Re: Plowing through the Enneads

[degringolade]

Again, this is a email that I am using as a post because I am to lazy to re-write it to make it seem stand-alone

I don't disagree with your philosophy. It just isn't how I prefer to operate inside my own brain.

I am not a great thinker, and truthfully spending too much time thinking about thinking makes me want to drink more than is good for me. So I do read your thoughts and mash them into my unordered and almost certainly incomplete view of how my brain works. I suppose my thinking about the way that consciousness works is like how I view the function of carburetors. I have a level of understanding of function day to day, and I know enough to guess correctly (at least the majority of the time) when to take the car into a skilled mechanic. I suppose that I read (and most of the time agree with) your writings because you think like the guys who wrote the service manuals. Me, I just drive the car.

Looking forward to the AI issue. I mostly think that it is a definitions issue. Look, not that many people in the world have "intelligence". What is being passed off as intelligence (both human and artificial) is the ability to absorb and execute a set of rules provided by people above us in the social pecking order. It isn't the intelligence of a healthy 12th century hunter-gatherer (which requires a much larger and diverse statistical universe), but it is an intelligence of sorts. Simply put, in the Industrial West today, intelligence is defined as the ability to follow the boss's algorithm faithfully. For most of the people in the "laptop class" which we used to be members of, this makes obtaining the means to purchase milk and cookies extremely difficult.

The unpleasant thought that I have been having of late is that my individual consciousness is perhaps more complex than I am capable of understanding. Doesn't mean that I am going to stop trying and I will probably keep plugging away at the issue, but I am increasingly accepting of the idea that I am probably wrong. I am also quite uncomfortable with the idea that my consciousness is not just mine. But it appears to be true. Right now I am beavering away, trying to come up with a valid argument for the idea that what I call "my" consciousness is mine alone and is not structured and effected by the world around me.

pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate

My sneaking hunch is that in my efforts to isolate and characterize a single phenomenon, I am chasing a simplicity that just doesn't describe the whole process I am trying to understand.

So, I ponder for a while, get frustrated, go for a walk, have a glass of wine, and then think about something else for a while.

Today I get the joy(?) of attending a one-year old's birthday party. The group attending is 20-somethings all on their first child. I am certain that I thought similar thoughts about my children during these years, but I am afraid that listening to a new parents delusions concerning the perfection of their child and the nobility of their sacrifice for the good of the anointed child is wearisome to me. The less-than-subtle hints that I should be "doing more" is quite annoying.

Comments

naaah

[chefxh]

Had some snark for the people who keep breeding, but naah.