SpaceTimeMind is a podcast by Pete Mandik (William Paterson University; Philosophy and Psychology) who talks with his guests about philosophy, science, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Pete Mandik is joined by philosopher and AI researcher Alex Kiefer (Monash University) to discuss some newsworthy Artificial Intelligence projects, especially Language Models such as LaMDA, DALL-E, and GPT-3. What are the spiciest possible takes on these systems, and is any take too spicy for Alex or Pete? How much of so-called human intelligence and consciousness is just a language game disconnected from reality? What’s a CRUNGUS, and how many are among us? Whose art will you consume when non-humans get better at making it than humans? And whose podcasts?
Religion resurfaces on SpaceTimeMind as Pete chats with Tarik LaCour (philosophy PhD student at Texas A&M) about how a Mormon can also be an illusionist about consciousness. The first half of the episode is dedicated to illusionism. In the second half, we talk about Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular, with an eye toward how such religious traditions square with metaphysics and epistemologies that are broadly naturalistic, empiricist, and physicalist.
Host Pete Mandik switches roles and becomes Guest Pete Mandik in order to answer questions from members of the Spirit of the Senses Salon in Phoenix, Arizona. Topics covered include the brain’s role in conscious experience, competing definitions of “consciousness,” hypnosis, near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy, the “self” and much much more.
Get ready to interrogate some mind colors! Can the so-called qualitative aspects of consciousness be explained in holistic and functionalist terms that undermine anti-physicalist critiques? Can the consciousness of a mental state be wholly explained in terms of a non-conscious thought about it? To find out, Pete Mandik talks to Jacob Berger (Lycoming College) about Jake’s work on consciousness within the Higher-Order Thought approach. Pete and Jake also get into the closely related quality-space view of sensory qualities that Jake defends.
Merch! It exists; it is available; I’m here to tell you about it. There are THREE flavors of SpaceTimeMind merch, and they’re all available in my RedBubble shop linked here: LINK.
The three flavors of SpaceTimeMerch: Logo, Cowboy, and Jellyfish.
Go hog wild. Get a teeshirt. Or some coffee mugs. Stickers, even. Proceeds go to pay for keeping the podcast casting (which mostly is just web hosting fees).
If you score some cool SpaceTimeMind merch, be sure to tell us about it here or on twitter! And if you’d rather help financially without also receiving cool merch, head on over to our support page and mash on the DONATE button over there. Thank you!
Behold!: The first new episode of SpaceTimeMind after a seven-year hiatus. Buddhist philosophy meets neuroscience when host Pete Mandik talks with Bryce Huebner (Georgetown U.) about Bryce’s NeuroYogacara project. We talk about Yogacara and other nearby schools of Buddhist philosophy as we delve into meditation, psychedelic drugs, biopsychist approaches to consciousness, disgusting things, 4E cognition, and philosophy as life craft.
Things get funky when Richard Brown and Pete Mandik tackle this funky question about consciousness and its contents: In order to account for consciousness in terms of representational content, how FUNKY does the content need to be? Along the way we discuss the representation of inexistents and whether mathematical structuralism can shed light on the conceivability of undetectable qualia inversions. Is there any real difference (as opposed to a merely notational difference) between the square root of negative one and the negative square root of negative one? If so, what would that tell us about the question of whether intersubjectively undetectable qualia inversions are conceivable? Anything?
Videos from the "Higher-Order Theories and Mental Qualities" conference in honor of David Rosenthal
ATTENTION! Richard Brown and Pete Mandik shine their spotlights on the philosophy of mind of attention and awareness. Many philosophers of mind endorse the Transitivity Principle, the view that if you have a conscious state, you must be aware of that state. But what is the best account of the relevant notion of awareness? Is attending a kind of awareness? Further, is it a kind of awareness that is distinct from the awareness one has in virtue of perceiving, thinking about, or sensing something? Does it suffice for being aware of something that information about it is globally accessible to an embedding system? Would global availability suffice for a higher-order awareness of one’s own mental states, or would it only suffice for a first-order awareness of environmental or bodily items? Along the way we also get into some methodology and metaphilosophy, especially as regards the question of to what degree philosophical and scientific theorizing should be constrained by folk theory.
Prof. David Pereplyotchik once again joins Pete Mandik to tackle pain in the philosophy of mind. Can there be a scientific reductive explanation of pain? Can robots feel pain? Will this hurt? We here continue the conversation we started in SpaceTimeMind Episode 27.
Richard Brown and Pete Mandik debate the following proposal: The worst thing you can imagine happening to you is an event that has a non-zero probability of occurring at any given moment, and the longer you stay alive, the greater the chances become of that thing happening at some point in your lifetime. Would literally infinitely-lived immortals necessarily run into their own worst imaginable hell? Would even finite, but long-lived transhuman lifespans increase their chances of suffering by increasing their time alive? Would any amount of possible pleasure make it worth risking the worst imaginable suffering? Along the way we talk a little physics and a little Buddhism. Are interpretations of quantum mechanics the place where explanations go to bottom out? What are the physical prospects of the universe itself not dying? If you can achieve, in a single moment, a conscious experience of eternity, what’s the point of having more than one such experience?
Get in the Delorean, Marty! It’s time for the future of philosophy and the philosophy of the future. Philosophers and chrononauts Richard Brown and Pete Mandik overclock their flux capacitors to see if philosophy has a chance of surviving into the deep future of the human race. In the first half of the episode, they discuss the future of life itself. Along the way they hit Nick Bostrom’s “Great Filter” argument, Susan Schneider’s argument that aliens will be robots, and Pete’s own “Metaphysical Daring” argument about mind uploading and posthuman survival strategies. In part two, they delve into the future of the human race, and the question of whether philosophy could survive humanity's slipping into a Mad-Max-style future-primitive dark age. If we don't devolve into an idiocracy, will philosophy ever converge on a uniquely correct way of representing the real?
(The audio in this episode is edited down from our video chat viewable @YouTube)
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.)
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.)
You are listening to SpaceTimeMind, a podcast by two philosophy professors, Richard Brown, and Pete Mandik, who talk about philosophy, science, and all sorts of other stuff. Please be advised that this podcast contains strong language and abstract ideas not suitable for all intelligent life forms.
The Google research team has released the code for the inceptionism artificial neural network image processing that we discuss in Episode 28. Download the code packages HERE. If that seems like too much, you can play around with a browser-based implementation HERE.
Here's the inceptionized SpaceTimeMind logo:
And here's the inceptionized version of the Episode 28 show art:
And finally, check out this cool video my Memo Akten:
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
