“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, May 31, 2011

AI, Anti-Ai vs OOO, Enaction


A perceptive commenter writes:
Curious as to what you think about pan-psychism vs eliminativist position? Ah -- googling i see you've got a dozen posts on pan-psychos...
I respond: Eliminativism versus pan-psychism—these are apples and oranges. In other words, you could be an eliminativist who thinks that consciousness inheres in nerve firings. I'm neither an eliminativist nor a pan-psychist--I'm an object oriented ontologist.

In other words, I think that there is something that my mind does that isn't that different from what a pencil does when it rests on a table. It's the other way around: it's not that pencils have minds, it's that minds are pencil like. The onus is on AI and anti-AI to prove that consciousness is a special bonus prize for being highly organized or highly evolved, a suspiciously anti-Darwinian notion.

I was talking with a neurobiologist in New Zealand who also thinks that consciousness is much "lower down" than AI or anti-AI deem to be the case. The smart money is on consciousness as an interobjective configuration space that includes 1+n objects (such as enaction theory).

1 comment:

Michael- said...

"The smart money is on consciousness as an interobjective configuration space that includes 1+n objects (such as enaction theory)."

That damn near made be break my face via a big ass smile. Enaction is the only why to fly...