Are you 80% angry and 2% sad? Why ‘emotional AI’ is fraught with problems
“Emotional AI’s essential problem is that we can’t definitively say what emotions are. “Put a room of psychologists together and you will have fundamental disagreements,” says McStay. “There is no baseline, agreed definition of what emotion is.”
Nor is there agreement on how emotions are expressed. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2019 she and four other scientists came together with a simple question: can we accurately infer emotions from facial movements alone? “We read and summarised more than 1,000 papers,” Barrett says. “And we did something that nobody else to date had done: we came to a consensus over what the data says.”
“All microsubjects featuring in the relevant structure relationally determine the phenomenal character of only one microsubject in a way that gives it a full human experience. […] The relevant relational structure is whatever is minimally necessary to produce my current conscious experience at any given time…”
“All microsubjects featuring in the relevant structure relationally determine the phenomenal character of only one microsubject in a way that gives it a full human experience.”
An imposing figure in the philosophy of mind, whose books on consciousness were among the first I read on the topic, always written in his distinctively clear, illustrative, and engaging style. His passing is a tremendous loss to academia.
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter & Daniel Clement Dennett, 2001
With contributions from Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, and Robert Nozick, The Mind's I explores the meaning of self and consciousness through the perspectives of literature, artificial intelligence, psychology, and other disciplines.
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’
"Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected."
AI, Consciousness and the New Humanism: Fundamental Reflections on Minds and Machines by Sangeetha Menon
This edited volume presents perspectives from computer science, information theory, neuroscience and brain imaging, aesthetics, social sciences, psychiatry, and philosophy to answer frontier questions related to artificial intelligence and human experience. Can a machine think, believe, aspire and be purposeful as a human?
“Inspired by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s metaphysics of monads, I will focus on a relational explanation of how simple subjects could constitute complex experiences, without them having to combine in virtue of their subjectivity. I call this view monadic panpsychism.”
The opprobrium panpsychists sometimes face is shocking. Yet, on the other end, I rarely see other theories receiving such spirited support. Maybe the fact that it's so polarising speaks volumes of its epistemic value, at the very least as a deep and thorough critique of established mores in literature on consciousness 🧠
Hi everyone, this is my second profile, which I plan to turn into an educational project in the near future. I'm not yet sure on the specifics, so I'm open to suggestions! 🙏🏻
Thomas Metzinger's entire book on consciousness is open-access! 📚
“In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness.”
What's your position regarding consciousness? Broad physicalism (we'll have a scientific explanation one day) or broad anti-physicalism (science can't give a complete account)? Or something else?
Please repost after voting, I'm genuinely curious! 🤔
“I argue that in spite of the ingenuity of Burge’s objections, they fail to show that there is no motivation for taking representational states as reducible to more fundamental natural states or that the core thesis of teleosemantics is flawed.”
“In the early days of modern consciousness science, back in the 1990s, researchers focused on identifying empirical correlations between aspects of conscious experience and properties of brain activity. […] In recent years, however, there has been a blossoming of neurobiological theories of consciousness.”
"I believe that #education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social #consciousness; and that the
adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social
consciousness is the only sure method of social #reconstruction."
John #Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
"I believe that #education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social #consciousness; and that the
adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social
consciousness is the only sure method of social #reconstruction."
John #Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
A lively and unconventional exploration of our senses, how they work, what is revealed when they don’t, and how they connect us to the world
Over the past decade neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world.
The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human
One of the world’s leading experts on mind and brain takes us on an expedition that reveals a new view of what makes us who we are.
Humans have long thought of their bodies and minds as separate spheres of existence. The body is physical―the source of aches and pains. But the mind is mental; it perceives, remembers, believes, feels, and imagines.
The Mind: Consciousness, Prediction, and the Brain
An accessible and engaging account of the mind and its connection to the brain.
The mind encompasses everything we experience, and these experiences are created by the brain—often without our awareness. Experience is private; we can't know the minds of others. But we also don't know what is happening in our own minds.