The only part of the world to which one has direct, non-inferential access is the contents of one’s own conscious mind. Abundant evidence from experimental psychology suggests we often confabulate even here. Even if one is uninterested in the topic of consciousness per se, I think it’s worth investigating how the properties of the medium infect the supposed propositional content of what one is saying. Thus while in the altered state of consciousness known as dreaming, for instance, a scientific rationalist may make all sort of cognitive errors; but the nature of the cardinal error is (normally) elusive. So how will posthuman superintelligence regard what humans mostly take for granted, namely “ordinary waking consciousness”—the state of consciousness in which we pursue the enterprise of scientific knowledge? Or as Einstein put it more poetically, “What does the fish know of the sea in which it swims?
“Plight”? Perhaps I should have used a more cumbersome but emotionally neutral synonym: a difficult, subjectively distressing or dangerous situation. I wasn’t intending to add “plights” to our ontology of the world!
The only part of the world to which one has direct, non-inferential access is the contents of one’s own conscious mind. Abundant evidence from experimental psychology suggests we often confabulate even here. Even if one is uninterested in the topic of consciousness per se, I think it’s worth investigating how the properties of the medium infect the supposed propositional content of what one is saying. Thus while in the altered state of consciousness known as dreaming, for instance, a scientific rationalist may make all sort of cognitive errors; but the nature of the cardinal error is (normally) elusive. So how will posthuman superintelligence regard what humans mostly take for granted, namely “ordinary waking consciousness”—the state of consciousness in which we pursue the enterprise of scientific knowledge? Or as Einstein put it more poetically, “What does the fish know of the sea in which it swims?
“Plight”? Perhaps I should have used a more cumbersome but emotionally neutral synonym: a difficult, subjectively distressing or dangerous situation. I wasn’t intending to add “plights” to our ontology of the world!