Hi Charlie, I’m glad to point to our announced collaborations with JHU, Harvard, ICL, and some of the other more established centers for neuroscience, as well as our psychophysics toolkit, which you can check out here. I find that many times people operate from cached impressions of what we’re doing and in such cases I try to get people to update their cache, as our work does now encompass what most people might call “normal” neuroscience of consciousness and associated markers of legitimacy (as inspired and guided by our theoretical work).
I highly appreciate Wittgenstein’s notion of language games as a nigh-universal tool for dissolving confusion. However, I would also suggest an alternate framing: “have you tried solving the problem?”—has anyone tried to formalize emotional valence before in a way that could yield results if there is a solution? What could a ‘solution’ here even mean? What would this process look like from the inside? What outputs should we expect to see from the outside? Is there a “fire alarm” for solving this problem? -- In short I think “dissolving confusion” is important for consciousness research, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the only goal. Rather, we should also look for ‘deep structure’ to be formalized, much like electromagnetism and chemistry had ‘deep structure’ to be formalized. I feel skeptics (analytic functionalists) risk premature optimization here—skepticism isn’t a strong position to hold before we’ve ‘actually tried’ to find this structure. (I say more about the problems I see with analytic functionalism / eliminativism as positive theories here.)
QRI is predicated on the assumption that, before we give up on systematizing consciousness, we should apply the same core formalism aesthetics that have led to progress in other fields, to consciousness—i.e. we should ‘actually try’. From both inside-view process and outside-view neuroscience outputs, I’m confident what we’re doing is strongly worthwhile.
That’s good news to me, and I’m sorry for making a sweeping generalization based on your older work. The marker of legitimacy I am particularly interested in is whether your empirical investigations are still useful in the case that consciousness is not at all amenable to simple formalization.
Hi Charlie, I’m glad to point to our announced collaborations with JHU, Harvard, ICL, and some of the other more established centers for neuroscience, as well as our psychophysics toolkit, which you can check out here. I find that many times people operate from cached impressions of what we’re doing and in such cases I try to get people to update their cache, as our work does now encompass what most people might call “normal” neuroscience of consciousness and associated markers of legitimacy (as inspired and guided by our theoretical work).
I highly appreciate Wittgenstein’s notion of language games as a nigh-universal tool for dissolving confusion. However, I would also suggest an alternate framing: “have you tried solving the problem?”—has anyone tried to formalize emotional valence before in a way that could yield results if there is a solution? What could a ‘solution’ here even mean? What would this process look like from the inside? What outputs should we expect to see from the outside? Is there a “fire alarm” for solving this problem? -- In short I think “dissolving confusion” is important for consciousness research, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the only goal. Rather, we should also look for ‘deep structure’ to be formalized, much like electromagnetism and chemistry had ‘deep structure’ to be formalized. I feel skeptics (analytic functionalists) risk premature optimization here—skepticism isn’t a strong position to hold before we’ve ‘actually tried’ to find this structure. (I say more about the problems I see with analytic functionalism / eliminativism as positive theories here.)
QRI is predicated on the assumption that, before we give up on systematizing consciousness, we should apply the same core formalism aesthetics that have led to progress in other fields, to consciousness—i.e. we should ‘actually try’. From both inside-view process and outside-view neuroscience outputs, I’m confident what we’re doing is strongly worthwhile.
That’s good news to me, and I’m sorry for making a sweeping generalization based on your older work. The marker of legitimacy I am particularly interested in is whether your empirical investigations are still useful in the case that consciousness is not at all amenable to simple formalization.