We are delighted to announce the next in our series of Brains Blog Roundtables. The topic of this discussion is Buddhism in Philosophy of Mind!
Please join Dan Burnston and our very exciting panel, Monima Chadha (Monash), Owen Flanagan (Duke), and Evan Thompson (UBC) for a fantastic discussion about how classical traditions in Buddhist philosophy can inform our current philosophy of mind and psychology!
Please see below for links to material cited in the video. Previous roundtables can be viewed at philosophyofbrains.com/category/roundtables.
Monima Chadha
https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/monima-chadha
https://philpeople.org/profiles/monima-chadha
Responsibility without Unified Agency https://research.monash.edu/en/projects/responsibility-without-unified-agency
Selfless Minds
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/selfless-minds-9780192844095?
Chadha & Nichols. Experiential unity without a self. The Case of Synchronic Synthesis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048402.2020.1836007
Evan Thompson
Mind in Life
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057517
Waking, Dreaming, Being
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/waking-dreaming-being/9780231137096
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264678/why-i-am-not-a-buddhist/
What’s in a Concept? In Coseru (Ed.) Reasons and Empty Persons: Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits.
https://link.springer.com/book/9783031139949 (open access: https://mindrxiv.org/2m84e)
Owen Flanagan
https://sites.google.com/site/owenflanaganhomepage/
The Bodhisattva’s Brain
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525206/the-bodhisattvas-brain/
How to Do Things with Emotions
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220970/how-to-do-things-with-emotions
The Geography of Morals
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-geography-of-morals-9780190212155?cc=us&lang=en&
Other scholars and works referenced.
The Art of Happiness. https://theartofhappiness.com/
Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560252/the-modularity-of-mind/
Martha Nussbaum. https://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum
Myisha Cherry. https://www.myishacherry.org/
David Shoemaker. https://philosophy.cornell.edu/david-shoemaker
Marya Schechtman. https://phil.uic.edu/profiles/schechtman-marya/
Thomas Metzinger. https://philpeople.org/profiles/thomas-metzinger
Tim Bayne. https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/timothy-bayne
Joelle Proust. https://joelleproust.org/en/
Dear all,
How do you reconcile no-self vs self debate?
Regards
Ram
Rlpvimal@gmail.com
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461