What’s the opposite of “meta”?
I want a word/root that is the opposite of "meta". "Meta" is all about abstracting away from details, and drifting into the realm of content-free algebra. How should we describe…
Are Selves Illusory? Emergent? Ubiquitous?
I was asked this question on Quora recently:
Here’s how I responded.
No one knows what the self is. Least of all my fellow neuroscientists! 😉
Personally, I think the idea that the self is an illusion is meaningless. I suspect it’s just a (highly misleading) shorthand for saying that people’s notions of a permanent, unchanging self are incorrect. In other words, it means that the self is not an eternal soul with permanent, intrinsic, essential properties. Instead it is a process that changes on various timescales.
Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so Hard? Intentionality.
Someone I know sent me some material related to their research on consciousness, asking for some feedback. What follows is an edited version of what I wrote to them.
Solving the easy problem of consciousness — by explaining the causes and neural correlates of particular conscious experiences — is challenging but at least conceivable. This is not so for any claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness — it is going to evoke skepticism from both scientists and philosophers. I’m one of the many neuroscientists that do not think the hard problem is solvable — to us it is not clear that phenomenal consciousness is a scientifically tractable phenomenon in the first place.
Science does not disprove free will
Someone contacted me through Quora recently because they were having an existential crisis — it was stimulated by the ostensibly scientific notion that humans do not have free well.
Any theory that insists that we do not actually make choices is going to causes distress among many people who valorize academic thinking. Many hard-nosed metaphysicians simply don’t care about the mental well-being of the general public. I find this attitude simultaneously patronizing and irresponsible.
Is thinking conscious or unconscious?
There are two ways to define thinking: each leads to a different answer to the question of whether thinking is conscious or not.
- Thinking as a subjective experience. If someone asks you what you are thinking about, you can introspect, and describe your thought process. You can also say that you weren’t really thinking at all.
- Thinking as the cause of ideas and thoughts. If you discover a thought, then you can infer that the process that led up to the thought was a form of thinking, even if there was no subjective experience associated with the process.
We can test our preference for definition 1 or definition 2 by considering an example.
Sherlock Holmes was a good chemist. When he found himself stuck while attempting to solve a mystery, he would sometimes distract himself by doing a chemistry experiment. At the end of such an experiment, he often found that a solution simply popped into his head.