Space Time Mind

Pete Mandik is joined by philosopher and AI researcher Alex Kiefer (Monash University) to discuss some newsworthy Artificial Intelligence projects, especially Language Models such as LaMDA, DALL-E, and GPT-3. What are the spiciest possible takes on these systems, and is any take too spicy for Alex or Pete? How much of so-called human intelligence and consciousness is just a language game disconnected from reality? What’s a CRUNGUS, and how many are among us? Whose art will you consume when non-humans get better at making it than humans? And whose podcasts?

The first half of the episode is dedicated to illusionism. In the second half, we talk about Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular, with an eye toward how such religious traditions square with metaphysics and epistemologies that are broadly naturalistic, empiricist, and physicalist.

Topics covered include the brain’s role in conscious experience, competing definitions of “consciousness”, hypnosis, near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy, the “self” and much much more.

Get ready to interrogate some mind colors! Can the so-called qualitative aspects of consciousness be explained in holistic and functionalist terms that undermine anti-physicalist critiques? Can the consciousness of a mental state be wholly explained in terms of a non-conscious thought about it? To find out, Pete Mandik talks to Jacob Berger (Lycoming College) about Jake’s work on consciousness within the Higher-Order Thought approach. Pete and Jake also get into the closely related quality-space view of sensory qualities that Jake defends.

Behold!: The first new episode of SpaceTimeMind after a seven-year hiatus. Buddhist philosophy meets neuroscience when host Pete Mandik talks with Bryce Huebner (Georgetown U.) about his NeuroYogacara project.  We talk about Yogacara and other nearby schools of Buddhist philosophy as we delve into meditation, psychedelic drugs, biopsychist approaches to consciousness, disgusting things, 4E cognition, and philosophy as life craft.

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?