One of Sciborg

Alex Rosenberg's usual stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/opinion/why-you-dont-know-your-own-mind.html?_r=0

(That should have been "one 'for' Sciborg" - sounds a bit like star trek 'seven of nine etc.'

Haha I saw this. Rosenberg seems to dance around his controversial claim that thought itself is illusory.

I actually think he'd make a fascinating interview though not if the (IMO) boring trend of hammering everyone about NDE research would continue.
 
I actually think he'd make a fascinating interview though not if the (IMO) boring trend of hammering everyone about NDE research would continue.

You have no idea how I agree with this. By now, we all get that most of the skeptic guests are either unfamiliar with -or not willing to invest their time in- NDE research. But it seems like lately all of the podcasts revolve around it, taking away from the actual topic and/or specialty of the guest. I am fine with having one or two questions about NDEs, but the insistence in pulling the interview's topic toward them is becoming repetitive.
 
Alex Rosenberg's usual stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/opinion/why-you-dont-know-your-own-mind.html?_r=0

(That should have been "one 'for' Sciborg" - sounds a bit like star trek 'seven of nine etc.'
from the article:
The upshot of all these discoveries is deeply significant, not just for philosophy, but for us as human beings: There is no first-person point of view.

He cites lots of observations that have been recorded and are well-formed data. The analysis he does to this data is just plain biased. When he arrives at an absurd claim - he turns and in his 1st person narrative sees the data and his own supporting analysis - when in fact others will look at the article and see a string of forced philosophy onto the natural facts.
 
You have no idea how I agree with this. By now, we all get that most of the skeptic guests are either unfamiliar with -or not willing to invest their time in- NDE research. But it seems like lately all of the podcasts revolve around it, taking away from the actual topic and/or specialty of the guest. I am fine with having one or two questions about NDEs, but the insistence in pulling the interview's topic toward them is becoming repetitive.

To be fair to Alex I did say I was gonna make a list of academics in the Guest Suggestion Thread of people who are somewhere between the materialist and full blown NDE/Psi spectrum.

And, well, I haven't so that's on me. Actually such guests would probably be more interesting than Rosenberg. I just think this idea of an entrenched materialist academia on one side and the "freedom fighters" of parapsychology on the other is inaccurate at this point. I mean there are many parapsychologists who are materialists, and people who AFAIK reject Psi who aren't.
 
Alex Rosenberg said:
Despite these assurances from philosophy, empirical science has continued to build up an impressive body of evidence showing that introspection and consciousness are not reliable bases for self-knowledge. As sources of knowledge even about themselves, let alone anything else human, both are frequently and profoundly mistaken.

A gap in Nisbett and Wilson’s findings? A first-person access to our cognitive processes.
The well-known experiments of Nisbett and Wilson lead to the conclusion that we have no introspective access to our decision-making processes. Johansson et al. have recently developed an original protocol consisting in manipulating covertly the relationship between the subjects' intended choice and the outcome they were presented with: in 79,6% of cases, they do not detect the manipulation and provide an explanation of the choice they did not make, confirming the findings of Nisbett and Wilson. We have reproduced this protocol, while introducing for some choices an expert guidance to the description of this choice. The subjects who were assisted detected the manipulation in 80% of cases. Our experiment confirms Nisbett and Wilson's findings that we are usually unaware of our decision processes, but goes further by showing that we can access them through specific mental acts.
In summary, without elicitation, the subjects only detect the substitution in 33% of the cases, while the picture remains hidden to them for 2 seconds. At the end of an elicitation interview, the detection rate is 80% while the picture remains hidden during the whole of the interview, that is 17 to 45 minutes.
 
Haha I saw this. Rosenberg seems to dance around his controversial claim that thought itself is illusory.

I actually think he'd make a fascinating interview though not if the (IMO) boring trend of hammering everyone about NDE research would continue.
I'm fairly sick of sceptical folk who just dance around the subject.

I mean, imagine that you wanted to become more sceptical, you wouldn't do it by learning to dance round the evidence. I'd line up all the best evidence and see if I could knock it down - or find someone else who could knock it down. A convincing experimental sceptic would start with all the best evidence and actually demonstrate what is wrong with it. A convincing theoretical sceptic, would start with the hard problem, and explain precisely how it wasn't relevant.

Anyone who starts by downgrading consciousness, loses my attention, because the process of downgrading consciousness also downgrades science itself - because it is done by conscious beings. Everything goes down the plug-hole!

The most widely accepted psychologist’s theory of consciousness identifies it as a mode of “global broadcast” solely from sensory modalities to “executive”— deciding, and “affective”— feeling systems that act on this sensory input.
The problem with that quote, is that the core problem of consciousness, isn't how information is shipped around, or even how consciousness is shipped around, it is "What is consciousness, and can it have a totally physical basis?"

So really, I am not in favour of more sceptical podcasts unless Alex is sure the person will really bring a new idea to the table. He generally gives his non sceptical interviewees more scope to tell it as they want to tell it, but even so, I think he should back off a bit more about biological robots, NDE's (except where relevant to the subject or mentioned by the interviewee), the meaningless universe, etc.

Even so, this is a matter of degree - interviewees do need to be pushed a bit, to find out how they respond.

David
 
I'm fairly sick of sceptical folk who just dance around the subject.

Anyone who starts by downgrading consciousness, loses my attention, because the process of downgrading consciousness also downgrades science itself - because it is done by conscious beings.
I strongly agree regarding the stink of materialistic apologetics.

The relationship of consciousness and science is not clear. For someone like me, consciousness is not a fundamental process variable. It's like an ocean of water. The chemistry of water, especially in biochem and the earth sciences, is fascinating and underlies much of our understanding of ecology. But it's the ocean that generates poetry and mystery. Oceanography is a perfectly good science - but it doesn't address the deep meaning of "ocean" to living things. However, scientific process models for the interaction of H2O molecules is where the measuring starts.

Consciousness is a term like this to me. Analogous to the ocean and water relation -- consciousness describes a complex global phenomena, composed of transformations of information.

Consciousness - like the ocean - is not scientifically specific to be a fundamental measured variable. However, meaningful data-objects as to their physical entropy, their informational entropy and the internal logic of their structures are computable. Just like the molecules of water, the 'sea" of information of our earth makes all the meanings that living things detect.
 
I'm fairly sick of sceptical folk who just dance around the subject.

I mean, imagine that you wanted to become more sceptical, you wouldn't do it by learning to dance round the evidence. I'd line up all the best evidence and see if I could knock it down - or find someone else who could knock it down. A convincing experimental sceptic would start with all the best evidence and actually demonstrate what is wrong with it. A convincing theoretical sceptic, would start with the hard problem, and explain precisely how it wasn't relevant.

Anyone who starts by downgrading consciousness, loses my attention, because the process of downgrading consciousness also downgrades science itself - because it is done by conscious beings. Everything goes down the plug-hole!

I think this depends on what you mean by "skeptical folk". CSICOP & JREF folks - sure take them to task.

But take the Searle interview. It's pretty obvious from reading his work that Searle isn't going to suddenly jump on board the NDE/Psi train. However he has provided some of the most well known arguments against computational theories of mind. He's even said no materialist theories are very good but philosophy wants to provide a bulwark against dualism.

So what would have been the more interesting interview - hammering about research we all knew he would neither know nor care about or asking him to expand on the aforementioned points?
 
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