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http://consc.net/papers/ideali...

I do not claim that idealism is plausible. No position on the mindâ"body problem is plausible.
Materialism: implausible. Dualism: implausible. Idealism: implausible. Neutral monism: im-
plausible. None of the above: implausible. But the probabilities of all of these views get a boost
from the fact that one of the views must be true. Idealism is not significantly less plausible than
its main competitors. So even though idealism is implausible, there is a non-negligible probability
that it is true.

Here's a fascinating article on some of the associated concerns.

The natural science lacks explanation for consciousness (hard problem of consciousness). Nothing in the laws of natural science as presently known indicates what is it like to be such and such arrangement of elementary particles and fields. The mere correlation between reports or introspection of conscious states and electro-chemical activity of the brain does not imply that conscious state is produced or maintained by the this electro-chemical activity. After all, there are no little people dancing and singing inside TV even though their activity is strongly correlated with electrical activity in the TV and can be interfered with by cutting off the electric power to the TV.

You might be interested in the work of David Chalmers. His website has a lot of terrific resources about philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, etc. from a wide variety of philosophers with every perspective and theory you could imagine. Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is quite technical, but fascinating. The basic idea is that conscious perception is an intrinsic property of patterns, not just an emergent property.

You might be interested in the work of David Chalmers. His website has a lot of terrific resources about philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, etc. from a wide variety of philosophers with every perspective and theory you could imagine. Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is quite technical, but fascinating. The basic idea is that conscious perception is an intrinsic property of patterns, not just an emergent property.

Sorry, sorry.

Their claim that "it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed" is pretty sceptical.

Analog computer thought experiments to accomplish this were proposed long ago.

e.g. for finding the shortest path between cities: cut lengths of string corresponding to each possible route between cities, then tie them all together. Then just grab the two knots corresponding to origin and destination and pull them taught (you may need to cut any irrelevant strings that restrict this pulling)

See http://consc.net/notes/analog.html for more.

http://consc.net/papers/extended.html

A paper called 'The Extended Mind', much of which is devoted to arguing that there's no important difference between remembering something and using a diary, to the extent that having something written in the diary counts as believing it. (The technical term is 'extended cognition'; it has to do with more than just memory.) One of the questions on my 2nd Year undergrad. Philosophy exams read: '"I didn't cheat in the exam--these notes written on my arm are part of my mind!" Discuss.'

It discussess three alternatives what is happening to one's conscious experience when replacing some (or just one) neuron in one's brain:

Option 1: Absent = You lose all conscious experience and become a robot (zombie).

Option 2: Fading = Your conscious experience degrades continuously as you replace more and more neurons.

Option 3: Dancing = You can switch your conscious experience on and off.

All three options are shown to be fruitless, so nothing should happen to your conscious experience when the brain or parts of it are replaced by some device with isomorphic input-output functions. So, maybe robots may have consciousness ...

The Alaska Association of School Boards is implementing a 1-1 laptop program, based on a similar successful program in Maine (which I believe has just gotten its funding renewed). From the executive summary of Maine's two-year retrospective report:

In summary, the evidence collected for this evaluation indicates that a large majority of Maine's middle schools have successfully implemented the one-to-one laptop program, and there is already substantial self-reported evidence that student learning has increased and improved. Additional research needs to be conducted in the coming years to document and understand the long-term impacts of the laptop initiative on teachers and teaching, students and learning, and on schools.

The report notes that there likely needs to be much more professional development and integration of technology into curricula, but it seems that even in its nascent stages the 1-1 program has helped keep students interested in and proactive about their learning, and improved the quality of their work.

One neat thing about technology in schools is that it lets you do completely new kinds of schoolwork. A new kind of project that many of my English-teaching acquaintances are starting to like is the fake-novel-movie-adaptation-trailer, or artsy-literature-inspired-music-video. Going outside the bounds of the traditional two-page book report or reading journal really helps students think differently and more deeply about the subject (especially for students not compatible with the text-based US school system). Film also really lends itself to literary tropes like symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. This kind of thinking is just not possible (or at least very difficult) without prevalent access to technology. I've heard anecdotally that music students love GarageBand for recording state honor band/choir audition tapes, or just for practicing in general (recording yourself is notoriously one of the best ways to figure out all the myriad ways you suck). And the sheer amount of good information and media available on the internet is rapidly rivaling even the best-equipped public school libraries.

Obviously the $100 laptop isn't going to be a great video editing machine (though, if you can do it on an Amiga...), but even the basic functions of word processing and Internet capability (the Wikipedia, for chrissake! how great would the world be if everyone had the Wikipedia?) have the capability to dramatically improve the baseline quality of education for developing populations.

From my own experience, I have been lucky enough to use computers since I began school in the mid-80s, and I feel that they shaped my development in a very positive way. Computers are fantastic tools for teaching critical thinking, reading comprehension, model-forming and abstraction, mathematical concepts (especially geometry), and with the internet, efficient internalization of data from multiple sources. David Chalmers and Andy Clark have argued that external resources, when properly utilized, can effectively become part of our cognitive process. By teaching children to take advantage of the astounding power and resources that computers make available to them, we do them a far greater service than cramming multiplication tables and D'Nelian handwriting exercises down their throats for 180 days a year from the age of 5 to 13.

After all, people should be generalists, and computers are the generalist's tool. What would we humans be without tools? Shivering, unathletic apes. $100 is cheap for a tool that

Actually, I always thought that was a great advantage of CSS layouts. Theoretically, you should start with a well-written and clean HTML document with H1s and Ps and OLs for navigation lists, etc. Then you add style to that. So when you view the page without the stylesheet, it looks like, say, an academic's website--not terribly pretty, but extremely readable and functional.

And while this does not imply that one must have concepts before one has them, it does imply that one can have the concept of green only by having a whole battery of concepts of which it is one element. It implies that while the process of acquiring the concept of green may — indeed does — involve a long history of acquiring piecemeal habits of response to various objects in various circumstances, there is an important sense in which one has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in Space and Time unless one has them all — and, indeed, as we shall see, a great deal more besides. — Sellars, 19 [bold added]

Can we agree on a definition, here? Here's a pretty standard one: "If someone does X, but could have done other-than-X, then they have free will." Is this an acceptable definition of free will?

Sure. That's fine, and most people would agree with that definition. But there could or should be a better one. From a scientific point of view, the "will" is the independent variable, and the end behavior is the dependent variable.

A decent wikipedia read on the subject is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

Look at the bottom paragraph of the "Science of Free Will" section.

People's "will" is not even good enough to randomly choose one of their arms. Without any manipulation they "choose" their right arm more than their left (60% vs 40%). Stimulate the right hand side of the brain with a magnet, and now they randomly choose their left hand 80% of the time.

Granted this is not the end all be all experiment, but if people cannot under any manipulation randomly pick one of their appendages (an average around 50% like that of a coin toss would be "random"), what can they choose?

Here is a weaker example, but one nonetheless: http://consc.net/notes/pick-a-number.html

People are not very good at picking a random number either. I believe that going to infinity is a bit extreme, but its pretty well known that 3 and 7 are "the least randomly picked" numbers between 1 and 10. And people frequently pick 37 when asked to go to 100. Even if people are not instructed to pick an integer, they will most likely pick one.

I guess a better experiment would be to offer a reward to people to really exercise their will by asking them to pick a random number between 1 and 50 or so, and also tell them that the integer that was "most random" would win a prize of some kind.

With this experiment, the person will be rewarded for being more unique and truly "random". Even with a huge sample size, I doubt that there would be nowhere near the same frequency for each number 1-50.

Assume the completed project does model a human brain, then according to the leading theory ("functionalism") then as it's a functional replica of a human brain, it has all the properties of a human brain - including consciousness.

The question "how would you tell?" is one that the functionalists get asked a lot!

The usual answer is that in the future we will know how to match functional (or in some variations, physical) states to conscious states. When this is done, we'll have a set of psycho-functional (or psycho-physical) laws, and will be able to say, with confidence, that if it's in state X it is having experience Y.

The argument that stands best against that idea is that no matter how well correlated X is with Y, just naming Y doesn't tell us "what it's like to be in state Y" for the system that is in state X. Like the prisoners' jokes ("53!", "hahah, that's a good 'un!") there seems to be a big GAP between the code and the experience.

Even supposing the brain-model to be conscious, how would we verify that red looks to it as red looks to us? What could we do, print out the hex code for the colour it's experiencing ("#FF0000"!)? Put the colour on a screen? But wait - our just looking at the screen tells us what it's like to be us looking at the screen, not what it's like to be the brain-model looking at it...

Positions which hold there must be more than a functional state involved in determining "what it's like" range from "physicalism" - the physical details determine the experience, through "physical-functionalism" - it's a mixture, with the functional relations accounting for behaviour and information processing, and the experiential details provided by the physical realisation - to what has been called "transcendentalism": neither functional nor physical models have the epistemelogical clout to get us any closer to determining the "what it's like". Thomas Nagel's paper What is it like to be a bat? is the classic statement of that position.

Suppose the case goes on being undecided, and we really can't tell. Then, as Hilary Puttnam has argued, perhaps we should play safe and regard the permanent switching-off (or erasure) of such a model as an act equivalent to murder, so long as the model is functionally like a human (it is able to hold a normal conversation).

There's a vast literature concerning the issue. See this bibliography by David Chalmers for a list of 1082 papers, just on the "what it's like" aspect, alone! That is part one of Chalmers' excellent and comprehensive bibliography of the philosophy of mind.

Assume the completed project does model a human brain, then according to the leading theory ("functionalism") then as it's a functional replica of a human brain, it has all the properties of a human brain - including consciousness.

The question "how would you tell?" is one that the functionalists get asked a lot!

The usual answer is that in the future we will know how to match functional (or in some variations, physical) states to conscious states. When this is done, we'll have a set of psycho-functional (or psycho-physical) laws, and will be able to say, with confidence, that if it's in state X it is having experience Y.

The argument that stands best against that idea is that no matter how well correlated X is with Y, just naming Y doesn't tell us "what it's like to be in state Y" for the system that is in state X. Like the prisoners' jokes ("53!", "hahah, that's a good 'un!") there seems to be a big GAP between the code and the experience.

Even supposing the brain-model to be conscious, how would we verify that red looks to it as red looks to us? What could we do, print out the hex code for the colour it's experiencing ("#FF0000"!)? Put the colour on a screen? But wait - our just looking at the screen tells us what it's like to be us looking at the screen, not what it's like to be the brain-model looking at it...

Positions which hold there must be more than a functional state involved in determining "what it's like" range from "physicalism" - the physical details determine the experience, through "physical-functionalism" - it's a mixture, with the functional relations accounting for behaviour and information processing, and the experiential details provided by the physical realisation - to what has been called "transcendentalism": neither functional nor physical models have the epistemelogical clout to get us any closer to determining the "what it's like". Thomas Nagel's paper What is it like to be a bat? is the classic statement of that position.

Suppose the case goes on being undecided, and we really can't tell. Then, as Hilary Puttnam has argued, perhaps we should play safe and regard the permanent switching-off (or erasure) of such a model as an act equivalent to murder, so long as the model is functionally like a human (it is able to hold a normal conversation).

There's a vast literature concerning the issue. See this bibliography by David Chalmers for a list of 1082 papers, just on the "what it's like" aspect, alone! That is part one of Chalmers' excellent and comprehensive bibliography of the philosophy of mind.

"Nothing in the entire universe that I've ever heard of points to any part of 'you' being anything other than a part of your physical body."

How about what it's like to see the color blue?

I'm not being facetious. This -- the mind-body problem -- is actually a hot-button philosophical and scientific issue nowadays, and there is no easy answer to it. The physicalist explanation of consciousness is still full of holes. See:

Maybe you are, maybe not. This question goes very far: What is consciousness ?

I can't answer this question (and I guess nobody can). But at least I can provide a link to a nice collection of scientific articles that try to answer the question:

http://consc.net/online.html