Philosophy - Mind - Lukas Bergstrom's weblog

the porous city - philosophy - mind

This is Lukas Bergstrom's personal weblog. You might want to visit my professional site. You can also find me on Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.

1/15/25
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It's the motivational system

We're not going to get the kind of sophisticated behavior that people associate with intelligent beings until we get a motivational system that's at least as rich as the ... well, whatever it is that LLMs do. Putting an LLM in a loop is not going to do it. You need vedana.

1/1/25
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Daniel Dennett's five favorite books

Interview

4/15/23
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Embodiment and intelligence

I need to write a real post here, but for now:

Catalyzing next-generation Artificial Intelligence through NeuroAI (some pretty aggressive branding here)

As AI pioneer Hans Moravec put it, abstract thought “is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old….effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge.”

Evan Thompson: Could All Life Be Sentient?

The core idea of the enactive approach is that autonomous sense-making is necessary and sufficient for cognition. An autonomous system is defined as an operationally closed and precarious system (Di Paolo and Thompson, 2014.) Precarious conditions imply the constant need for adaptivity, for regulating activity and behaviour in conditions registered as advantageous or deleterious with respect to the system’s viability in a nonstationary environment (Di Paolo, 2018). Adaptivity implies sense-making, which is behaviour or conduct in relation to norms of interaction that the system itself brings forth on the basis of its adaptive autonomy. An adaptive autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions, registered as better or worse, and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status.

2/18/14
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Kurzweil lol omg

4/6/05
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Conscious Entities
Sweet. I've always wondered what the academy thought of Chalmers.

6/24/03
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representational theories of consciousness

4/23/02
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"The reason the book is in some way unsatisfying is that there's another aspect of the problem of consciousness for which no one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation: why there's a clear intuitive difference between one organism that feels pain and another organism that acts as if it feels pain but doesn't really feel it, or one organism or system that has the experience of seeing red when a red object is in front of it, whereas another acts identically in every way but does not have the experience." -- edge.org

Seems like Pinker's been reading Chalmers. I've always liked Chalmers's ideas, but I thought he was pretty fringe. Pinker used to be a respected scientist, though (before he quit doing research to write pop science books) so it's intriguing to hear him talk about science's possible limits.

It's too bad Dennett totally ignores this part of the problem of consciousness, because it prevents some people from reaching the main body of his argument, which is fascinating in its own right.

"What about the person who said it? Did he mean it? Well, ask him. The person who said it will say, 'Well, yeah, I meant it. I said it. I didn't correct it. My ears aren't burning. I'm not blushing. I must have meant it.' He has no more access into whether he meant it in any deep, deep sense than you do. As E.M. Forster once remarked, 'How do I know what I think until I see what I say?'"

Which, of course, is why I'm writing this.