Annaka Harris on Consciousness

It's a nice change to hear a woman talking about this! The men all seem to say the same nonsense.


At 13 minutes 38 seconds she presents an interesting characterisation of the spectrum of conscious awareness. See Julian Barbour Making Sense of Information and FT Illustrating The Problem With Modern Medicine, in particular this talk by Max Tegmark:


At 4 minutes 32 seconds Harris compares consciousness with switching on a light-bulb and finds the comparison fails. I think this is just because she does not understand how a light-bulb works. See


Sabine is hard-nosed about art! See from 2 minutes 45 seconds. This statement by the artist "The machine depicts fictional beings from the future trying to communicate into their past". Sabine's comment could be an indication that she understands it in the same way I do, in which case these beings are not fictional anymore, or she could be indicating that she thinks it is nonsense. But why? The artist said fictional beings, not actual beings, and at least one view of art and the artistic enterprise is the process of actualising things that before were unrealized potential. I am referring to creativity.

Here's my nonsense (literally) about: consciousness Relational Semantics subtitled "The Evils of Lego".  The essay deals with the necessity of consciousness for any scientific theory to be meaningful in any non-trivial way (i.e. not merely a tautology).

At the time I wrote this, a decade ago, I did not realise that what Adrian Kent was referring to here was a deliberate campaign by the mythical "military/industrial/academic complex," to prevent academics from effectively investigating quantum mechanics.


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