My text analysis method started at the bottom and sent each thing to a single best/famous hero based on a quick mental lookup with no reference checking or anything.
I present this textual linkage work below with a sorting of heroes with: “fewest points first” and then ties to “earliest in history first”.
AFTER doing the work, I annotated it with citations to vaguely justify the operation of my isolated consciousness in terms of things that are ambiently accessible in this timeline at this moment <3
Hume’s 1739-1748 reworked critique of Descartes often gets a potted summary in Intro 101 classes where (16) memory of memory comes up, focusing on how “at this very instant” I may or may not know if any of my memories are honest or how I got them. Hume focuses on “you can’t know for sure if your memories are fake and don’t refer to real things” whereas whoever answered Critch seems to be focusing more on a thing where “some memories endorse others, and it is all pleasingly bundled up together, and essentially cohesive and internally consistent and that’s nice”.
I’m very very tentatively giving “Heidegger” the nod on (9) symbol grounding as the core subjectively accessible thing that “is consciousness”. Not that he claimed that! Not that it was all he talked about, but it shows up as a concept in AI discourse (proximate to Heideggerian and Embodied AI takes) so I’m calling this for him that way. (Also, maybe Critch was talking with people who had afantasia, and this was a sort of residue of “a neural pointer to an inner imaging brain module… that didn’t exist in those two people’s brains for some reason”??)
Thomas Nagel has a 1974 book that touches on (13) subjective cognitive uniqueness (where famously specifically “bats” are different from us, and have subjectivities, and probably we and bats aren’t just ONE giant psychic overmind nearly for sure, and presumably similar logic to this extends all the way down to each snowflake of a human). Notably, Nagel brought this up to point out that knowing HOW bat brain/minds work isn’t the same as knowing “WHAT it is like”. Then he had thoughts on the how/what distinction suggested “the inner brain stuff amenable to science” and “the subjective stuff amenable” were not actually literally the same thing. Like if they are accessible to different ways of knowing maybe that says something about the things themselves.
John L Pollock is someone you’ve probably never heard of. He might be famous to you as the guy who invented, in 1989, the OSCAR Architecture in AI (a “scruffy” AI project from before the “neats” took over, that he never even was able to build a working demo of, at least not to my knowledge) and his architecture would have coded (7) perception of perception as the explicit core process for how the whole thing essentially worked, and what determined the line between the “subconscious” and the “conscious” in a coherently designable way.
Descartes is the first on my list to have two hits! He includes the factor of (11) awakeness (in the course of considering how much of what seems to be sensorily around him mind be a dream or a projection by an evil demon) as well as (3) experiential coherence (where the parts of awareness are clear and distinct and internal mutually consistent sense in a way that God would want for us, if God wanted us to be able to understand things honestly and directly).
Metzinger wrote “Being No One” in 2004 with lots and lots and lots of details about how the brain has many distinct modules for constructing a self model, and how these computations are combined, but can fail individually due to strokes and other brain injuries that leave most of the rest of the self model intact. His work seemed preeminent to me for all the body things including a (17) vestibular sense (world is out there in the coordinate system), a sense of (15) cognitive extent (my body IS “me” at “the origin”), (14) mind location (visually speaking, I am inside my dominant eye), (10) proprioception (where one of the not-five-canonical senses is the thing that lets you touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed), and the (5) experience of distinctive affective states (like “my” feeling of “hunger” or “tiredness”).
Finally, using “Buddha” as a philosophy hero proxy for MODERN meditators in general (which might be historically questionable, but it helps organize things), six of the concepts seemed to have been best discussed as part of this wisdom tradition, where people often talk about (12) alertness (which they can meditatively vary, with zen ninja-like-situational-awareness being BIG and mindfully mindless candle gazing being SMALL, and various other traditions also playing with it), and (8) awareness of awareness (where they become “alert” but to “their INNER stuff”, like intentions and memories, and one of those inner things is the thing being alert on purpose?), and also (6) pleasure and pain (because people show up at meditation with the explicit goal of learning to use one’s volition to turn off suffering), the (4) holistic experience of complex emotions (sometimes with the goal of (for example) gaining volitional control of lovingkindness, to aim it at everything on purpose for ethical reasons), (2) purposefulness (the sense of being an OK person with a soul and intrinsic worth, which they sometimes gain the power to make sure it is always experienced as a nice sort of selfish side benefit of meditative practice (though you could also probably get it through egoic self destruction and then restore it via all-encompassing lovingkindness)), and finally (1) introspection (which seems like it showed up in Critch’s ontology as a stub that gestures towards some of the other stuff, but also most of the stuff it might unpack into was already in the meditation bucket).
I tried to attribute each theory to some “philosophy hero”, then I used Critch’s N counts and Huffman Encoded thusly:
This is NOT a unique Huffman Encoding (the 2s can be hot-swapped, which would recluster things):
My text analysis method started at the bottom and sent each thing to a single best/famous hero based on a quick mental lookup with no reference checking or anything.
I present this textual linkage work below with a sorting of heroes with: “fewest points first” and then ties to “earliest in history first”.
AFTER doing the work, I annotated it with citations to vaguely justify the operation of my isolated consciousness in terms of things that are ambiently accessible in this timeline at this moment <3
Hume’s 1739-1748 reworked critique of Descartes often gets a potted summary in Intro 101 classes where (16) memory of memory comes up, focusing on how “at this very instant” I may or may not know if any of my memories are honest or how I got them. Hume focuses on “you can’t know for sure if your memories are fake and don’t refer to real things” whereas whoever answered Critch seems to be focusing more on a thing where “some memories endorse others, and it is all pleasingly bundled up together, and essentially cohesive and internally consistent and that’s nice”.
I’m very very tentatively giving “Heidegger” the nod on (9) symbol grounding as the core subjectively accessible thing that “is consciousness”. Not that he claimed that! Not that it was all he talked about, but it shows up as a concept in AI discourse (proximate to Heideggerian and Embodied AI takes) so I’m calling this for him that way. (Also, maybe Critch was talking with people who had afantasia, and this was a sort of residue of “a neural pointer to an inner imaging brain module… that didn’t exist in those two people’s brains for some reason”??)
Thomas Nagel has a 1974 book that touches on (13) subjective cognitive uniqueness (where famously specifically “bats” are different from us, and have subjectivities, and probably we and bats aren’t just ONE giant psychic overmind nearly for sure, and presumably similar logic to this extends all the way down to each snowflake of a human). Notably, Nagel brought this up to point out that knowing HOW bat brain/minds work isn’t the same as knowing “WHAT it is like”. Then he had thoughts on the how/what distinction suggested “the inner brain stuff amenable to science” and “the subjective stuff amenable” were not actually literally the same thing. Like if they are accessible to different ways of knowing maybe that says something about the things themselves.
John L Pollock is someone you’ve probably never heard of. He might be famous to you as the guy who invented, in 1989, the OSCAR Architecture in AI (a “scruffy” AI project from before the “neats” took over, that he never even was able to build a working demo of, at least not to my knowledge) and his architecture would have coded (7) perception of perception as the explicit core process for how the whole thing essentially worked, and what determined the line between the “subconscious” and the “conscious” in a coherently designable way.
Descartes is the first on my list to have two hits! He includes the factor of (11) awakeness (in the course of considering how much of what seems to be sensorily around him mind be a dream or a projection by an evil demon) as well as (3) experiential coherence (where the parts of awareness are clear and distinct and internal mutually consistent sense in a way that God would want for us, if God wanted us to be able to understand things honestly and directly).
Metzinger wrote “Being No One” in 2004 with lots and lots and lots of details about how the brain has many distinct modules for constructing a self model, and how these computations are combined, but can fail individually due to strokes and other brain injuries that leave most of the rest of the self model intact. His work seemed preeminent to me for all the body things including a (17) vestibular sense (world is out there in the coordinate system), a sense of (15) cognitive extent (my body IS “me” at “the origin”), (14) mind location (visually speaking, I am inside my dominant eye), (10) proprioception (where one of the not-five-canonical senses is the thing that lets you touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed), and the (5) experience of distinctive affective states (like “my” feeling of “hunger” or “tiredness”).
Finally, using “Buddha” as a philosophy hero proxy for MODERN meditators in general (which might be historically questionable, but it helps organize things), six of the concepts seemed to have been best discussed as part of this wisdom tradition, where people often talk about (12) alertness (which they can meditatively vary, with zen ninja-like-situational-awareness being BIG and mindfully mindless candle gazing being SMALL, and various other traditions also playing with it), and (8) awareness of awareness (where they become “alert” but to “their INNER stuff”, like intentions and memories, and one of those inner things is the thing being alert on purpose?), and also (6) pleasure and pain (because people show up at meditation with the explicit goal of learning to use one’s volition to turn off suffering), the (4) holistic experience of complex emotions (sometimes with the goal of (for example) gaining volitional control of lovingkindness, to aim it at everything on purpose for ethical reasons), (2) purposefulness (the sense of being an OK person with a soul and intrinsic worth, which they sometimes gain the power to make sure it is always experienced as a nice sort of selfish side benefit of meditative practice (though you could also probably get it through egoic self destruction and then restore it via all-encompassing lovingkindness)), and finally (1) introspection (which seems like it showed up in Critch’s ontology as a stub that gestures towards some of the other stuff, but also most of the stuff it might unpack into was already in the meditation bucket).