Space Time Mind

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 30: Singularity Cinema: Ex Machina and Advantageous

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Spoilers galore as philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik wade up to their necks in spoilers to discuss recent cinematic depictions of (spoiler) artificial intelligence and (another spoiler) mind-uploading, especially in the 2015 films Ex Machina and Advantageous. DID WE MENTION THERE WILL BE SPOILERS? The first half of the episode largely focuses on Ex Machina and we shift to Advantageous for the second half. Also: Spoilers.

(Audio drawn from our video chat viewable @YouTube.)

• Ex Machina (film) @Wikipedia
• Turing test @SEP 
• Knowledge argument @SEP 
• Ned Block "The Harder Problem of Consciousness"
• How do you know you’re not a zombie? @YouTube
• Searle's Chinese Room Argument Against AI @YouTube
• Advantageous (film) @Wikipedia
• Personal identity @SEP
• Interview of Pete Mandik on mind uploading @hopesandfears.com
• Donna Hardaway’s A Cyborg Manifesto @Wikipedia

 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 29: The Rise and Fall of Phizzy Callizm and the Spiders From Mars

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Gather up your microphysical constituents and embark on an epic audio odyssey wherein Richard Brown and Pete Mandik rock out about: physicalism, whether the mind is physical, how best to define "physical" and "physicalism," whether the physical universe is causally closed, and whether brainless spiders from Mars can have minds, etcetera, etcetera, and so on, and so forth. TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME

(The video chat the audio is edited down from can be viewed here: @YouTube.)

• Daniel Stoljar "Physicalism" 
• Von Neumann's universal constructor @Wikipedia 
• David Papineau "The Rise of Physicalism" 
• "Consciousness, Dualism & Physicalism (Papineau & Goff)” @YouTube
• Howard Robinson's review of The Soul Hypothesis @NDPR 
• Ned Block “The Canberra Plan Neglects Ground” 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 28: Psychedelic Artificial Neural Networks

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Cognitive philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik examine recent claims by Google researchers to have implemented dreams, imagery, and hallucinations in artificial neural networks. The images created by these artificial systems are kind of cool, but can anything at all be learned from such projects about how the mind or brain actually functions? Richard and Pete move from there to debate connectionism, AI, and rationalist vs. empiricist methodologies in the philosophy of cognitive science. Special prize for the first listener to correctly identify all three of the neuroscientists that Pete misidentifies! #deepdream

(The audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

• "Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks" @GoogleResearchBlog
• Jifeng Dai, Yang Lu, Ying-Nian Wu “Generative Modeling of Convolutional Neural Networks” 
• Jonas Degrave "LSD neural net: Large Scale Deep neural net visualizing top level features" 
• Sidney Lehky & Terrence Sejnowski "Network model of shape-from-shading: neural function arises from both receptive and projective fields" 
• "Planarian Regeneration Model Discovered by Artificial Intelligence" @TuftsNow 
• David Papineau "The Rise of Physicalism" 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 27: Pains and Brains (with David Pereplyotchik)

Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

Pete Mandik is once again joined by David Pereplyotchik (see episode 25) and this time they enter into a world of pain. Are pains identical to states of brains? Are pains fully accessible only from the first-person point of view? Is there anything contradictory about the idea of unconscious pains? Can you merely seem to yourself to be suffering without actually really being in a state of suffering? Will Pete and David answer any of these questions about pain in the philosophy of mind?

(The audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

Links:

• Jennifer Corns
• The Value of Suffering Project
• Pete Mandik - "Varieties of Representation in Evolved and Embodied Neural Networks"
• Pete Mandik, Mike Collins, and Alex Vereschagin - "Evolving Artificial Minds and Brains"
• Galen Strawson - "Consciousness Myth"
• Daniel Dennett -  “Why you can’t make a computer that feels pain” 
• Murat Aydede and Donald Price “The Experimental Use of Introspection in the Scientific Study of Pain and its Integration with Third-Person Methodologies” 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 26: Your Digital Afterlives (with Eric Steinhart)

Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

Pete Mandik talks to philosopher Eric Steinhart (William Paterson University) about his book, Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death. They dig deep into the computational and value-theoretic foundations of all existence. Other topics tackled include atheistic neopaganism, the cognitive science of hyper-arousal trances, the prudential self-concern of mind-uploads, entheogenic drugs, and Roko’s basilisk. Get comfy with a hot bowl of monads and enjoy the show while an infinite army of zombie-Leibnizes tear up the town.

(The audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

Links:

• Eric's webpage: ericsteinhart.com

• David Auerbach - The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

• Eric Steinhart - Axiarchism and Paganism 

• Eric Steinhart - The Evolution of Naturalistic Gods

• God’s God by DarkMatter2525 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 25: Leaning Into the Linguistic Turn (with David Pereplyotchik)

Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

Pete Mandik is joined by David Pereplyotchik (assistant professor of philosophy at Kent State University) to sleep furiously on some colorless green ideas. Also, they talk about language. Grammar, meaning, syntax, truth, translation, Google, and the difficulty in faking deafness are just a few of the topics tackled.

(The audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

• David Pereplyotchik online: pereplyotchik.com
• Brian Keeley - "The Early History of the Quale and Its Relation to the Senses" 
• Richard Rorty on Truth and Pragmatism @YouTube 
• Timothy Williamson - "Review of Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas" 
• Jerry Fodor and Ernest LePore - "Why Meaning (Probably) Isn’t Conceptual Role" 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 24: Fading Qualia

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

Is it a law of nature that if your neurons are gradually replaced with silicon chips, your qualia won’t thereby gradually fade? Can the armchair methodology of analytic metaphysics deliver knowledge of natural laws? Or can the boundaries of the nomologically possible be discerned only from within the natural sciences? And who cares? Richard Brown and Pete Mandik, that’s who!

(The audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

Links:

• Koro Syndrome: The Irrational Fear of Lethal Genital Shrinkage 
• David Chalmers - Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia 
• Pete’s interview in 3am Magazine 
• Mario AI 

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 23: Transhumanist Hot Tub (with Ken Williford)

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

Richard Brown takes a one-episode hiatus while Pete Mandik heads down to Texas to talk to philosopher Ken Williford. Pete and Ken discuss whether (1) it’s desirable for humans to transform themselves into something alien, (2) whether we or our brains are already alien to us, and (3) whether an “acquaintance relation” view of consciousness is consistent with physicalism.

• Ken Williford - VIDEO: Meditation Neuroscience and Ethics 
• Ken Williford - Representationalisms, Self-Acquaintance & Subjective Character
• Ken Williford - Husserl’s Hyletic Data and Phenomenal Consciousness
• Ken Williford - VIDEO: Mescaline & Jean-Paul Sartre’s Theory of Imagination
• Stanislaw Lem - His Master’s Voice 
• Stanislaw Lem - Fiasco 
• Philip Goff - Real Acquaintance and Physicalism 

Pete and Ken on the road in Texas. October 2014.

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 22: Time Shuffling, Finger Sausages, and a Brain Made out of Paper

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

After two physics episodes in a row Richard Brown and Pete "Macho Bluff" Mandik dial the way-back machine to the Golden Era of Dinosaur Travel and kick out some old-school philosophy of mind jams. In part 1 ("Time Shuffling") they sort some stuff out about temporal counterpart theory and so-called “real identity.” In part 2 (“Finger Sausages”) they tackle the transparency of conscious experience and phenomenal acquaintance. In part 3 (“A Brain Made out of Paper”) they discuss the extended mind hypothesis and it’s connection to panpsychism and meditation (with a mild de-rail on journal refereeing best/worst practices).

(Audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

• Eric Steinhart - Temporal Counterpart Theory
• Hilary Putnam - Perceptual Transparency and Sinha's Observations
• Richard Brown & Pete Mandik - On Whether the Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness Entails Cognitive Phenomenology
• Pete Mandik - The Introspectibility of Brain States as Such
• Brie Gertler - Renewed Acquaintance
• Josh Weisberg - Abusing the Notion of What-It's-Like-Ness: A Response to Block
• Andy Clark - Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head
• Tad Zawidzki - Trans-Human Cognitive Enhancement, Phenomenal Consciousness, and the Extended Mind
• David Chalmers - The Contents of Consciousness: Reply to Hellie, Peacocke, and Siegel
• Jeremy England - Statistical Physics of Self-Replication

SpaceTimeMind Ep. 21: Three Men and a Baby Universe (with Sean Carroll)

Richard Brown & Pete Mandik

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Episode Notes and Links

Physicist Sean Carroll joins philosophers Richard Brown and Pete Mandik on the SpaceTimeMind podcast to discuss, for example: anti-intellectual academics; intelligent design and fine tuning; entropy, decoherence, and the arrow of time, baby Benjamin-Button universes; Boltzmann brains; lambda cold dark matter; many worlds; disappearing worlds; interacting worlds. And much much more! 

(Audio for this episode is drawn from the video chat viewable here: @YouTube.)

• Sean’s anti-Boltzmann-brains papers @PreposterousUniverse
• Measure for Measure: Quantum Physics and Reality  - panel discussion including David Albert, Sean Carroll, Sheldon Goldstein, Ruediger Schack, and moderator Brian Greene @YouTube
• Tim Maudlin - "What Bell Did" -  @arXiv - @YouTube