>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
The global workspace can only hold a single piece of information at a time. At any given time, multiple different subsystems are trying to send information into the workspace, or otherwise modify its contents.
The exact process by which this happens is not completely understood,
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
According to the Multiple Drafts model, perception is accomplished in the brain by parallel, multi-track processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. These content discriminations produce something like a narrative stream. Probing this stream at different places and times produces different effects and precipitates different narratives. There are many small agents screaming for attention. What we experience is a product of many processes of interpretation.
Frustratingly, Dennett has very little to say about how these content discriminations work and it is unclear what governs the modules.
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.” [...]
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
“My” model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant “the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together”. I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene’s work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series.
(I liked Dennett’s book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly—he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn’t experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I’d first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxyVCjp48S4
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.”
http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/som-1.html
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6pMbRiSBPs
“My” model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant “the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together”. I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene’s work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series.
(I liked Dennett’s book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly—he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn’t experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I’d first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)