It depends upon whether you believe consciousness really exists. If you do then it's irreducible and the problem goes away. If you don't then you have a career ahead of you.
The more interesting problem in consciousness studies is what is it that narrows conscious experience to the extent that we start to believe that it is produced by the (human and other animal) brain. There sometimes seems to be a force in the modern world that separates consciousness into individual beings. This is not a natural force but it seems to be produced by human activity of a certain unhealthy (i.e. unwholesome) kind. I think there are physiological explanations that take in the health of society as a whole, including the whole ecosystem in which we live. I think that ecosystem in many places is itself in an unhealthy state. In Sweden this sort of approach to public health is taken seriously, and it works.
I once had an opportunity to work with The Natural Step, founded by Karl-Henrik Robèrt at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm:
As head of the Division of Clinical Hematology and Oncology at the Department of Medicine at the Huddinge Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden and director of research at the Karolinska Institute, he conducted research and lectured widely on several forms of cancer, including leukemia, lymphoma and lung cancer. ...
From his study of cancerous cells, he realized that “cells are the unifying unit of all living things. The difference between our cells and the cells of plants are so minor that it's almost embarrassing; the makeup is almost identical all the way down to the molecular level.” The natural and the human worlds are both built of cells. His studies led him to realize that cancer rates and other threats to global health, would only increase with increasing concentrations of pollutants and other unsustainable mechanisms. His focus on toxins and their health implications, led him to see the link between these and a systems perspective on future health.
... but it all fell apart for reasons I don't understand. Maybe it was because I smoked too much?
He's fed up with talking about this. I used to have a copy of the little book he wrote called Minds, Brains & Science. Apparently the AI at Google has read it too and gets it completely: How does stuff like this happen? Most people won't even notice what I'm saying even if I point out that the Google search changed the title. The book was really called Minds, Brains & Science , not Minds, Brains & Programs . (But maybe that was a later edition or something?) I asked Google and it said: John Searle's book Minds, Brains and Science did not become "Minds, Brains & Programs"—rather, they are two separate, distinct works published a few years apart: "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1980): A landmark academic paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. This is where Searle first introduced his famous Chinese Room Argument to challenge the concept of "strong AI". "Minds, Brains and Science" (1984): A shor...
Listening to Freya Holmér last night I started to get glimmers of an idea I had long ago about how to represent vector spaces in computational processes using this recursive abstract type : abstype 'a point = POINT of {getx : 'a vector, diff : 'a point -> 'a point, move : 'a point -> 'a point, scale : 'a -> 'a point, proj : 'a point -> 'a} with fun new i (op +) (op -) (op * ) dot = let fun self x = POINT {getx = x, move = fn (POINT pr) => (self (x + (#getx pr))), diff = fn (POINT pr) => self (x - (#getx pr)), scale = fn i => (self (x * i)), proj = fn (POINT pr) => ...
I think this is the first time they've actually publicly announced anything about this project. See these posts: Eron Woolf on Why Open Source is Failing Matt Mikhailov and Vincent McKibbon on The Problem with Open Hardware Jason Kridner talking About BeagleBoard.org and Software Development . See these places: https://danielc.dev/rk/ https://github.com/petabyt/rk https://github.com/futo-org/ret See also https://pine64.org/devices/pinebook_pro/ . Subscribe to FUTO . See https://github.com/nir9/low-level-learning-resources/tree/master/setups/debian . Subscribe to Nir Lichtman . If you're looking for a cool init process, try https://ctx.graphics/terminal/ . See Artful Bytes - When to Use a RTOS and How to Create a Successful Open Source Project .
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