What AI Jack (Anthony I Jack) is getting at in his talk is that we have two networks in the brain, the analytic and the empathic. The one sees matter and understands it, the other sees minds and understands them. He says the explanatory gap is in our heads - literally - because when one network fires up - the other dampens down, so he argues we won't be able to merge these two views and close the gap.
That might work for Jack as a person who wants to understand life and consciousness as ‘virtual’, but it doesn't work for me. In my opinion he's grabbed the wrong end of the stick, like most cognitive neuroscientists.
He claims his studies support the idea of these two networks and his experimental work confirms what he says about the networks not being able to work together.
That's what he claims. Do others in his field agree? Do others who study consciousness and are not in his field agree?
The first question after his talk is to ask him to compare his theory with McGilchrist and he says for McGilchrist the gap is out there, in nature, for him it is in our brains, in the gap between the two networks.
Both nature and consciousness are too complex – immensely and intricately complex -- to be accounted for by incompletely understood processes of neural networks. The integrations accomplished in nature -- and in the relationship of consciousness to nature and human culture – require investigations far broader and deeper than those postulated by neuroscience to explain us to ourselves.
@Constance you ask:
1.
The object-oriented school of recent philosophical vintage will deny that the world's being is raised to the level of understanding, even if only in the temporal existence of conscious beings here or anywhere in the universe. What do you think?
The way I understand OOO is that everything is an object and no object has a privileged status - our relationship to other objects is no more important or special than any other object interaction - and that they wanted to get back to a world beyond man and his perceptions - and away from our idea that we are only relating to a construction in our heads, not the world as it is.
I can buy the statement in red, that in the long view of the history of the universe {a view no one of us can achieve -- a view from far outside the temporality of our existence}, our consciousness has no ontologically 'privileged status'. But within our temporal lifetimes our consciousness has an unblinkable significance for us as individuals and as a species, and indeed (given our control over what happens on this planet) for the temporal balance and health of our planet's life and ecosystem within the temporality of our planet's existence.
Re the statement in blue, that the OOO philosophers wanted to "get away from . . . [the] idea that we are only relating to a construction in our heads, not the world as it is," that idea itself is false from the point of view of phenomenological philosophy since Kant. If our consciousness and the capabilities of our minds that grow out of consciousness did not interact with the world
as we experience it in our local environment we would not have been capable of surviving in our local environment and in the cultural environments we have constructed on the earth. We cope existentially with nature and the cultures we create, with what they provide and what they deny in terms of possibility. It seems to me that the OOO philosophers cannot accept the conditions of the given existentiality of human experience and the recognition that the meanings we find and produce in existence are also existential --
taking place in the time being.
To me, it seems right that we look at the world beyond us spatially and temporally and ourselves in it - and that we should question the idea that we are only relating to a model in our heads, to me it doesn't seem like that would work - there has to be an out there, out there that we respond to - the mind is externalized in that sense, but it also makes sense that we don't see or know everything of course, although I don't think we only see what is strictly necessary to our survival based on our genes and evolutionary history - we are capable of noticing new things and doing novel things and we aren't the only species, this may well be a characteristic of life itself - that's where I questioned
@Pharoah's division of individuated responses.
I generally agree with what you've said in that paragraph [provided that we recognize the distance between what we can think and what we can know], but I don't understand what you mean by
@Pharoah's "division of individuated responses." Can you clarify that?
2. Also, do you think that being as we experience it in ourselves and recognize it in physical nature is a 'virtual being'? Has AI Jack read enough phenomenological philosophy to understand the import of the question? I'll read the paper in an attempt to find out.
You may well know more about Anthony Jack by now than I do! I'm not sure what "virtual being" is or how it could have meaning without there being a real being?
I doubt that I know more about Jack than you do. I read half his paper and then only skimmed the rest.
I too would like to understand what is meant by the term 'virtual reality' and, by implication (as you extend it;
ETA: actually as I first extended it) the concept of
'virtual being'. Maybe someone will come along and articulate what's meant to be understood by those concepts.
ETA: Do those who promote the notion that we live in a 'virtual reality' actually understand the concept of 'being' in the first place?
