostrom’s “Great Filter” argument, Susan Schneider’s argument that aliens will be robots, and Pete’s own “Metaphysical Daring” argument about mind uploading and posthuman survival strategies. In part two, they delve into the future of the human race, and the question of whether philosophy could survive humanity's slipping into a Mad-Max-style future-primitive dark age. If we don't devolve into an idiocracy, will philosophy ever converge on a uniquely correct way of representing the real?

Spoilers galore as philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik wade up to their necks in spoilers to discuss recent cinematic depictions of (spoiler) artificial intelligence and (another spoiler) mind-uploading, especially in the 2015 films Ex Machina and Advantageous. DID WE MENTION THERE WILL BE SPOILERS? The first half of the episode largely focuses on Ex Machina and we shift to Advantageous for the second half. Also: Spoilers.

Gather up your microphysical constituents and embark on an epic audio odyssey wherein Richard Brown and Pete Mandik rock out about: physicalism, whether the mind is physical, how best to define "physical" and "physicalism," whether the physical universe is causally closed, and whether brainless spiders from Mars can have minds, etcetera, etcetera, and so on, and so forth. TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME

Cognitive philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik examine recent claims by Google researchers to have implemented dreams, imagery, and hallucinations in artificial neural networks. The images created by these artificial systems are kind of cool, but can anything at all be learned from such projects about how the mind or brain actually functions? Richard and Pete move from there to debate connectionism, AI, and rationalist vs. empiricist methodologies in the philosophy of cognitive science. Special prize for the first listener to correctly identify all three of the neuroscientists that Pete misidentifies!

Pete Mandik is once again joined by David Pereplyotchik (see episode 25) and this time they enter into a world of pain. Are pains identical to states of brains? Are pains fully accessible only from the first-person point of view? Is there anything contradictory about the idea of unconscious pains? Can you merely seem to yourself to be suffering without actually really being in a state of suffering? Will Pete and David answer any of these questions about pain in the philosophy of mind?

Pete Mandik talks to philosopher Eric Steinhart (William Paterson University) about his book, Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death. They dig deep into the computational and value-theoretic foundations of all existence. Other topics tackled include atheistic neopaganism, the cognitive science of hyper-arousal trances, the prudential self-concern of mind-uploads, entheogenic drugs, and Roko’s basilisk. Get comfy with a hot bowl of monads and enjoy the show while an infinite army of zombie-Leibnizes tear up the town.

Pete Mandik is joined by David Pereplyotchik (assistant professor of philosophy at Kent State University) to sleep furiously on some colorless green ideas. Also, they talk about language. Grammar, meaning, truth, translation, Google, and the difficulty in faking deafness are just a few of the topics tackled.

Is it a law of nature that if your neurons are gradually replaced with silicon chips, your qualia won’t thereby gradually fade? Can the armchair methodology of analytic metaphysics deliver knowledge of natural laws? Or can the boundaries of the nomologically possible be discerned only within the natural sciences? And who cares? Richard Brown and Pete Mandik, that’s who!

Richard Brown takes a one-episode hiatus while Pete Mandik heads down to Texas to talk to philosopher Ken Williford. Pete and Ken discuss whether (1) it’s desirable for humans to transform themselves into something alien, (2) whether we or our brains are already alien to us, and (3) whether an “acquaintance relation” view of consciousness is consistent with physicalism.

After two physics episodes in a row Richard Brown and Pete "Macho Bluff" Mandik dial the way-back machine to the Golden Era of Dinosaur Travel and kick out some old-school philosophy of mind jams. In part 1 ("Time Shuffling") they sort some stuff out about temporal counterpart theory and so-called “real identity.” In part 2 (“Finger Sausages”) they tackle the transparency of conscious experience and phenomenal acquaintance. In part 3 (“A Brain Made out of Paper”) they discuss the extended mind hypothesis and it’s connection to panpsychism and meditation (with a mild de-rail on journal refereeing best/worst practices).

Physicist Sean Carroll joins philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik on the SpaceTimeMind podcast to discuss, for example: anti-intellectual academics; intelligent design and fine tuning; entropy, decoherence, and the arrow of time, baby Benjamin-Button universes; Boltzmann brains; lambda cold dark matter; many worlds; disappearing worlds; interacting worlds. And much much more!

Philosophers of mind and science Richard Brown and Pete Mandik burn the book of the world while orbiting a decaying black hole with Maxwell’s demon, a reversible cellular automaton, and can of whoop-ass worms. Will they survive? Will one of them successfully execute the argumentative equivalent of the Five-Point-Palm Exploding-Heart-Technique against the other? And how would you even know?

Does all of reality exceed what we believe about it? Even the reality of fun? How about the reality of pain? Eric Linus Kaplan is an author (Does Santa Exist?), a TV writer (Big Bang Theory, Futurama), and an all-around philosophical dude (Buddhist monk, UC Berkeley philosophy doctoral student). Eric joins philosophy professors Richard Brown and Pete Mandik, co-hosts of the SpaceTimeMind podcast, for a discussion of ontology.

Philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik continue their discussion from the SpaceTimeMind podcast’s Episode 11 on Scientism. Here they focus on naturalistic versions of truth and reality. Can evolution by natural selection ground our ability to represent truths that transcend usefulness? If it can’t, what can?

Neuroscientist and rock star Joseph LeDoux (NYU) joins SpaceTimeMind podcast co-hosts and philosophers Richard Brown (CUNY) and Pete Mandik (WPU) to discus the neural bases of memory, emotion, and consciousness in human and non-human brains.

Philosopher kings Richard Brown and Pete Mandik are once again joined on the SpaceTimeMind podcast by science fiction author and essayist Roger Williams. In the first part of the episode we discuss the technological singularity as well as Williams' own singularity tale, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. The themes of transformation continue on through to the last part of the episode, where we discuss Roger's essay, "Hannibal Lecter as Transhumanist Icon." So, slap some sim-stim 'trodes on your forehead, poor yourself a nice chianti, and kiss your precious meatspace goodbye, oh you pretty pre-post-humans. We're gonna find out what's at the bottom of the bag of infinite free ponies.

In this episode of the SpaceTimeMind podcast we discuss supernature, a hypothetical realm that is, in some sense, above and beyond the world accessible to the natural sciences. In part one of the episode, Richard Brown and Pete Mandik are joined by science fiction author Roger Williams. In part two, we are joined by philosopher Gregg Caruso, who you may remember from episode 7 on free will. If you notice anything strange occurring while you listen to this episode, please let us know about it at spacetimemind.com. It may have just been a coincidence. Or it may, just possibly, have been an intrusion into our world from the world of SUPERNATURE.

A 3-D object, fully present in the now, walks into a bar where the bartender is a 4-D spacetime worm. The worm asks the object “Why so tense?” Further instantiations of such high-grade philoso-physical hilarity ensue in this, the third episode of the SpaceTimeMind podcast on the topic of time. Brit Brogaard is back by popular demand, and this time a Brogaard/Brown presentist team-up gives Pete “Erstwhile Eternalist” Mandik a run for his money…forever.

Hide your brains; the neurophilosophers are coming! Philosopher and Neuroscientist Berit (Brit) Brogaard joins Richard Brown and Pete Mandik on the SpaceTimeMind podcast to discuss what makes some states of the mind or brain conscious and others unconscious. Is this sort of question answerable from a psychological or philosophical perspective that makes no essential reference to neuroscience? Or, instead, are neuroscientific data unavoidable in this domain? And: can Brit go a full ten minutes without using the word “brain?"

In this episode of the SpaceTimeMind podcast, Richard Brown and Pete Mandik continue their discussion from Episode 9 ("A Journey to the Edge of Hypertime”) and consider the view that time constitutes a fourth dimension analogous to the three spatial dimensions of height, width, and depth. What’s gained and what’s lost in viewing moments other than the present as analogous to places other than here? Do we lose an ability to account for change and motion? And if a computer simulation of a brain can have consciousness when we run the program, could it have consciousness even when the program isn’t being run?

Good news everybody! Science-obsessed philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik duke it out over which one is the most egregious purveyor of scientism, the view that anything worth knowing is worth knowing scientifically. Or is scientism just empiricism? And what the hack is that, anyway? Is it simply an affirmation of the superiority of sensory knowledge? Or is it at bottom a denial of necessary truths? Or is being a scientismologist just what happens when you label yourself as such to achieve greater societal respectability and sell more books? Put on your goggles have a clean beaker handy. It is time to science.

Neuroscience and philosophy meet in the arena of consciousness when neuroscientist guest Bernard Baars joins philosopher hosts Richard Brown and Pete Mandik on the SpaceTimeMind podcast. Topics we tackle include (1) the interface between science and philosophy, (2) the Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness, (3) the relevance of quantum mechanics for phenomenal consciousness, (4) the possibility of machine consciousness, and (5) Ned Block’s thesis that perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access. We’ve saved you a seat in the theater of consciousness, so pop open an ice cold can of qualia and enjoy the show.

This is the first of several episodes of the SpaceTimeMind podcast wherein amateur chrononauts Richard Brown and Pete Mandik tackle topics in the physics and metaphysics of time. In this episode, one of the main ideas we kick around is whether any moments exist beyond the present moment. Additionally, we tackle the issue of whether it makes any more sense to say that time flows than it does to say that space moves. If time flows at some rate, must there exist a hypertime relative to which first-order time changes? And is the ensuing infinite regress an intolerable ontic horror? Finally, we discuss the relationship between the phenomenology of time experience and the metaphysics of time by exploring whether a computer simulation of a brain would notice being run backwards in time. WARNING: Under no circumstances should you attempt to listen to any part of this episode backwards.

Could a robot or an alien have a mind even though its physical structure may contain nothing similar to a human brain? To address this, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel once again joins Richard Brown and Pete Mandik to finish what we started in episode 4, “Death and Logic.” Here Richard defends brain-o-centrism against Eric’s “crazy-ism” (the view that something crazy has to be right about the metaphysics of consciousness) and Pete’s pro-AI, born-again functionalism (the view that minds are multiply realizable or substrate independent). Our launch points for discussion are themes from Eric’s recent essays, “If Materialism Is True, the United States is Probably Conscious” and “The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind."

You have only three options: One, you listen to this episode of your own free will. Two, you listen to this episode as a matter of pure chance, with neither cause nor reason. Three, you were predetermined since the big bang to listen to this episode. One way or another, you're going to hear philosopher Gregg Caruso join Pete Mandik as they gang up on Richard Brown, who intermittently operates under the illusion that he has libertarian free will.

Vygotskian developmental psychologist Lara Beaty joins philosopher-scientists Richard Brown and Pete Mandik to tackle questions such as: Is the mind bigger than the brain? Does conceptual thought and even consciousness require the use of language or other sorts of social interaction? Which is morally preferable: making animals smarter or making humans stupider? Would it be totally cool to eat somebody who volunteered for it?

Neurophilosophers Pete Mandik and Richard Brown wax futurological on whether the post-human future will be populated by Kantian superheroes or Sartrean sociopaths. Other questions addressed include: Is your brain a douchebag? Are “uplifted" monkeys happy monkeys or sad monkeys? Is it OK to torture sims? And if so, what’s the best way to do it? Musical interludes provided by the New York Consciousness Collective and Quiet Karate Reflex.

People say that two things in life are certain. The first is that no one gets out alive. The second is that if possibly necessarily P, then necessarily P. But, are death and logic really certainties? If, for example, there exists an infinite number of situations which each contain an individual who is intrinsically similar to you, aren't you effectively immortal? And is there a single best logic to use in assessing such possibilities? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel joins Richard and Pete to tackle death and logic as well as topics concerning the reality of the past and proper role of common sense in science and philosophy. This is the first part of our conversation with Eric. The second part will appear in a future episode.

This is the second of a two part discussion between Richard and Pete concerning whether and how consciousness can be explained and whether it should be regarded as a fundamental feature of reality. In this episode, the discussion focuses on the question of what counts as an explanation and what norms govern good explanations in physics as well as in metaphysics.

This is the first of a two part discussion between Richard and Pete concerning whether and how consciousness can be explained and whether it should be regarded as a fundamental feature of reality. In this episode, the discussion focuses on the view that everything that exists is ultimately computational/mathematical.

Topics tackled include whether the physical universe is really a computer simulation and whether you can know with certainty that you are currently conscious.