Philosophy, Science, and a Bunch of Other Stuff
SpaceTimeMind is a podcast by Pete Mandik (William Paterson University; Philosophy and Psychology) who talks with his guests about philosophy, science, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
In further pursuit of S C I E N C E, we here at the SpaceTimeMind Laboratory are conducting an experiment, codename "MindChunks." Each MindChunk will be a brief little tidbit or bite-sized morsel. It will be small, short, and entirely user-friendly. A MindChunk takes only a few minutes out of your day, but its effects may last a lifetime. What are you waiting for? Ask your doctor about MindChunks today.
Two philosophy professors decided to have some guests on their podcast and what happens next will literally blow your mind. (And we mean "literally" literally.) Watch the video below to see what Richard Brown and Pete Mandik are freaking out about this time. (See also this previous blog post for further valid news regarding upcoming guests.)
When a podcast mentions another podcast, it's a very beautiful thing. SpaceTimeMind just got a shout-out in the most recent episode of the excellent Very Bad Wizards podcast hosted by philosopher Tamler Sommers and psychologist David Pizarro. If for some weird reason you listen to SpaceTimeMind but not Very Bad Wizards, I don't know what your problem is, but stop that right now. Go check it out!
Richard and Pete welcome their new scientismicological overlords and hope they find their nifty blue shirts pleasing.
This video chat is the basis for episodes 2 & 3 of the SpaceTimeMind podcast with Professors Richard Brown and Pete Mandik. The audio from the first half of the video chat found its way into Episode 2: "Consciousness Explained (?) Part 1: Computational Pythagoreanism" and the second half wound up in Episode 3 "Consciousness Explained (?) Part 2: The Nature of Explanation." More info is available at the following links:
Download: MP3 Audo (91MB)
Neurophilosophers Pete Mandik and Richard Brown wax futurological on whether the post-human future will be populated by Kantian superheroes or Sartrean sociopaths. Other questions addressed include: Is your brain a douchebag? Are “uplifted" monkeys happy monkeys or sad monkeys? Is it OK to torture sims? And if so, what’s the best way to do it? Musical interludes provided by the New York Consciousness Collective and Quiet Karate Reflex.
(The music in the mid-episode break is “Tommy the Hobbes” by the New York Consciousness Collective. The rest of the episode’s music is by Quiet Karate Reflex. The song in the intro is "SpaceTimeMind Theme Song" [link to music video] and the in the outro is “FINST-icuffs." More of Quiet Karate Reflex's music can be heard here: http://quietkaratereflex.bandcamp.com/.)
(The video chat between Richard and Pete that this episode's audio is drawn from is viewable on YouTube.)
Chatbot: A.L.I.C.E.
Episode 5 of the SpaceTimeMind podcast drops tomorrow, and our launch point for discussion is the technological singularity, especially as depicted in fictions such as Roger Williams' novel, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and the new Johnny Depp flick, Transcendence. Podcast co-host Richard Brown took one for the team and saw Transcendence for the rest of us so we don't have to. For another proxy, check out the official featurette below. Actor Paul Bettany says a scientist told him we'll have digital immortality in 30 years, so I got that goin' for me.
In case you missed it the first time around, here are some pertinent installments from Richard Marshall's series of interviews of philosophers for 3:AM Magazine. First off, here are the interviews with the hosts of the SpaceTimeMind podcast, Pete "Brain Hammer" Mandik and Richard "Shombies vs Zombies" Brown. See also the interview with our first guest, Episode 4's Eric "Splintered Skeptic" Schwitzgebel.
"Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man Cantor's Diagonal Proof, blow his mind out of his asshole. Now you don't have to feed him." --Philosophy Bro
Richard Brown mentions Cantor's Diagonal Proof towards the end of Episode 3 of the SpaceTimeMind podcast. This may perhaps be one of those things that are a bit hard to follow in a strictly audio format. Here's my own take on the proof. It's excerpted from "Welcome To Infinity," a short paper I wrote in 2012 for students in my class on the philosophy of science. The proof comes in the paper's final section, called "There's more!"
Read it, and we won't have to feed you.
An infinite set that has members that can be mapped one-to-one onto the natural numbers is a countable set. Georg Cantor proved the existence of infinite sets larger than this. Such sets are uncountable. Cantor proved that there are more real numbers than integers.
If for each of the natural numbers we had a row upon which we wrote the infinite decimal expansion of a real number, then we could discover a number that is not on any of those rows by taking the diagonal (the number whose first digit is the first digit of the first row, second digit is the second digit of the second row, and so on) and changing each of the diagonal’s digits. The resultant changed diagonal is guaranteed not to have been anywhere in the original list since any number on the original list would differ from the changed diagonal at the digit where that number’s row intersected the diagonal.
In the following example the digits in bold italic form the diagonal.
Row 0: 0.1234567…
Row 1: 0.2468101…
Row 2: 0.481632…
Row 3: 0.5101520…
Row 4: 0.98989898…
Row 5: 0.75757575…
Thus the diagonal number is 0.28087…The changed diagonal is a number that differs from Row 0 in having a different 1st digit, differs from Row 1 in having a different 2nd digit, differs from Row 2 in having a different 3rd digit, and so on. The changed diagonal will differ from every number on a Row by one digit. Thus, the changed diagonal will not itself be one of the Row numbers. Thus the changed diagonal will not be mapped onto one of the natural numbers. AND... there thus exists at least one more real number (the changed diagonal) than there are natural numbers. Ta da!
We're about a week away from Episode 5 of the SpaceTimeMind podcast, and the episode's audio will be culled from the videochat below.
Richard Brown recently saw (and hated) that new Johnny Depp movie, Transcendence, and that got us going on Sartrean Singularity, Kantian AI, and torturing your sims. Stay tuned, spacetimeminders!
Today cognitive neuroscientist Bernard J. Baars joined Pete and Richard in the virtual studio to discuss the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. The raw unedited video of our conversation is available below. As is our custom, this is the source of the audio that winds up in our SpaceTimeMind podcast.
One of us is once again on Philosophy TV. This time it's Pete, and he's appearing as part of the 2nd Annual Online Undergraduate Philosophy Conference that Phil TV is hosting, and he's commenting on Chris Crogan's "Mind, Brains, and Contents." Check it out if you're into (or identical to) any of the following: Artificial Intelligence, brains, representational content, swamp people, and Chinese rooms.
Past Phil TV appearances of the SpaceTimeMinders include:
(PARENTHETICAL BONUS: Speaking of television, here's Richard's appearance in an episode of Fly Girls.)
Download: MP3 Audio (93MB)
People say that two things in life are certain. The first is that no one gets out alive. The second is that if possibly necessarily P, then necessarily P. But, are death and logic really certainties? If, for example, there exists an infinite number of situations which each contain an individual who is intrinsically similar to you, aren't you effectively immortal? And is there a single best logic to use in assessing such possibilities? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel joins Richard and Pete to tackle death and logic as well as topics concerning the reality of the past and the proper role of common sense in science and philosophy. This is the first part of our conversation with Eric. The second part will appear in a future episode.
(The music in the episode is by our band, Quiet Karate Reflex. The song in the intro and outro is "SpaceTimeMind Theme Song" [link to music video] and the song in the mid-episode break is “Skinner Box." More of Quiet Karate Reflex's music can be heard here: http://quietkaratereflex.bandcamp.com/.)
(The video chat between Richard, Pete, and Eric that this episode's audio is drawn from is viewable on YouTube. For this episode's source content, see especially the first half of the linked video.)
Eric Schwitzgebel, Lara Beaty, & Gregg Caruso
Episodes 1-3 of the SpaceTimeMind podcast have so far featured only Richard Brown, Pete Mandik, and their wild imaginations. But actual live humans have agreed to join us in the virtual studio for forthcoming episodes. Upcoming guests include philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, psychologist Lara Beaty, and philosopher Gregg Caruso.
Other guests are in the works. Stay tuned for further announcements.
As always, the audio that gets edited into the podcasts originates in wild and wooly video chats that are archived at the SpaceTimeMind YouTube channel. Sneak a peek!
Our theme song premiered in episode three. And now, here's the music video for it.
Follow SpaceTimeMind on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/spacetimemind
The Oxford Bibliography "Philosophy of Cognitive Science" by Pete Mandik is free this week (April 13 - April 19) along with a whole bunch of other online content as part of Oxford University Press's "Library Week". To check it out, use "libraryweek" as both username and password.
Download: MP3 Audio (48.8MB)
This is the second of a two part discussion between Richard and Pete concerning whether and how consciousness can be explained and whether it should be regarded as a fundamental feature of reality. In this episode, the discussion focuses on the question of what counts as an explanation and what norms govern good explanations in physics as well as in metaphysics.
(The music in the episode is by our band, Quiet Karate Reflex. The song in the intro and outro is "SpaceTimeMind Theme Song" and the song in the mid-episode break is "Aristotelian Eye Jelly." More of Quiet Karate Reflex's music can be heard here: http://quietkaratereflex.bandcamp.com/.)
(The video chat between Richard and Pete that this episode's audio is drawn from is viewable on YouTube. For this episode's source content, see especially the last half of the linked video.)
Richard Brown has made a second trailer for the launch of SpaceTimeMind. This one has way more narwhals in it! (You can see the first trailer here.)
Download: MP3 Audio (47.5MB)
This is the first of a two part discussion between Richard and Pete concerning whether and how consciousness can be explained and whether it should be regarded as a fundamental feature of reality. In this episode, the discussion focuses on the view that everything that exists is ultimately computational/mathematical. In the first half of this episode, we discuss applications of computationalism in explaining brains, consciousness, and even reality itself. After a musical break, we turn in the second half of this episode to wrestle with the general merits of Pythagoreanism, the view that everything is ultimately mathematical. Are physical objects reducible to sets, which are in turn reducible to numbers, which are themselves reducible to the empty set and sets thereof?
(The music in the episode is by Quiet Karate Reflex. The song in the intro and outro is "Aristotelian Eye Jelly" and the song in the mid-episode break is "Skinner Box." More of Quiet Karate Reflex's music can be heard here: http://quietkaratereflex.bandcamp.com/.)
(The video chat between Richard and Pete that this episode's audio is drawn from is viewable on YouTube.)
Links for the first half of this episode
Links for the second half of this episode
