Hard News: A thing that rarely ends well
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merc,
Thanks Jose, that says it. I feel freed from the tyranny of correction.
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That Fallowell column that Geoff Lealand refers to is here:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200802140010
And Fallowell's right -- his book has been "absurdly distorted". That's a polite way of putting it. I think that everyone who got worked up about it and attacked him now owes it to him, and themselves, to actually read the book and assess it. There was a weird, defensive, ugly nationalism playing out there.
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And Fallowell's right -- his book has been "absurdly distorted". That's a polite way of putting it. I think that everyone who got worked up about it and attacked him now owes it to him, and themselves, to actually read the book and assess it. There was a weird, defensive, ugly nationalism playing out there.
Fallowell might want to look sideways at his publishers -- I presume it was them who released a very skewed, deliberately provocative depiction of the book in order to stir the very controversy we're seeing. Virtually identical stories appeared in NZ and Australia, obviously based on press material from the publisher.
It did work. Would there have been a cover story in the Listener or an interview with The Press without it? Not a chance.
I suppose I should read the book myself, but it doesn't seem to say a lot I don't already know, and he seems to have come looking for a country that doesn't exist any more. Although, as you pointed out in your interview with him, his mate Roger Lewis didn't do him any favours either.
But I am minded to send him a copy of Great New Zealand Argument, seeing as he mentioned Robin Hyde. Email me an address, if you have one.
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And I know regular PA commenter Pete Darlington once practiced the dark arts of the bookshelf. I gather the new info-storage architecture in his house is a thing to behold ...
Jeez Russ, everyone on PA thought I was cool until you spilled the beans on that one!
Librarianship might be the best job in the world with the worst pay. It has the potential to be highly enjoyable, relevant and essential in this so called information age. Many research librarians are exceptional at finding information hidden away in the deepest recesses of medical, research and commercial databases. They can also excel at researching source quality to separate the wheat from the chaff. In public libraries, you have people who genuinely want to help with any kind of request from the public and will often go the extra mile to do this.
But it's also a job that's cursed with the idea of being a 'calling' rather than a profession and those following a more commercial orientation are viewed with vague suspicion.
I actually spoke at the LIANZA national conference last year (although my publicity seemed to get lost amongst a load of brouhaha about Paula Ryan) on the subject of moving from libraries to ICT because it's seen as a fairly rare event and this may be the key problem with Librarianship. In other professions, especially media/journalism but also teaching, ICT and others, there's a lot of cross pollination that creates diversity whereas librarians seem to struggle for a way to evolve outside of their world. Hence the silo mentality and a lack of radical thinking about how to work differently with content and access. Some in the library world have also been quick to jump on the Web 2.0 Haters bandwagon, whereas here in NZ I got the feeling at the Conference that they're only just starting to think about it.
However, I've been out of it for years (so to speak) so my views may not be 100% reliable.
And yes, our house is now storage heaven, mainly thanks to the enthusiastic amateur builder I live with, but the music area was my baby.There's a pic off the 3/4 build stage here. Extra shelving and the broadband connection have been completed since this was taken. All music is alphabetical ordered by artist and title, no crazy genre crap gets in the way.
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Doh! Link here
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Thanks Jose for the XKCD webcomic site reference.
Going back through its archive, I found one that adds to the Turing test described upthread. -
it's also a job that's cursed with the idea of being a 'calling' rather than a profession
Like nursing. And teaching. And various other jobs predominantly done by women. Meh.
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I tend to understand 'conciousness' (and/or the 'mind') to be the (as it were) space where things like thoughts and experiences happen. And appeal to my experience of it to suggest it isn't a physical thing and certainly isn't the same as brain activity.
[Which makes it effectively the only a priori style argument I will allow - partly because 'my experience' is effectively identical to my conciousness]
Neuroscience makes it fairly clear that it's caused by brains, but that's not the same thing.
We can postulate a being that functioned just like a person but just ran automatically rather than 'experiencing'. I'm not saying it's actually possible or not, just that the concepts are distinct.
We tend to assume other people have a mind because we do and they are like us. Which makes it difficult to sensibly assess other kind of entity (when people worry about the 'net coming alive, I always feel like, even if it were conscious, it might not want or be able to do anything other than what it would do anyway).
Consequence: I satified myself that while we can explore what changes in the brain do what to the mind, we can't 'explain' it - the things being so different you can't form a syllogism or make a scientific investigation. Maybe.
Am I getting myself into trouble?
Anyway, XKCD: Yay!
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If the above is overly defensive or involved, it's just that I've tried running that line on psychologists and I'm still scarred by the lack of acceptance.
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And appeal to my experience of it to suggest it isn't a physical thing and certainly isn't the same as brain activity.
That experience is being mediated by your mind which may just want you to think that.
...the things being so different you can't form a syllogism or make a scientific investigation. Maybe.
There's plenty of scientific investigation going on into the brain/mind. There's still a region of experience that is only accessible through internal reflection but that's been getting smaller.
With the ability now to image in real time thoughts as they occur in the brain there's lots of interesting stuff being discovered.
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With the ability now to image in real time thoughts as they occur in the brain there's lots of interesting stuff being discovered.
That sounds cools. What is meant by 'image'? Are you talking about tracking brain activity during various tasks?
We can postulate a being that functioned just like a person but just ran automatically rather than 'experiencing'. I'm not saying it's actually possible or not, just that the concepts are distinct.
The concepts are indeed distinct but what they refer to might not exist. Unicorns are different ideas to pixies, but neither one seems to exist.
We could not know that the 'being', if it was truly 'functionally equivalent' to a person, was having experiences or not. If they were functionally equivalent they would talk about having experiences. If they did not know, for instance, what pain felt like, then they would have trouble understanding a lot of human emotions, and would not seem equivalent at all. But 'what pain feels like' may be just a description of a bunch of inputs that conflict with the being's goals, one of which is probably to remain intact. And maybe it is for me too, certainly strong pain feels much like 'wow, massive signals of damage, which I don't want' to me.
The trouble is that the whole way that we talk about consciousness presumes its existence. It's hard to find language to talk about a void mind which appears functionally equivalent to a human. The closest I get to knowing what void is like is considering the times when I'm deeply asleep and not dreaming. I can't remember it. I can't describe the feeling of it, because so far as I can tell there are no feelings, other than the most basic ones like discomfort (which may cause me to roll over), and I can only remember them if they wake me up. But at those times the only kind of human I'm functionally equivalent to is another one that's asleep. I wouldn't be able to pass a Turing test, that's for sure.
It may not be possible to make language in which talking about consciousness does make sense. Language is about communication, and in this case we are trying to communicate something which may be incommunicable - what it is to 'be me'. The most that you can really say about it is that it's much like 'being you'. But you'd only be guessing when you said it.
That's why I've always like the Zen approach to consciousness, which seems to me pretty much to be "Just experience it. Talking about it may fool you into thinking you get it, but you would be getting it about as much as an expert on swimming who had never been in the water"
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I've always like the Zen approach to consciousness, which seems to me pretty much to be "Just experience it. Talking about it may fool you into thinking you get it, but you would be getting it about as much as an expert on swimming who had never been in the water"
Finally something I might understand, if I was brave enough to think about it, in this thread.
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Librarianship might be the best job in the world with the worst pay
I used to work in a business that supplied information and software to European corporates and banks (it's now part of Dialog, which you librarians would know, I think).
As well as our team getting pretty reasonable money for the UK IT industry, the librarians (and CIOs = flash way of saying Chief Librarian) were also on quite good money.
One advantage of being a hub for Evil Capitalism in its full fury is that it creates lots of nice well paid jobs for knowledge workers. We don't have that in NZ, really.
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Finally something I might understand, if I was brave enough to think about it, in this thread.
Lucky you. I didn't understand it, I just said it. Android uc.
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[incredulous and choking up}
Did you really mean that about unicorns and pixies? -
Yup, sorry man, the pixies have never been confirmed, and every unicorn so far has been a hoax.
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the pixies have never been confirmed
but that would make the entire grunge movement a hoax...
the Zen approach to consciousness
Hai. In a similar vein, when people get overly concerned with 'what it's all about' I like to recommend Voltaire's Candide.
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Neuroscience makes it fairly clear that it's caused by brains, but that's not the same thing.
i) Neuroscience does make it clear that something is caused by brains and you might wish to attribute to it the properties of consciousness as you choose to define it. But I'm gonna call you out over suggesting that neuroscience would separate cause and effect/consequence in this way. Hence that Neuroscience accepts the the notion that it isn't the same thing.
ii) Even if such a proposal were acceptable we still get caught in the Dualist sandwich of explaining how activity becomes another otherwise defined property of our conscious experience. This then falls into a cycle of regress and/or is subject to a parsimony argument.
For this reason I am quite fond of dynamic (dynamical if you must...ich) systems models of mind in so far as they adopt a neo-behaviourist approach to causal mechanisms. The redeeming feature being that they allow consciousness and associated states to be highly changeable and include a vast range of antecedents (constraints) that define a range of conscious states might emerge from the meshing of brain states with perception. Hence, the room, the keyboard and my day are all part of my consciousness and that this will change the instant I close my eyes; in certain circumstances it may change quite profoundly (non linear change) in response to small but critical shifts in circumstances. But the big point is that this approach has no baggage associated with information theory (symbolism, formal logic and strong modularity). The shortcoming is the ever grumbling issue of what representation is or isn't with respect to brain/mind and of course the dirty detail of causal mechanisms.
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Sorry if that came out a bit garbled I've just finished my first round of meetings to investigate the most efficient method of turning intelligent adults into Turing machines !
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With an apple logo on it ! How could you !
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My very first computer program was self aware. It said "Hello world". I felt like God.
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the pixies have never been confirmed
>but that would make the entire grunge movement >a hoax...
the Zen approach to consciousness
Nirvana?
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81st, the nice thing about dynamical systems is that they can implement digital style thinking/processing, but they don't have to. OTOH, I'm betting they're all implemented on digital machines, which of course can simulate dynamical systems. Funny huh? Reminds me of a course I studied in which they created the basis of all maths from logic. Then they created the basis of all logic from maths. I realized the only distinction is in what people tend to use them for.
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The swanky coverage of Owen Glenn, the thief's apology to the nation bought to you by Holy Father Campbell – “bless me newsreader/front person/knobbly journalist for I have sinned and these are my sins”.
We have an election looming and it is almost as if the bulk of the media and TV 3 in particular are following a skewed and fixed position that is chronicling “Helen Clark, the election and TV 3’s part in her downfall”. I can’t see that TV 3 have demonstrated the capacity to take “it” to either party on anything other than weak personality based issues. As far as swank TV journalism goes at present shouldn’t the “s” be at the end.
Personally, I need a mini vacation from the “news of the day” and will not be taking the time to watch “news” for a few weeks – it really has become the sort of drivel one can do without. I hope it does get better before the election starts proper.
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Ben - I get the Maths to Logic and back thing, and the modelling of dynamic systems on formal logic devices is entirely consistent with Turings early proposals. Incidentally where cognitive psychologists arguably went wrong was in assuming that brains contained anything that corresponded with bounded symbols and consistent logic. The best that can be said about logic is that it is brain local which is an alternative to Fodors treatment of modularity. From my POV I'm curious about what you mean when you say "getting dynamic systems to implement digital style thinking processing" the concept seems to turn my brain to fudge.
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