Author | Lightnews

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 7d

So, you obviously have a grudge against her, as shown by your overstating the case. But you could make a case that "Barrett over emphasizes the cultural and social-cognitive aspects of emotions, while downplaying their innate, biological roots". But i wonder if you understand it yourself.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 9d

Old prof of mine had a maxim, "Things are as they seem, unless there is a reason to think otherwise." -- Ossorio.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 12d

The extreme of that is solipsism. Organisms start that way, and gradually learn to perceive and act on the world objectively. Objectivity is a skill learned over time. Objectivity just means learning how the world works. Subjectivity never goes away completely (emotions, etc.), just managed. Agree?

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 13d

My hammer drives a nail into wood. That's objective and scientific, so your statement is false. But yes, other, more complex objectivity may be grounded in consensual belief. But you seem to be overgeneralizing and stating principles out of thin air. I'm not sure how to proceed.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 14d

I'm sorry but Chalmers has gone from bad qualia obsession to inappropriate math obsession. Where are complex systems concepts? Nowhere to be found. Where is cognitive science? Nowhere. Sorry, but this qualifies for "so bad it isn't even wrong". Didn't even mention attention schema theory. Sigh.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 14d

One thing Ball didn't comment on is the paper's observation that: "this framework reveals a highly “jagged” cognitive profile
in contemporary models" which, to me, hints at a fundamental problem yet to be identified.

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 14d

Yes Ball makes a couple good points about the limitations of www.agidefinition.ai/paper.pdf. But LLM's have sparked a broad reassessment of conventional views of intelligence, and this paper is a decent foray into that. Neither Ball nor the paper get it all right. We can expect much more to come.

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 14d

Some processes are merely chemical or atomic (lower level of abstraction than biological). I'm not sure your statement is meaningful. You're saying some processes are not objectively observable, in principle. If so, how would you even be aware of such processes? Religious faith?

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 15d

That concept of "knowing what's it's like" really confused and hampered a lot of philosophers of mind. I'd like more cog scientists to weigh in and say it is knowledge of feelings, a biological process.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 20d

I took a little look ahead. One key idea is that Shannon information is reinterpreted or is generalized as being about the general logic of inference, thus about the most probable contents of the original message. But still not about message meaning.

Reposted by Ebben

Mike Levin @drmichaellevin.bsky.social · 24d

Here's a talk that's quite different from ones I've given before, although it has connections to everything I often talk about, presented at #alife2025:

thoughtforms.life/meet-a-new-s...

(downloadable slides link there too). 🧪

Forms of life, forms of mind | Dr. Michael Levin | Meet a new synthetic colleague: robot science as a translation tool between diverse intelligences

A video, and downloadable slides, of a presentation I gave on robot science and Xenobots at the 2025 Artificial Life meeting.

thoughtforms.life

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 25d

First, your body/mind does function without awareness for most of its operations. Second, the ability to be aware gives an evolutionary advantage. Awareness, hypothetically being the attentional use of the schema, enables the ability to adaptively focus, abstract, and generalize the situation.

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 26d

True, we can't yet get more specific. But subjective experience = identifiable feeling and body state. What more (objective factors) are you suggesting is missing? Thus, robots could have subjective experience if and only if they can have "feelings". Feelings are produced by neuro-chemical state.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 26d

Can you feel something and not experience it? Keep in mind there is more than "nerve signals", there are also neuro-modulators and chemistry that affect the whole body. The brain maps a body state to a neuro chemically produced feeling, and attending to that is the subjectively felt experience.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 27d

I'm always amazed why people do this. I keep very few tabs open and rely on URLs that i drag to the desktop or a folder on the desktop. It's easy enough to redisplay them, and keeping them as URLs is much easier way to organize them. What am i missing?

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 27d

Consider the fact that our biology makes us "feel", and that includes the feeling of confidence. So, people feel consciousness is mysterious. But in reality conscious is merely the fact that we can represent our world (our knowledge, skills, feeling and we can focus on what is important to survive.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · 27d

Just read "what is consciousness" section. You didn't mention attention schema theory. I think you are limiting yourself to an older notion of consciousness that presumes that it it a mysterious phenomenon. It doesn't have to be thought of that way.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 23

Ah, so you're tying things to predictability? I don't really understand your overall point. All I noted was that emergence occurs when things become organized into a natural self-organized system. Predicting details is another matter.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 23

Don't understand your reply. What does prediction have to do with it? What does Miller's situation have to do with it? Please clarify.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 23

It's not clear what you're driving at. Care to elaborate?

To me "emergence" is better understood as "system". A phenomenon "emerges" when the phenomenon is viewed as a system.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 14

Don't understand your question. What is "it" referring to? What do you mean by "neuralAI"?

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 14

Not sure where you comment is coming from, but I suppose you could say that FEP is about entities learning in general, in the sense that a Markov blanket enables an entity to have its own history. In particular, reinforcement learning is a type of learning.

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Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 13

I found something similar. Young neighbor asked me to help cut some boards to convert his SUV into a camper. He had asked gpt for instructions and was trying to follow them. He was confused. I asked him why he didn't draw a sketch. He didn't know why. I showed him how to visualize the problem. Sigh.

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 13

My unconscious understands this sorta, my consciousness has no idea what is going on.

Ebben @ebben.bsky.social · Sep 10

bsky.app/profile/msua... May find this interesting. Outside my interest area, but seems related to your recent post about your paper.

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