Tim Bollands recently tweeted his short solution to the Hard Problem (I mean, not literally in a tweet – it’s not that short). You might think that was enough to be going on with, but he also provides an argument … Continue reading
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Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments have been among the most-discussed topics of neuroscience for many years. Libet’s experiments asked a subject to move their hand at a random moment of their choosing; he showed that the decision to move could be … Continue reading
Conscious Entities has gone quiet for some while now. Initially this was due to slowly worsening health issues which I won’t relate in detail; both the illnesses and the treatments involved cause serious fatigue. In November I had to spend … Continue reading
Encouraged by a recent return of energy, I have recklessly started a second blog, Seen and Done, where I will talk about creative stuff I have either experienced or produced. Please check it out!
The Guardian recently featured an article produced by ‘GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator’. It’s an essay intended to reassure us humans that AIs do not want to take over, still less kill all humans. GPT-3 also produced a kind … Continue reading
Can you remember with your leg, and is that part of who you are? An interesting piece by Ben Platts-Mills in Psyche suggests it might be so. This is not Psyche the good old journal that went under in 2010, … Continue reading
This short piece by Tam Hunt in Nautilus asks whether the brain’s electromagnetic fields could be the seat of consciousness. What does that even mean? Let’s start with a sensible answer. It could just mean that electromagnetic effects are an … Continue reading
Cormac McCarthy asks an interesting question here, and gives the wrong answer, also interestingly. Along the way he manages to describe in simple language a fundamental problem of how our minds work, one that he rightly says, remains mysterious – though … Continue reading
Scott Morrison’s “secret powers” are being heralded in much of the media as proof that he was up to no good. The simpler explanation is that on governance issues, he was often just not much good. As a journalist and … Continue reading
I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political … Continue reading