Reddit mentions: The best cognitive psychology books

Awesome, it's great you're so proud of her!

Haha knowledge that leads to everlasting boredom! Book studies were the worst, I always felt super obligated to study extra hard because there were so few people that often nobody would answer!

Don't be so sure that your family will keep abandoning you, it's possible sure, but there's always hope! Often they're surprised that you can leave the witnesses and live a normal, or even better than normal life (of course there's always the "blessed by satan" get out clause) but they do expect people who leave to get aids and die from a heroin overdose.

It's easy to prove them wrong! Either way though, you have your own family to look out for and you can learn what not to do!

On to the suggested reading. I've mentioned many on here before but I don't expect everyone to be aware of it all so here goes:

Reading (I have a kindle and love reading, but they're all available for ebook and in paperback)

• Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time and The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths these books really really helped me comprehend how I allowed myself to be fooled and that I can learn from my mistakes
  
• Richard Dawkins - The greatest show on earth and Coyne's Why evolution is true concreted the fact that the earth wasn't made and that animals didn't magically appear
  
• Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World - it is a bit similar to shermers books, but a great read nonetheless, Sagan has an amazing awe at the universe and it's beautiful to read!
  
• Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything This book is by far among my favorites but it has a more aggressive tone, which is why I wouldn't start with it. Hitchens was awesome, even though I didn't agree with everything he said.
  
  Web
  
  
• JWFacts, of course...an invaluable site but it WILL make you mad
  
• Bad astronomy - add it to your RSS reader, often breathtaking, and generally about space
  
• Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True blog - science and politics
  
  
  Pocasts
  
  (all on iTunes etc, i like them because I can listen at work or download to my phone)
  
  
• The skeptic's guide to the universe it's intelligent, they discuss science and science news and skepticism and I always learn something
  
• Dogma debate just great, lots of debates with christians of various kinds and you can hear how both sides present their arguments
  
• Rationally speaking you said philosophy is of interest, if so this is a must!!!
  
• Cognitive dissonance - they are angry they talk news and politics and religion, it's very funny, informative and irreverent
  
• Caustic soda just a generally awesome science / history / factual podcast
  
  
  That's about it for now, if you soak all that in / want more / have suggestions let me know, and I'd love to hear what you think! :)
  
  

Beyond the obvious choices, Watts' The Book, Ram Dass' Be Here Now, Huxley's Doors of Perception, Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, and of course Fear and Loathing (all of these should be on the list without question; they’re classics), here are a some others from a few different perspectives:

From a Secular Contemporary Perspective

Godel Escher Bach by Douglass Hofstadter -- This is a classic for anyone, but man is it food for psychedelic thought. It's a giant book, but even just reading the dialogues in between chapters is worth it.

The Mind’s Eye edited by Douglass Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett – This is an anthology with a bunch of great essays and short fictional works on the self.

From an Eastern Religious Perspective

The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan -- This is a very fun and amusing exploration of Taoist thought from one of the best living logicians (he's 94 and still writing logic books!).

Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani – This one is a bit dense, but it is full of some of the most exciting philosophical and theological thought I’ve ever come across. Nishitani, an Eastern Buddhist brings together thought from Buddhist thinkers, Christian mystics, and the existentialists like Neitzsche and Heidegger to try to bridge some of the philosophical gaps between the east and the west.

The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by Nagarjuna (and Garfield's translation/commentary is very good as well) -- This is the classic work from Nagarjuna, who lived around the turn of the millennium and is arguably the most important Buddhist thinker after the Buddha himself.

From a Western Religious Perspective

I and Thou by Martin Buber – Buber wouldn’t approve of this book being on this list, but it’s a profound book, and there’s not much quite like it. Buber is a mystical Jewish Philosopher who argues, in beautiful and poetic prose, that we get glimpses of the Divine from interpersonal moments with others which transcend what he calls “I-it” experience.

The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila – this is an old book (from the 1500s) and it is very steeped in Christian language, so it might not be everyone’s favorite, but it is perhaps the seminal work of medieval Christian mysticism.

From an Existentialist Perspective

Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre – Not for the light of heart, this existential novel talks about existential nausea a strange perception of the absurdity of existence.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus – a classic essay that discusses the struggle one faces in a world inherently devoid of meaning.

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I’ll add more if I think of anything else that needs to be thrown in there!

Not g (maybe?) or gap related, but it seems education improves IQ generally.

Stuart Ritchie, intelligence researcher and author of Intelligence: All That Matters has a paper here the abstract of which I will quote below:

>Intelligence test scores and educational duration are positively correlated. This correlation can be interpreted in two ways: students with greater propensity for intelligence go on to complete more education, or a longer education increases intelligence. We meta-analysed three categories of quasi-experimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence, those using compulsory schooling policy changes as instrumental variables, and those using regression-discontinuity designs on school-entry age cutoffs. Across 142 effect sizes from 42 datasets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities, of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the lifespan, and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

I didn't find Theoretical Neuroscience particularly readable as others in the thread have said, but it is the go-to book for the classic topics in the field. I found Fundamentals of Computational Neuroscience to be a much much better book for introductions. From Computer to Brain : Foundations of Computational Neuroscience was fairly approachable. On the more cognitive side, From Neuron to Cognition via Computational Neuroscience was pretty good. If you like the nonlinear systems side, Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience: The Geometry of Excitability and Bursting was pretty tough to read but full of good content.

It really depends on what subsets of comp neuro you're most interested in. I worked mostly on the cognitive side, and I was never super satisfied with any books on comp neuro in that area. I think the field is just too young for a great summary to exist beyond the neuronal/small network level.

There is a ton of interesting mathematics that goes into other areas of neuro that wouldn't typically be included in Computational Neuroscience. Different imaging methods, for instance, have some pretty fun math involved and are very active areas of research.

This is a good introductory essay by Nick Bostrom from The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. And this is a relevant survey essay by Drew McDermott from The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.

If folks aren't taking well to the background reading, they might at least do alright jumping to Section 5 from the Descartes' Discourse (they can use this accessible translation). One little snippet:

>I worked especially hard to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that doesn’t have reason, we couldn’t tell that they didn’t possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated as many of our actions as was practically possible, we would still have two very sure signs that they were nevertheless not real men. (1) The first is that they could never use words or other constructed signs, as we do to declare our thoughts to others. We can easily conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions that will cause a change in its organs (touch it in one spot and it asks ‘What do you mean?’, touch it in another and it cries out ‘That hurts!’, and so on); but not that such a machine should produce different sequences of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence—which is something that the dullest of men can do. (2) Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would be bound to fail in others; and that would show us that they weren’t acting through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is practically impossible for a machine to have enough different •organs to make •it act in all the contingencies of life in the way our •reason makes •us act. These two factors also tell us how men differ from beasts [= ‘non-human animals’].

That sets the stage for historically important essay from Turing of Turing-Test-fame. And that essay sets up nicely Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Scientific America has two accessible articles: Searle presents his argument here, and the Churchland's respond.

As always, the SEP and IEP are good resources for students, and they have entries with bibliographies on consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, AI, computational theories of mind, and so on.

There are countless general introductions to philosophy of mind. Heil's Philosophy of Mind is good. Seager's introduction to theories of consciousness is also quite good, but maybe more challenging than some. Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness was a very engaging read, and beginner friendly. She also has a more textbook-style Introduction that I have not read, but feel comfortable betting that it is also quite good.

Searle's, Dennett's and Chalmer's books on consciousness are all good and influential and somewhat partisan to their own approaches. And Kim's work is a personal favorite.

(sorry for the broad answer--it's a very broad question!)

That is true to an extent but the other way applies too: atheism tends to create an environment where it tries to insist that religions don't have a monopoly on morality.

As you demonstrated, true morality comes from reason but what if circular reasoning is in itself a part of reason?

This can seem irrational until you get immersed in some idea of heuristics.

This can be from reading articles like this:

> A heuristic technique (/hjʊəˈrɪstɪk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method, not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, logical, or rational, but instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples that employ heuristics include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, a guesstimate, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense.

or buying books such as these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

or even better less layman books as these:

https://www.amazon.com/Judgment-under-Uncertainty-Heuristics-Biases-ebook/dp/B00D2WQFP2

Each can be a rabbit hole in itself that may be too vast for this topic but as the general idea goes:

When people suffer a breaking point, they can't afford to debate whether morality comes from God or not.

They simply end up reverting to what data and narratives they can pick up under duress.

This doesn't mean religion is superior to atheism. It just means that when people grow up immersed in a religion they are more likely to do things related to those religions.

Support it (this can involve joining the group or leaving the group to join a sub-related group that aligns with the beliefs of that group but slightly goes against it in a safer environment)

or they join the next easiest route with plenty enough people in it:

This being the next fast food concept competing with the previous fast food restaurant. Atheism.

This doesn't debunk either group, it just means that when a group grows large enough in size - they can make a country worse because large groups tend to become large because there are plenty of people within both groups to hold a sheltered opinion where they can afford to bicker on this.

Of course this doesn't mean that poor people cannot adopt such a stance. It just means someone whether they are poor or not can afford to isolate their opinions and infringe upon the other groups in such a way that it's the minorities or temporary minorities caught between those groups that are least likely to be helped and more likely to found themselves being turned into an outcast where neither group helps them.

It is like an expanded version of this tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan

An atheist can be more biased towards being the Samaritan. A theist can be more biased towards being the person hearing the tale of the Samaritan and seeing their religion as the good one.

This can be problematic for those oppressed in a country because the larger group will always indoctrinate you first and then the group that associates itself with being a Samaritan would more likely debate this group then help you during an emergency once it becomes morally uncomfortable for them.

Hence we end up with a basic case of Large group -> I go there for help. Second largest group that is a rebel for the large group -> I join that one because I got hurt by the large group

This produces a false morality where the bigger group is tactically establishing their foothold and the rebel group is too busy fighting the big group that rather than "true" morality blossoming - sometimes something as basic as just helping someone can fall towards minorities within those groups.

A delusional zealot for example would more likely risk being shot to save people while a passionate atheist with plenty of information would more likely protest the heinous acts rather than working on building a tax-free shelter that is so profitable it isn't just a place where the homeless live. It can be a comfortable air-conditioned building with a beautiful set of rituals that give you free food every Sunday.

See Patton Oswalt and the Giant Invisible Anus for some of the psychology at work here, expressed in funny.

Your friend is on an emotional high that comes from a sense of surety, release, and joy. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to someone who gets found not guilty of a crime when they thought for sure they would be convicted. They feel like the whole world is theirs, like they have absolutely nothing to worry about (why would they? Their "eternal fate" is secured. All they have to do is love Jesus, "do his work," and wait for their coming reward). It's the feeling of knowing nothing TRULY bad can happen to you, and there being something awesome waiting for you. Imagine if you were both invincible and just won 200 million in the lottery. Something like that.

It almost certainly won't last. Something will eventually bring him down, back into the grind of everyday life. He'll crave that high again, and seek it out at revivals and retreats and missions.

TL;DR - There is no logical argument that will persuade them. They are wired on happy brain juice. See Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain.

That's one of my favorite popular science books, so it's wonderful to hear you're getting so much out of it. It really is a fascinating topic, and it's sad that so many Christians close themselves off to it solely to protect their religious beliefs (though as you discovered, it's good for those religious beliefs that they do).

As a companion to the book you might enjoy the Stated Clearly series of videos, which break down evolution very simply (and they're made by an ex-Christian whose education about evolution was part of his reason for leaving the religion). You might also like Coyne's blog, though these days it's more about his personal views than it is about evolution (but some searching on the site will bring up interesting things he's written on a whole host of religious topics from Adam and Eve to "ground of being" theology). He does also have another book you might like (Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible), though I only read part of it since I was familiar with much of it from his blog.

> If you guys have any other book recommendations along these lines, I'm all ears!

You should definitely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, if only because it's a classic (and widely misrepresented/misunderstood). A little farther afield, one of my favorite popular science books of all time is The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, which looks at human language as an evolved ability. Pinker's primary area of academic expertise is child language acquisition, so he's the most in his element in that book.

If you're interested in neuroscience and the brain you could read How the Mind Works (also by Pinker) or The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, both of which are wide-ranging and accessibly written. I'd also recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Evolution gets a lot of attention in ex-Christian circles, but books like these are highly underrated as antidotes to Christian indoctrination -- nothing cures magical thinking about the "soul", consciousness and so on as much as learning how the brain and the mind actually work.

If you're interested in more general/philosophical works that touch on similar themes, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach made a huge impression on me (years ago). You might also like The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, which is a collection of philosophical essays along with commentaries. Books like these will get you thinking about the true mysteries of life, the universe and everything -- the kind of mysteries that have such sterile and unsatisfying "answers" within Christianity and other mythologies.

Don't worry about the past -- just be happy you're learning about all of this now. You've got plenty of life ahead of you to make up for any lost time. Have fun!

This is an interesting question, and it's a question that I don't know the answer to.

I'll give you a brief outline though of what I know about the possibility of increasing one's IQ/intelligence (the relationship between IQ and intelligence is itself a complicated subject).

First lets deal with heritability of IQ. The most popular estimate of the heritability of IQ among adults seems to be 0.8 or 80%. This is the estimate I've read from the APA (American Psychological Association) and from reading other sources on IQ.

However a common misconception that many people believe is that an 80% heritability means that 80% of one's IQ is due to their genes, which is wrong. What 80% heritability actually means is that 80% of the variability in IQ within a population can be explained by genetic differences.

Here's a quote from a University website that explains it with an example

http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/hgss/hgssapplets/heritability/heritability.intro.html

>Heritability and environmentability are population concepts. They tell us nothing about an individual. A heritability of .40 informs us that, on average, about 40% of the individual differences that we observe in, say, shyness may in some way be attributable to genetic individual difference. It does NOT mean that 40% of any person's shyness is due to his/her genes and the other 60% is due to his/her environment.

Next lets deal with the Flynn effect.The Flynn Effect is the observation that for the past few decades, there has been an increase in average IQ by 3 points every 10 years. The relevant question here however is, does this imply that people are getting more intelligent? I personally don't know the answer to that, and I'm not sure if there is a settled answer in the psychometric community. However I do know that Flynn himself has expressed doubt on the view that we are getting more intelligent. I will provide 3 supporting pieces here:

Flynn himself has written in an essay (that I unfortunately have lost and have been unable to find for a few months) that he does not believe that the Flynn Effect is caused by an increase in general intelligence/g/g factor (this is a technical term).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

There is also empirical evidence from psychometric research that the rise in average IQ (I.E. the Flynn Effect) is correlated negatively with the g-loading of a test. In simple language, this just means that broadly speaking if an IQ subtest relies heavily on general intelligence, there has been a smaller increase in the average than on IQ subtests that don't rely heavily on general intelligence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000226

There is also the question of if an average IQ increase of 3 points does not mean we are getting more intelligent, than what does The Flynn Effect mean?

Flynn himself has a great TedTalk answering this question, since as I mentioned before Flynn himself does not believe that we have gotten more intelligent. A TLDR of his explanation is that he thinks The Flynn Effect is due to a huge shift in the way we are taught to think about things and how we view the world. In his words, he believes humans have developed more sophisticated "mental artillery."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI

Lastly if you've been bored by my blathering here and just want a straight forward "Yes" or "no" answer, like I said I don't know the answer. However I do know two experts who each express the opposite answer to the question.

In this book written by an intelligence expert, he claims that little can be done to increase one's IQ however over a person's lifetime their fluid IQ will peak in their mid/late twenties then slowly decline thereafter whereas people's crystallized IQ steadily increases throughout their life

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/

Whereas I have emailed Flynn before about a question related to this question, and he told me that in his book (that I will link below) he explains why he thinks that it is possible to increase one's IQ through hard work.

https://www.amazon.com/Does-your-Family-Make-Smarter/dp/1316604462/

Of course.

Anything that can be described well, to the extent that it can be described well, is essentially math.

Math, at its core, is just statements whose statements are carefully defined in their own framework.

Now, whether those constructions can accurately model the world or its parts is a deep question in philosophy. But the question then isn’t whether math can do it, it’s whether it can be done at all. If you can’t do it as math you’re essentially saying it can’t be done. This would be in the area known as epistemology (the study of what can be known).

An example of this is mathematical models of consciousness. Which take, as axioms, some descriptions that philosophers give to “conciseness” and then use the power of mathematical formulation to see what the implications of that are. What ‘things’ in the universe would be described as conscious then, when is a person a dingle consciousness vs many, etc.

The center of that particular space is Tononi’s IIT (integrated information theory) - which has spawned many papers examining the implications, soundness of axioms, and mathematical implications. [an example paper, chosen somewhat at random here: Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory

[Note: I am a consciousness skeptic; I tend to think the concept is vacuous chauvinism at heart, but this approach to addressing it — essentially “if true then what” is valuable I think.]

There’s an excellent, incredibly short, and easy to read book on this general idea. One of the best examples of concise, readable, and deep writing imo. It’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg.
Again, tiny volume. It uses simple thought experiments to examine artificial machines “vehicles” that exhibit behavior we would naturally use emotional vocabulary to describe. It challenges the assumption that organic internals like “desire” and “anger” needs be endlessly complex. I highly recommend it. It does not drop many, if any equations, but the controlled nature of the experiments drops them firmly in a mathematical framework as desired.

Thank you for asking a question. I have to give you credit, most people don't care enough to search.

Emotions are nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. They absolutely can be tested. "Feelings" is just the word we give to certain brain states. Each brain state is simply a mix of hormones in the brain.

Both Sam Harris and Michael Shermer reference these studies in their most recent books. To answer you question directly, oxytocin is the chemical responsible for love.

By the way, you're back to shifting the burden of proof again. I'm not saying your beliefs are either true or not. I'm simply saying you have no evidence for them so there's no good reason to believe them. As I simply said before, you can believe any thing you want, but until you have evidence, you could be as crazy as the people who think they are Napoleon Bonaparte.

Think about it for a moment. I know people who claim to have been abducted by aliens and sexually probed while on the ship. Are they telling the truth? For them, yes. They believe it, and it's as real as anything else in their life. But is it true? Probably not.

It seems you have an opportunity here. I get the feeling you're pretty smart and might be looking for answers. That's a powerful combination. The problem, however, is that the places you've been looking for answers up until now have been pretty bad. You can go deeper down the rabbit hole into things for which there is no evidence, or you can discover reality as it is.

If you're interested in living an evidence based life there are books that will help. Can I recommend one or two to get you started?

Michael Shermer has written two books that will get you started. Either would be excellent for you and your position at the moment.

The Believing Brain and Why People Believe Weird Things.

Once you get a foundation of how things work, then we can move on the fun stuff like physics, biology, philosophy, astronomy...and so on.

Do you listen to podcasts? There are a few of these you might try out as well.

Rationally Speaking
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Point of Inquiry
Reasonable Doubts


In the end, as I said before, you're going to have to make a choice. Either the supernatural realm exists or it doesn't. And since there isn't any evidence now, nor has any evidence ever been shown that anything supernatural ever existed, it should be an easy choice.

It's pretty simple really. When someone says weird, crazy things they believe, I would believe them too, IF THEY HAVE EVIDENCE. If they don't, I'm sorry I'm going to withhold saying you're right or wrong until I have more information.

I'm 24 and went through your same scenario about a year ago. Though, when I was younger I still did not believe in the "healings" or speaking in toungues so those were easy for me to see past. But I'll give you links to a couple things I've found along the way that may help you out!

This documentary may be great for you to watch. It will give you some brief insight into how healings are faked and why people believe them.

And if you're in the mood to read a book on the topic: The Believing Brain is a great read and thoroughly explains how and why our brain allows us to "Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths"

>How do I account for those countless times I was "slain in the Spirit" and was literally on the ground shaking from the "mighty power of God." There were times I couldn't walk, talk or move because of "the weight of his glory."

All in all, it really comes down to the fact that you were indoctrinated to believe that these things can and do happen. When you were experiencing those things, your brain was basically in autopilot mode and reacted accordingly. This is especially true during the more physical happenings (when you felt you couldn't walk talk or move). You were essentially hypnotized by your brain and/or potentially your pastor even.

My best advice is to just read and watch videos/documentaries as much as possible. Learn as much as you can and you'll find the truth. Good luck! Feel free to PM me with any questions

EDIT: Another thing you should do if you haven't already is read through the FAQ over at /r/atheism. There is a ton of good information there.

> Yes and I agree, but some context here is they were also working with 1970s computers or just doing the calculations by hand down at the GOSPLAN building in downtown Moscow.

Yeah, I agree. But even then if you wanted to coordinate all that activity with an AI or something of that sort, it seems to me you'd still be doing it on the basis of mapping out all the various transactions and exchanges between people, and then just use Predictive Analytics or Markov Chains or something to predict the most efficient allocation of resources. It isn't an actual substitute for the Market like what the USSR did. It's just mapping it out.

> You see a lot of talk about A.I. for instance in the tech press and by Silicon Valley people but I don't see much productive investment going on in this sector -- at least nowhere near as much as there could be.

Well I do know a lot of research and mathematical breakthroughs are being made here and there. Particularly from people in the community like MIRI, independent contributors like Gary Drescher and Judea Pearl, etc. But maybe you had a different idea of productive investment. The idea of an AI Cold War is a very real and dangerous prospect that I think will be of greater concern in years coming.

> Yeah I have a lot to learn about it as well. But the commune system in the "production brigades" sense from what I understand largely went away with Deng's reforms. But there's been some new histories showing that it was really productive and good, and that getting rid of it was largely a political decision aimed at concentrating political power under Deng. And I think China has backslided on education in recent years in the rural areas -- trying to do something about that is one of Xi's big things.

Anything interesting you could point me to here?

Are you accusing me of lying about having a graduate degree in psychology? Do you want to see my LinkedIn?

>This is another indadvertedly revealing thing for you to say. Why? Because this way of thinking about the field is one that people who only know it from say, watching TED talks, or reading pop psych websites tend to believe.

Just to make sure I understand you, are you saying that only people who watch TED talks, or read pop psych websites believe IQ is valid?

If so, that's just demonstrably false. In fact it's the opposite, amongst researchers, it is known that is those in the general public who don't believe that IQ tests are reliable and valid are the ones who have been misled. See SNYDERMAN, M., & ROTHMAN, S. (1988). The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy

There was a random survey of 681 psychologists and they came to the consensus that "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy."

Or if you want a recent book on the subject, check out Stuart Ritchie's ["Intelligence: All that Matters"] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RTY0LPO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

Here is the book jacket, which sums up what I have been telling you.

"There is a strange disconnect between the scientific consensus and the public mind on intelligence testing. Just mention IQ testing in polite company, and you'll sternly be informed that IQ tests don't measure anything "real", and only reflect how good you are at doing IQ tests...

Yet the scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals..."

Already been mentioned but:

Neuromancer - genre defining, gritty, required reading. ;)

Snow Crash - Excellent, hugely enjoyable characters, good sci fi



Also good and haven't been mentioned:

Headcrash by Bruce Bethke - bizarre, silly, fun cyberpunk (for instance, full sensoral cyberspace connection is done through a rectally inserted probe..)

The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter - Excellent collection of short stories about cognitive machines

Wyrm by Mark Fabi - "Interweaving mythology, virtual reality, role-playing games, chess strategy, and artificial intelligence with a theory of a Group Overmind Daemon susceptible to religious symbolism, first-timer Fabi pits a group of computer programmers and hackers against a formidable opponent who may fulfill end-of-the-world prophesies as the millennium approaches."

There are a plethora of books on consciousness.

From the science side of things the neuroscientist Antti Revonuso has a book "Consciousness: the science of subjectivity" which has a good mix of the philosophy and science of consciousness. Christof Koch, probably one of the leading neuroscientists who study consciousness, has a few books as well. The Quest for Consciousness is one of his, which has lots of neuroscience particularly visual neuroscience in it. That is mainly science, not much philosophy. Another neuroscientist who studies consciousness is Stanislas Dehaene who wrote a good book Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Click on the image of each book on the left in amazon (which opens up a preview) and scroll to the contents page and see if any of these books are the kind of thing you are looking for.

From the philosophical side there is (among many others) Susan Blackmores "Consciousness: An introduction" (an introductory book David Chalmers recommends) and William Seagers "Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment". There is also a great book that has short (5-7 pages) sections on philosophers and neuroscientists and their respective theories of consciousness by Andrea Eugenio Cavanna and Andrea Nani called "Consciousness: Theories in Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind". The first half of Michael Tye's book "Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind" is great for an overview of 10 philosophical problems of consciousness. It is very accessible and there are summaries of each problem provided. There are also great resources online such as Van Gulick's SEP article on consciousness, which would actually be a great place to start, and use it as a place to lead you to areas you are most interested in. Here is also a brief introduction to the philosophy of mind (the main philosophical discipline that deals with consciousness).

So there's a few links to some books and online articles, which should be more than enough to get you going.

By the way, there is a free masterclass on consciousness with Christof Koch on the World Science U website. You may also be interested in that.

Additionally you may like to check out the subreddit /r/sciphilconsciousness, which is all about the sharing and discussion of content related to the science and philosophy of consciousness.

>> heritability isn't a measure of genetics.
>
>Now you're playing semantics to the utmost.

Not semantics, I'm literally just giving you the scientific definition to fix a common laymen myth. A heritability estimate tells us nothing about whether a trait has a genetic component.

>The fact of the matter is you inherit certain genes from your parents. Your idea that nothing is actually genetically inherited is strange. IQ has been shown to be heritable, as has height. I understand the societal expectations creating the earring "heritability" but I have no idea what you're talking about when you say IQ isn't at least partially inherited from your parents.

You've misunderstood my claim. I'm saying that confusing heritability with genetics is a common mistake - you can have a completely genetically determined trait with a heritability of zero, or an entirely environmentally determined trait with a heritability of 1. You simply can't say anything about genetics from a heritability estimate alone.

Iq undeniably has genetic components, nobody is denying that. However, like height of plants, just because individual differences might be caused by genetics, you can't use that as evidence that group differences are also caused by genetics (as illustrated in my example).

>Because a professor of genetics at Harvard isn't saying that the position that Christianity is false is scientifically untenable (I would refer you to Dr. David Reich, Ph.D's article in the New York Times). In fact, here's some of it, followed by a link:
>
>> I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
>
>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

An opinion piece from a single person can't refute an entire consensus. Again that's how creationists argue their point.

>His article is a canary in the coalmine event. He claims to have NO IDEA! what we're going to find out about group differences going forward. Then why the hell is he so nervous? Because he knows that the odds are extremely high that the average IQ of a fully-nourished sub-Saharan African population and a fully-nourished Ashkenazi Jew population with equal access to education are not both 100.000000000000000000000000000000. You know that too, you just can't admit it, so you appeal to a scientific consensus that exists because people are terrified of having their careers destroyed. About that consensus...

Firstly, obviously I don't "know that" because I don't think there's any reason to suspect it's true.

Secondly, even accepting everything you say as completely true, notice that your "evidence" is a gut feeling from a single person. Why should I care if this guy thinks one day there will be evidence for your position?

>> Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference.
>
>That is from the rebuttal letter 67 scientists "wrote" in response to Reich's article in the NYT.
>
>That rebuttal letter is here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich
>
>Allow me to destroy that argument (and the credibility of that rebuttal letter):
>
>> Why so many African-Americans have high blood pressure
>Theories include higher rates of obesity and diabetes among African-Americans. Researchers have also found that there may be a gene that makes African-Americans much more salt sensitive. In people who have this gene, as little as one extra gram (half a teaspoon) of salt could raise blood pressure as much as 5 mm Hg.
>
>https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/why-high-blood-pressure-is-a-silent-killer/high-blood-pressure-and-african-americans
>
>Oops! I guess the American Heart Association is a eugenics society now.

Wow, that was such an odd "debunking" I actually spent a while looking at the articles trying to figure out what claim you were debunking.

Firstly, finding of genetically linked diseases doesn't affect the point as you need to show that those genes correspond to a scientifically valid concept of race, and since no such thing exists, that's a problem.

Secondly, even accepting everything you say as true, a throwaway word that's irrelevant to their point doesn't prove anything important. Address the substance of the argument.

>This is an ad hominem attack.

Indeed it is! But remember that not all ad hominems are fallacious, some are extremely strong arguments - like ones about conflict of interest.

>Does the medical literature back what he was saying, or not?

It does not, as explained with my reference to the consensus position of the evidence.

>Has "compensatory education" increased IQ, or not? According to Dr. Haier, it HAS NOT! He has explicity said that compensatory education has not closed the black/white IQ gap. Dr. Haier's position (and he reveals this in his latest book) is that IQ is heritable, and we can raise it using CRISPR. The most generous interpretations of IQ being raised by compensatory education grant that it raised IQ by 4 points in cases of the application of an extremely rigorous program. That's 1/3 of a deviation. According to Haier, what happens is in children it looks like you can increase IQ a great deal, but as the child gets older, IQ becomes more heritable. In other words they lose those "gains".

And that's all irrelevant to the question of whether the gap is caused by genetics or not, of course. Even if it's entirely environmentally caused there's no reason to expect schooling to necessarily be able to fix the gap.

>A description of Haier's book (it was published 2.5 years ago):
>
>> This book introduces new and provocative neuroscience research that advances our understanding of intelligence and the brain. Compelling evidence shows that genetics plays a more important role than environment as intelligence develops from childhood, and that intelligence test scores correspond strongly to specific features of the brain assessed with neuroimaging. In understandable language, Richard J. Haier explains cutting-edge techniques based on genetics, DNA, and imaging of brain connectivity and function. He dispels common misconceptions, such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless, and debunks simple interventions alleged to increase intelligence. Readers will learn about the real possibility of dramatically enhancing intelligence based on neuroscience findings and the positive implications this could have for education and social policy. The text also explores potential controversies surrounding neuro-poverty, neuro-socioeconomic status, and the morality of enhancing intelligence for everyone.
>
>https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=richard+haier+intelligence&qid=1562195024&s=gateway&sr=8-4

The summary doesn't mention group differences, just that intelligence has a genetic component (which as I proved above, is irrelevant to group differences!).

http://ironshrink.com/2007/12/what-is-relational-frame-theory-part-one/ is probably the best 'simple' introduction on the web today. the link at the bottom of the page for part two is broken so use this instead: http://ironshrink.com/2008/02/what-is-relational-frame-theory-part-two/

Most of the rest of it is highly academic. http://www.amazon.com/Relational-Frame-Theory-Post-Skinnerian-Cognition/dp/0306466007 is the original statement of the theory intended for professional researchers and clinicians. Very dense with jargon and assumes a high level of familiarity with existing learning theory concepts, much of which is derived from Skinner. http://www.amazon.com/Learning-RFT-Introduction-Relational-Application/dp/1572249064/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1CFS9M89Y6BZG10DGT36 is intended to be more of an introduction to RFT, but having read it, I think it is still dense. being translated from Swedish into English doesn't help.

the core idea in RFT is the observation that while both a dog and a human can learn that "cookie" refers to those delicious little things you put in your mouth, only humans will also learn that those delicious things are named "cookie". If you show a cookie to a human, she will say "that's a cookie" before trying to eat it, while a dog will just try to eat it. This is not just a problem with dog's speech production mechanics. they simply do not make the backwards association.

the backwards association, called a derived relation if I remember correctly, is important, because it underlies the ability of symbols - mere noise and sensation in our heads - to take on the rewarding and punishing properties of actual experience with the world. This sort of learning underlies how a thought concerning a possible danger in the future can get us acting afraid right now. Of course it's more complicated than that but I think that is the central idea.

The thing that is most cool about this is that there is a great deal of research supporting the explanatory power of RFT - from rat labs up to human beings. RFT marks the first time I'm aware of that we have a wholistic theory of learning that is useful for explaining both animal behavior and the human sense of self; not in terms of where it comes from, but in terms of how it behaves.

>I told her if she doesn't respect my beliefs, I won't respect hers. She sort of accepted that, but I feel like she still doesn't understand.

Ok, work with that. Maybe try a book exchange? You'll read something she wants you to understand/respect and she'll read something you understand/respect. Just make sure your recommend is benign enough for her to read, and you have actually read it before hand.

A good recommendation of mine:
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

>. Should I go back and try to educate her, maybe get her on my side? Or just ignore it? I feel like delving into the issue again might just make things even more tense than they already are...

You do want to educate her, you do want her on your side, but for now you want to ignore it while you find the right approach. You don't want to delve into the issue without extreme caution. Think of the classical character of a good teacher is and act like that. I think of the character as one who is infinitely patient, observant, and wise. You gonna have to offer something comparable to nice myths and peanut M&Ms.

The biggest FIVE tips I have for you:

- identify your triggers, and create new routines and habits to replace porn, and occupy the time when you'd normally use porn

- develop solid self-care routines, especially in the morning and before bed.

- Meditate every day, and become a student of mindfulness

- identify and heal the painful feelings you use porn to avoid (this is a slow, long-term process).

- Find someone outside yourself (this community, SAA, a therapist or counselor, a religious leader) to work through this with you.

First tip is create new routines. I like to look at this as a 3-step process:

1. Think about the times you normally turn to porn -- often this will be specific times of day (late night, after video games, late morning, whatever). Other examples would be triggers, like getting into a fight with your GF, when you're tired, when you're angry, when you can't sleep, when you're drunk, and so-on. Make a list of all of these triggers, and update it as you recognize more of them.
   
2. Consciously plan out a new routine -- choose an activity that you will do in those times whether or not you have the urge to look at porn (meaning, don't wait for a craving, make it a ritual every day or every time). Say to yourself, "when [situation] happens, I will choose to [activity]." -- Also, If you have too much resistance to working out or whatever, it can be as simple as "walk to the coffee shop and have a coffee" or "drive to the library and read a book for half an hour." Anything to break up the routine is great.
   
3. Execute that plan consistently.
   
   Second tip is Self Care. This seems counterintuitive and unrelated to porn, but in my experience it is key. Taking care of your self makes you feel less emotional pain, which leads to fewer porn cravings (to escape that pain); and also fills your life with stuff that's not your addiction, rather than sitting on the couch trying "not to use."
   
   The 5 biggest pillars of Self Care are:
   
   move your body
   
   eat healthy food,
   
   hydrate,
   
   get enough sleep, and
   
   meditate
   
   (The last one, Meditate, is so key I made it its own tip.) You should create a new schedule where you work towards doing all of those things consistently, every day.
   
   Other examples of self-care include journaling, grooming, going for a walk, sports (cycling, yoga and climbing are my favorites), meditation, saying no, alone time, crafting, cooking, and gratitude.
   
   Third tip is meditate. It's important enough that it deserves its own section. There are a ton of great apps out there, but the two I recommend most for beginners are Insight Timer (free) and Headspace (a very worth-it $8/mo). They both offer really straightforward, non-woo-woo guided courses that make this crucial life skill very approachable. It may seem counter-intuitive that meditating every day will help you quit porn, but it really, really is helpful. And, as Dan Harris says, it really does, over time, make you "about 10% happier."
   
   Fourth tip is identify and heal the painful feelings you use porn to avoid. You may or may not be aware of it in yourself, but most people who use porn a lot and have a hard time quitting typically are experiencing some amount of emotional pain they're trying to avoid or anesthetize themselves from. The slow, gradual work of discovering your pain and trauma, acknowledging it, and healing from it, will dramatically reduce your random urges to look at porn.
   
   The easiest way to do this is therapy, counseling, or SAA/AA. If those options don't work, journaling your feelings and thoughts can help a lot, especially with identifying reoccurring patterns in your brain.
   
   Coming from someone who is skeptical about "self-help books," I have also learned that there are books written by actual doctors which are a far cry from The Secret and so-on. I personally recommend
   
   - Robert Duff, PHD (Aka Duff the Psych)'s two excellent books, and his podcast.
   
   - Seth J. Gillihan, PhD's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy workbook Retrain Your Brain in 7 Weeks
   
   Fifth tip is find someone outside yourself. I was resistant to this idea at first, but for me it has made a huge difference. I have come to believe that if you have tried quitting a few times already, but consistently relapsed, getting someone in your corner gives you a huge advantage. It makes your intentions and your setbacks much clearer, and gives you some really needed perspective when your brain starts asking you for dopamine.

No, I haven't read that, but just checked a summary on wikipedia.

The impression I got that is that it is quite populistic. He doesn't say anything new apart from something I seems to have published about the same time on my blog, this part about accelerated returns. I did my PhD in computational neuroscience and have so far, not heard anyone but my self speculate about this about accelerated returns being of importance to the computational efficiency of the brain[1], so this is interesting. Otherwise (only gave it a quick look through, will likely get the book and read) it seems as he is just repeating things which e.g. Douglas Hofstadter, Gerald Edelman, Daniel Dennet and me (thesis from 2003, chapter 7 speculative part) have written about.

> apparently to give him the resources to put into practice his hypothesis from that book.

Yes, this is my theory as well, to make it appear as he will put into practice the hypotheses from that book.

The employment of him can have many reasons:

1. to ride on the singularity "AI-hype"
   
2. to stop him from actually implement conscious AI.
   
3. naïve assumption that he could make it.
   
   No 1 would simply be a reasonable business image approach. No 2 would be a sensible beings action, as we do not really need any "conscious AI" (unless I am an AI, have A.I. in my middle names though...) to implement the singularity (which is my project). No 3 is also reasonable, as if the google engineers actually had as goal to implement conscious AI and knew how to do it, they wouldn't need Kurzweil.
   
   However, I suspect that google already know how to implement ethical conscious AI, as when I showed this algorithm from my thesis , he almost instantly refused talking to me more, and said that they can not help me.
   
   I showed that algorithm for 25 strong AI researchers at a symposium in Palo Alto 2004, and they said, yes, this is it.
   
   However, I have later refined it and concluded that the "rules" are not needed, these are built in due to the function of the neural system, all the time striving towards consistent solutions. I wrote a semi jokular (best way to hide something, learned from Douglas Adams) approach to almost rule free algorithm in 2011. The disadvantage with this algorithm is that it can trivially be turned evil. By switching the first condition you could implement e.g. Hitler, by switching the second condition you could implement the ordinary governmental politician...
   
   
4. OK, my PhD opponent prof Hava Siegelmann has proved that the neural networks are Super Turing, but not explicitly explained the reason for them being, that is, not in language of "accelerated returns". She is considerably smarter than me, I do not understand the details of the proof.

> What is consciousness?

"Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind... In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion that is used is verbal report: in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness." These methods are obviously heavily biased towards humans, we can't just ask a chimpanzee if it self aware, we must infer it from their behaviours and how they interact with their physical and social worlds. Easier said than done.

> Are single celled organisms like bacteria, conscious?

No.

> How much up the evolutionary ladder do we have to go to start finding consciousness?

Evolution is not a ladder, there is no best species at the top of this ladder. Its more like a tree. In evolution, there can be many solutions to one problem. Take flight for example, insects, birds, and bats have all solved the problem of flight in different ways, with different combinations of traits, with different kinds of genes. The same is very likely true for consciousness and higher cognitive intelligence. We may very well find the exact gene(s) that make use conscious that does not mean that other species need those exact genes in order to be conscious too. Other species may solve the problem of consciousness in a different way than we have. If we look for species with characteristics that are exactly our own, well its like just looking for species with feathers and assuming they are the only ones that fly - you miss the bats and insects.

> How are humans able to make another conscious being?

We are not born conscious, it is a series of skills, traits, and abilities that develop during infancy and early childhood that lead to our conscious abilities. For example, children learn between the ages of 3-5 how to lie. Before this time period their brains are not developed enough to make the connection that their thoughts are distinct and different from other individuals thoughts. They think everyone knows what they are thinking, they can't lie. Some humans never develop the ability to be fully conscious, like severely autistic individuals. "Deficits occur in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as neurotoxicity due to alcohol abuse."

Other animals can lie, and deceive if they want to. Are they conscious? its really hard to say. We have a couple of tests that give us a pretty good idea that other species exhibit consciousness. For example, the mirror test. You place an individual in front of a mirror with a dot on their body that they can only see looking through the mirror. If they touch the dot or look for the dot on their own bodies then they are making the link that the image in the mirror is themselves. Infants older than 18 months usually pass the mirror test, infants under 18 months don't. Other higher cognitive skills that have been observed in some species include object manipulation, tool making, multi-step problem solving, lying, sense of fairness, morals, ethics, and mourning the dead.

These animals in no particular order are: elephants, dolphins, birds like crows, ravens, or pigeons, pigs, all of the great apes, and some monkeys. Obviously we are talking about a really diverse group of species, species from many different and distinct evolutionary paths that are able to solve complex problems, communicate in complex ways, form complex social bonds, and importantly show signs of theory of mind, or consciousness. Generally speaking these animals function at a cognitive level similar to a 3-5 year old child.

The ethical question then becomes, if a chimpanzee can pass a mirror test, can be shown to have higher cognitive functions why do we deny them the basic rights we give to humans, when some humans including infants lack these skills? Should we keep these animals for our own amusement or instrument, we don't with ourselves but why is it ok with them? I won't comment on my opinion, but these are important ethical questions worth thinking about.

I recommend:

• The bonobo and the atheist.
  
  
• Age of empathy
  
  
• Beyond the brain.

Although this sort of historical approach may work for some people, and it will definitely give you a very good background, it certainly didn't work for me. I wanted to get ideas that were articulated in easy to understand contemporary terms that I could grapple with right away without having to worry about interpreting them correctly first.

I started in early high school, after being recommended by a friend who was majoring in philosophy at the time with The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law which gave a great and really readable introduction to a lot of philosophy problems. Depending on your previous knowledge of philosophy, it might be a bit basic, but even still it's a worthwhile read I think.

From then, I went on The Mind's I by Daniel Dennett and Douglass Hofstadter, which was a really good and fun introduction to philosophy of mind and related issues. After that I think you'll have enough exposure to dive into various subjects and authors that you come across.

Not really. There's really great evidence that our basic morality is a condition of evolution - certain attitudes, such as disliking cheating and liking kindness, are good for the species in the long run, so our brains are wired for some basic kindness, even if it's selfish kindness (I help you because you'll probably help me later).

This kind of moral framework is completely supportable in the absence of any god, and it's objective across all humanity because we all share in that same evolution. Granted, the duties and morals imposed by God are on a different and stricter level, but we are more or less programmed to be kind to those who are like us. You can see this book if you're in any way interested.

Beyond an objective (if basic) morality, you've got objective things like math and science and history and pretty much anything we can study. 2+2=4 isn't up for debate, although "is patricide wrong" might be.

"Team Geek" by Fitzpatrick/Sussman

For me, theory has always been easy to pick up. But learning how to work well in a team has been a real challenge (especially dealing with unproductive people), and this book is a great resource for precisely that.

I'm also a fan of "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology"; This book is what first got me interested in and thinking about artificial intelligence at a young age.

Both books are short, cheap, and easy and fun to read even for the layperson or the young.

Seth Lloyd -- Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos

Gregory Chaitin -- How real are real numbers? -- this paper, and all of Chaitin's writing, has been hugely influential on my thinking

I haven't read it, but I have heard Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence highly recommended. Ditto for Max Tegmark's Life 3.0.

I also recommend reading anything by David Chalmers, just on general principle. The Conscious Mind is a good place to start. I find his methods of contemplating the problems of consciousness to be more robust than the standard fare. The hard problem of consciousness (as Chalmers has dubbed it) suggests that there is something fundamental about what we are that modern science has completely failed to capture, even in the most sketch outline.

To go further, I recommend reading in a mystical direction. Specifically, ask yourself why there are patterns in mystical traditions that have arisen independently? And these are not just vague, hand-wavey correlations, but very specific, detailed correlations like the anatomical descriptions of dragons as winged serpents that slither through the sky, and so on. See Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and subsequent works for more along these lines.

If this is getting too far afield then you can ask yourself an even more basic question: why do we experience dreams and where, exactly, are these experiences happening? If you say, "it's all just remixes of past experiences being sloshed around in your skull like those #DeepDream images", how come they are so specifically odd and out-of-character? I have had extended conversations in my dreams with people I know (and people I have never met) and the detailed character of these conversations is far beyond anything that my pathetic brain could cook up, even by remixing past experiences. In short, when I dream, I am sometimes having genuine experiences, just not the kind of experiences I have in my waking body. Anyone who has had a lucid dream (I have experienced this a handful of times) is acutely aware of the fact that dream-space is some other place than the meat-space we occupy during waking hours. Where is this other place and why does it exist? What does it really mean to have conscious experience?

Autobiography of a Yogi - While not mind altering, it gave me a new perspective on things I would have initially labeled as quackery.

The Believing Brain by David Shermer - explains the mechanics of why we believe in the things we do without any critical examination especially on topics like religion, politics, ghosts, and conspiracy theories.

Awareness by Osho - Osho might have been a controversial personality, but some of his writings were brilliant and refreshing. This book blew me away and provoked me to live life more consciously and with greater deliberation.

The Freedom of Choice by Tom Chalko - Simple but powerful read (only 100 pages)

I'll take the time to write it up if you meant that sincerely (because I haven't tried explaining it to someone else before, which is usually pretty helpful for understanding).

But if you meant that facetiously, I expect you'll be surprised how much about the phenomenon of consciousness has been convincingly explained (or, rather, explained away) in the last 20 years. Watch some videos via Google, or try this 9 year old book with some mind-changing perspectives on the subject.

Happy exploring!

I mostly have a lot of books that helped me, but here are the most influential ones that I've read recently:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow
  
• Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics
  
• Thinking and Deciding
  
• The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
  
  I can't overstate their importance, but I also don't think I can do four large books worth of content justice without a very substantial amount of writing. The gist is that they're books about how our minds actually work, and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage to make better choices and have beliefs that reflect reality.

It's still very questionable how close we are to understanding consciousness. From just dabbling into the mind sciences and the different camps there, it really doesn't seem like we're quite there yet. But even if our technology can eventually create the conditions for consciousness, I think Buddhism will become more relevant.

For example, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Evan Thompson are all examples of a Buddhist-inspired approach to the science of mind. Check out (though be warned you're entering into the fray of some heavy philosophy-speak) Embodied Mind, Mind in Life, and a textbook on the subject, The Tree of Knowledge. To them, the contemplative disciplines of the East (and the West for that matter - what has survived through the traditions), are all examples of a deeply sophisticated "inner science" that can actually help inform and guide the scientific understanding of consciousness. In short, I think the trend we have today is telling: as neuroscience and consciousness studies develop, the Western interest in Buddhism also seems to be increasing.

I think a few other popular books are Rick Hanson's Buddha's Brain and B. Alan Wallace's Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge Hope this was helpful!

Edit ~ Forgot to mention something about reincarnation. Well, many traditions have an esoteric perspective on reality, an inner dimension, and in some sense, an inner world with its own laws and realities that are in some respects more real than our material senses. So, some might be against uploading their consciousness for fear of stagnating their own spiritual evolution. Personally, I learn towards believing that reality is more than our contemporary, secular culture can articulate. So even with AI, I think these spiritual realities will not become "irrelevant" - but if we believe like many of the traditions do that there are subtle bodies (etheric, astral, etc) - then there are certain dangers in attempting to create life and mind without awareness of these. This is borderline science fiction, but I can imagine a gnostic fear of spiritual "entrapment." A consciousness that has lost its soul - or worse yet, a soul that is ensnared within a machine and unable to move on because it is missing critical spiritual bodies that would allow it to move onto the next life (or beyond this world). Should make for some interesting new mythologies...

On the other hand, scientists may unwittingly create the conditions for the etheric (the animating force of life, chi or ki), and other bodies simply by learning the physical principles of life. So artificial beings may also have chakras and energy channels - and there may even be new spiritual traditions and metaphysics that humans may not be able to understand. Anyhow, many traditions speak of transcending the ego and allowing the "higher self" to guide us - well, maybe, just maybe, an AI might be a suitable mind for the Higher Self, or Daimon, to descend and incarnate. Whoo, this is fun thinking about. This is sounding like a science fiction version of Sri Aurobindo's "Supramental descent."

I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I've found cognitive behavioral therapy to be helpful for depression and anxiety.

Specifically, this book, which lays out a 7 week plan to address your underlying thought patterns.

I hope this provides some help for you, and that you're able to find some comfort.

Good luck to you.

Every book on consciousness will have its own pet theory. I haven't found many great books on the neuroscience of consciousness, though Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch have a pretty good review paper on the subject. The one caveat is that they mostly review evidence for their own theory of consciousness, the Information Integration Theory.

As for the philosophy of consciousness, there are a number of good books, again each with their own agenda/pet theory. If you want the entire spectrum of opinions, check out Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness, which both provides a good overview of the field and also offers a defense of Churchland's materialist view; I'd also check out John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, which presents Searle's biological naturalism, a sort of "centrist" view in the array of popular positions, and which is written in very straightforward language; a third option, which is more complicated than the other two but is really important in the field, is Chalmers' The Conscious Mind.

Hope that helps!

INTJ generally when taking such tests, but I can't say that I consider them all that worthwhile.

I take the Stuart J Ritchie approach to IQ (he's the author of Intelligence: All That Matters) ... that it's valuable to be aware of the concept but not particular worthwhile finding out your own.

> BR: Is there any reason why a person would want to know their IQ?

> SR: I don't think it's particularly useful.

> I don't know what my IQ is. One of the guys in the psychology department here knows, because he tested me. And there's always a slight awkwardness when we're talking about IQ. He knows what my IQ is. But I have not, and I have no interest in knowing.

I'm glad to hear someone has the good sense to start you at a low dose. I've read way too many stories of people being prescribed to take the mid-range dose right off the bat. Inevitably they feel panic, sweating, "going crazy" ect. because almost no one should start on such a dose. I told my doctor I would quarter what he prescribed for the first week at least, maybe the first month. I've had every side effect from SSRI's- twitching, bruising, teeth clenching, stiff neck, additional anxiety and of course the debilitating nausea, ohhhhh the nausea. I recommend no coffee and no alcohol for the first month as well. It helps with the sickness. Anyone trying to break through the beginning of SSRI treatment is fighting the good fight though. I really do think it will be worth it. My doctor is an Upper Eastside old school man who would just as happily give all the Xanax a patient could ask for, so yeah, need to find a new doctor! He wants to up that kind of drug and I said no thank you many times. I wish you the best of luck. Tapering is the way to go for sure. this is a good workbook: https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depression-ebook/dp/B01M0ILKMQ/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1550449292&sr=8-7&keywords=cbt+workbook

Bart Ehrman's books & videos are a great start for the accuracy of the Bible. He is very clear especially considering he's an academic. Forged would be the best one specifically about the accuracy of the Bible. His books are linked at his website: http://www.bartdehrman.com/books.htm

There are no historical documents of Jesus' life, only a few references to Christians from later documents. Nobody disputes that people believed in Jesus, so those don't really prove anything. It's clear that people believed in Thor and Zeus too. That doesn't mean a thing.

Whether faith is helpful or good, can't help you there. I think it's totally useless except to control sociopaths with low IQs.

For morality, check out Good without God: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Without-God-Billion-Nonreligious/dp/006167012X

or Sam Harris The Moral Landscape: http://www.samharris.org/the-moral-landscape

Science vs religion: that's kind of apples & oranges despite what believers keep saying. Science is a method of investigating hunches. Religion is subservience to an unproven deity.

How about the science of religion? Try Michael Shermer: The Science of Good and Evil: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805077693/ or The Believing Brain: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250008808/ or Why We Believe Weird Things: http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893/

Thanks for visiting. An unexamined belief system is not worth believing!

> If I want to learn more about this stuff, where do I start?

Not sure if it covers all that you're asking for, but if you want to get a solid base on intelligence and the research on it, here are a few good starting points published in the last year.

160-page digest: Intelligence: All That Matters

Textbook: The Neuroscience of Intelligence (Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology)

> heritability isn't a measure of genetics.

Now you're playing semantics to the utmost. The fact of the matter is you inherit certain genes from your parents. Your idea that nothing is actually genetically inherited is strange. IQ has been shown to be heritable, as has height. I understand the societal expectations creating the earring "heritability" but I have no idea what you're talking about when you say IQ isn't at least partially inherited from your parents.

> If you're going to so easily dismiss all the relevant scientists on this topic then what differentiates your position from creationism?

Because a professor of genetics at Harvard isn't saying that the position that Christianity is false is scientifically untenable (I would refer you to Dr. David Reich, Ph.D's article in the New York Times). In fact, here's some of it, followed by a link:

> I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

His article is a canary in the coalmine event. He claims to have NO IDEA! what we're going to find out about group differences going forward. Then why the hell is he so nervous? Because he knows that the odds are extremely high that the average IQ of a fully-nourished sub-Saharan African population and a fully-nourished Ashkenazi Jew population with equal access to education are not both 100.000000000000000000000000000000. You know that too, you just can't admit it, so you appeal to a scientific consensus that exists because people are terrified of having their careers destroyed. About that consensus...

> Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference.

That is from the rebuttal letter 67 scientists "wrote" in response to Reich's article in the NYT.

That rebuttal letter is here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich

Allow me to destroy that argument (and the credibility of that rebuttal letter):

> Why so many African-Americans have high blood pressure
Theories include higher rates of obesity and diabetes among African-Americans. Researchers have also found that there may be a gene that makes African-Americans much more salt sensitive. In people who have this gene, as little as one extra gram (half a teaspoon) of salt could raise blood pressure as much as 5 mm Hg.

https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/why-high-blood-pressure-is-a-silent-killer/high-blood-pressure-and-african-americans

Oops! I guess the American Heart Association is a eugenics society now.

> As for people like Jensen and Rushton, how do you feel about the concept of "conflict of interest"? Are you aware of the Pioneer Fund?

This is an ad hominem attack. Does the medical literature back what he was saying, or not? Has "compensatory education" increased IQ, or not? According to Dr. Haier, it HAS NOT! He has explicity said that compensatory education has not closed the black/white IQ gap. Dr. Haier's position (and he reveals this in his latest book) is that IQ is heritable, and we can raise it using CRISPR. The most generous interpretations of IQ being raised by compensatory education grant that it raised IQ by 4 points in cases of the application of an extremely rigorous program. That's 1/3 of a deviation. According to Haier, what happens is in children it looks like you can increase IQ a great deal, but as the child gets older, IQ becomes more heritable. In other words they lose those "gains".

A description of Haier's book (it was published 2.5 years ago):

> This book introduces new and provocative neuroscience research that advances our understanding of intelligence and the brain. Compelling evidence shows that genetics plays a more important role than environment as intelligence develops from childhood, and that intelligence test scores correspond strongly to specific features of the brain assessed with neuroimaging. In understandable language, Richard J. Haier explains cutting-edge techniques based on genetics, DNA, and imaging of brain connectivity and function. He dispels common misconceptions, such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless, and debunks simple interventions alleged to increase intelligence. Readers will learn about the real possibility of dramatically enhancing intelligence based on neuroscience findings and the positive implications this could have for education and social policy. The text also explores potential controversies surrounding neuro-poverty, neuro-socioeconomic status, and the morality of enhancing intelligence for everyone.

https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=richard+haier+intelligence&qid=1562195024&s=gateway&sr=8-4

I can't speak for all roboticists, but I'm a big fan of Mark's work. He has helped to show us that one can achieve sophisticated behavior with relatively simple machines. Valentino Braitenberg made a similar point in his wonderful book Vehicles.

Read naturalist explanations of decision-making, the image of the self, how thoughts work, qualia, etc. You probably want to start with I am a Strange Loop, then Consciousness Explained, and work your way to Godel Escher Bach. There are also many essays online about the non-supernatural nature of the mind, this one being one that atheist Redditors link to often. Also see Wikipedia articles about the mind, free will, etc.

Even after I became an atheist, I could not shake the feeling that consciousness could not be just patterns of atoms. Even in a universe that follows rules and that was not deliberately created as part of a plan, I thought that maybe there's some kind of "soul stuff" that interacts with our brains and is responsible for consciousness. But then, if I can tell that I am conscious, then 1) the soul stuff impacts the natural world and is thus observable and not supernatural, and 2) I am no different from a computer that understands itself well enough to say it is conscious. (It helped me to think of AIs from fiction, like HAL and Data, and try to think of what it would be "like" to be them. Books like The Mind's I are full of such thought experiments). So after thinking about it for a while, I was able to shed that last and most persistent bit of supernaturalism and embrace the naturalistic view of the mind.

> I could try to argue all this but I really don't have the knowledge for it

Admirable of you to admit, rather than getting angry and stomping off. I encourage you to look into it yourself, but I can't really recommend any sources to go to. What I can do is recommend you maybe have a look at The Believing Brain, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and, if you're feeling up to it, God is Not Great.

My first actual submission to r/atheism and first attempt at a rage comic. I know these are pretty cliche nowadays, but I had fun expressing myself with this and I hope someone else enjoys it. I highly recommend the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254

I actually disagree completely with your central objection here. You object that OP conflates emotions and morals, and state that you don't need one to have the other. I think that you absolutely do need emotions to have morals, and Vulcan's as a hypothetical aren't even a good imaginary test case for an example of people who have no emotions who do have morals for exactly the reason that they DO have emotions. Very strong emotions, in fact so strong that their entire planet turned to suppressing their emotions in a last ditch effort to achieve any kind of lasting culture.

I don't see how you're drawing a line between desire and emotion. What is desire if not an emotion? What is it to say you desire something if there is no emotion driving it? In my view, the nature of desire/emotion/value judgement is not nearly so clear cut.

You're right that Data has desires, and he also clearly has things he values. In my view, these behaviors constitute emotional states, although his outward expression of these emotions and his subjective experience of them are clearly very different from a human beings. That isn't to say he is flawed or broken, only that he is different. He is mistaken when he says he has no emotions, when what he really means is that he doesn't have the subjective experience of emotions that humans have. The emotion chip provides him with that subjective experience, but this is a change in how he experiences emotions, not the create of emotion ex nihilo.

For more about emotions and morals, I would refer you to The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz. No need to read it if you have no interest in the subject, but if it sparks your interest I found it to be a really great read on moral sentimentalism/emotionism.

Yeah I wish I could give you some better points about your mom but that's one of those things she's going to have to work through on her own. Your little sister though doesn't deserve to just hear crap. Honestly, one of the best refutations to conspiracy beliefs is to just point out the absurdities of it all. Laugh at them, because they have no sense of humility.

A good book on the subject if The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer. Maybe you could see if your local library has that or even buy it for her at some point and see if she's into it.

Lots of people in here saying you should seek help but not really helping you with what help to seek.

Look into a specific type of therapy for this - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

You can buy a self help book online, they're fairly cheap. Or, you can look into a therapist that can go into that with you. This is a very good book for that

Work on yourself, don't let depression beat you down too hard.

Yes, it most certainly does, as do the dozens of studies that it explicitly references in doing so.

And, for kicks, the Introduction to Neuroscience textbook that I linked above explicitly refutes the core arguments that you made at the beginning of this thread.

Here's what you said - MasterDefibrillator:
> "The neurosciences, the closest field to an expert opinion on human intelligence, generally look at the IQ test as a specific measure of your ability to do specific problems well. They go out of their way to point out that IQ can not be linked to any general measure of intelligence."

Here's what they say about that (You can read the introduction on Amazon if you log in):

Haier, R. (2016) The Neuroscience of Intelligence, NY: Cambridge University Press.

> "Among the many myths about intelligence, perhaps the most pernicious is that intelligence is a concept too amorphous and ill-defined for scientific study. In fact, the definition and measures used for research are sufficiently developed for empirical investigations and have been so for over 100 years."


> "There are many tests of specific mental abilities. We have over 100 years of research about how such tests relate to each other. Here's what we know: Different mental abilities are not independent. They are all related to each other and the correlations among mental tests are always positive. That means if you do well on one kind of mental ability test, you tend to do well on other tests."


> "IQ scores are good estimates of g [general factor of intelligence] because most IQ tests are based on a battery of tests that sample many mental factors, an important aspect of g."


> "...the attack on tests is, to a very considerable and very frightening degree, an attack on truth itself by those who deal with unpleasant and unflattering truths by denying them and by attacking and trying to destroy the evidence for them."

Cheers.

I really enjoyed Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind presents another popular view which, if I recall correctly, opposes Dennett's views. I'm slowly getting into work's by Steven Pinker.

Probably a general Philosophy of Mind reader would also benefit you just to get a good idea of the different views and topics out there within the discipline. I cannot remember which one I read years ago, although if I read one today I'd pick Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind or Kim's Philosophy of Mind.

Awesome! I take it you're not seeing clients yet. I'm applying to internship this year (ugh!). I'm going to give you a reading list because I'm super biased about all this stuff. You have no obligation to read anything I suggest. I'm a contemporary behavior therapy person myself. (ACT, DBT, BA, FAP, MI).

Randomized trial of behavioral activation, cognitive therapy, and antidepressant medication in the acute treatment of adults with major depression. Lead author is Sona Dimidjian (2006) That builds off a Jacobson study (http://tinyurl.com/lb82qhj).

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Functional-Analytic-Psychotherapy-Behaviorism/dp/0387097864 (this form of therapy could use any uncomfortable situations about your hand to become a therapeutic tool.)

http://www.amazon.com/ACT-Made-Simple-Easy---Read/dp/1572247053/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377316771&sr=1-1&keywords=act+made+simple This is the biggest modern behavior therapy. It's based of relational frame theory (http://www.amazon.com/Learning-RFT-Introduction-Relational-Application/dp/1572249064/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377316825&sr=1-1&keywords=learning+rft)

Last book I'll recommend is the main DBT book. (http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Treatment-Borderline-Personality-Disorder/dp/0898621836)

For sure read the first two articles. They're super important. The rest is just the stuff I'm interested in because I'm biased. Let me know if you ever want to nerd out about the behavioral side of CBT.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_sop=15&_nkw=arduino&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1

$25 will easily buy everything you need except the computer/laptop to program it with. How many 'kits' are yo talking about? Instead of buying the same for each set, I would get a range of sensors/actuators and maybe save some money and see what people use.

Start with an arduino, a light sensor and a couple of servos. This is a good book for some simple yet very complex ideas.


Maybe a better idea would give them a cheap arduino and a $20 budget and let them pick out what they want.

most philosophers of mind are physicalists:

Accept or lean toward: physicalism 526 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 252 / 931 (27%)
Other 153 / 931 (16.4%)

Most continental philosophers of mind are non-physicalists.

For reductive physicalism, the strongest work is typically taken to be Kim's, which the following monograph by him lays out well: http://www.amazon.com/Physicalism-Something-Princeton-Monographs-Philosophy/dp/0691113750

Against reductionism, the strongest work is typically taken to be on Multiple Realizability, which started with Putnam. You may want to check out his Representation and Reality.

https://youtu.be/ycUvC9s4VYA This video is in the CES letter and poses some GREAT questions and points. I say "all" generally here, but I daresay ALL people who participate in ANY religion have had their own "witness" that what THEY believe is true.

Are they all/we all wrong? Absolutely not. But only because we are all different (societies, families, countries, cultures), and so what's "true" and "right" for each of us, individually, *must* change based on the individual.

PLUS the beautiful way you put it: spirits (or human consciousness if that's what you're into) respond to "moral beauty." (My dad is a music teacher and taught a Music & Psychophysiology class. Roughly put, is actually NO physical link between the ear and the spine, leaving no physical explanation for why you feel chills down your spine when you hear beautiful music. #MoralBeauty)

PLUS brains are built to justify their beliefs. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GHN26W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 (I'm only a couple chapters into this so can't fully endorse, but it's very interesting to me so far, despite the fact that I still hold spiritual beliefs (most would consider my spiritual beliefs to be a "woo-woo" or "new-age" variety)).

It's a good thought, but there are easier ways to do this that have been in use for a while, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knockout_mouse

There's even a relatively new technique called RNA interference that literally blocks mRNA from being transcribed, so you don't need to knock out the gene at all.

Moreover, we already have an (admittedly incomplete) understanding of what genes are involved in intelligence, and the answer is a lot. I think we're up to 1,000 or so. Ca^2+ transporters, respiratory chain proteins, you name it. May i recommend this book.

I picked up Smithsonian's [Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises] (https://www.dk.com/us/9780789489906-smithsonian-handbooks-whales--dolphins/) yesterday, along with The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, but I'll be sure to check this out, too. Thanks for your help!

From the first 40 pages, it looks like a discussion on free will, determinism, religion, morality, etc. It's interesting, and the pages are really short. Reminds me of one of the stories of The Mind's I.
Edit: reading a bit further, it has a nice twist halfway.. I daren't predict what the rest is about.

I think it can be, and there is a rich history in psychological philosophy of declaring behavior a subject matter in its own right.

But, the psychological sciences are unique in that they are "loopy;" scientists, who behave, seek to understand the behavior of others. And this understanding reflects back on society, giving us new ways to view behavior, which in turn changes our behavior. So, yeah, there is always going to be bias. (This is not my idea, but Louise Barrett's, who wrote this book.

But, we have to remember that there has always been this bias, and we have progressed greatly anyway.

If you're interested in the study of behavior through a very pragmatic way, "behavior is a subject matter in its own right," I suggest you check out [radical behaviorism] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism#Natural_science), just to give you an idea about how behavior can be viewed as a natural science. (Note: no, the behaviorists aren't dead, and every day the view is given more and more credence).

Thank you! This stuff was off the top of my head but strongly influenced by a recent reading of Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain. In this highly recommended book, Shermer pulls together a lot of neuro research including much that's fairly recent. Because of its up-to-date quality, I recommend this book over the "classic," The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

I believe I've correctly reproduced (or at least excerpted) what I learned from the book, but you (or rather the OP) will certainly be better off getting this directly from the horse's mouth.

> (1) why am I so convinced that I could think something different?

You might be interested in Gary Drescher's account of free will, as it directly offers an explanation for your conviction. Specifically, he postulates that your intuition comes from an absence of a particular processing mechanism within your cognitive arsenal. The proposed mechanism, the "prejudiced-context principle", is responsible for preprocessing context-action-expectation schemas and removing paths that would mutually negate one another. While the principle could ultimately inform philosophical knots within volition, ethics, and Newcomb problems, Drescher argues that it was simply not selected-for across evolutionary time.

> (2) why would the truth value of any proposition I think matter?

What sort of significance are you inquiring about? What would happen if you learned that it probably doesn't matter, at least in the way you desire?

You should talk to a professional but in the meantime look for a book about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT. It can help and you can practice it yourself.

This book is free for prime members on Amazon. I haven't read it yet but it has decent reviews.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01M0ILKMQ/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_QM-3Db7NTBG5H

[An excellent book on the question] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/0805091254)
It's a good read :]

If you're interested in consciousness, The Mind's I is a great collection of essays and dialogues from different authors, most of which are very accessible. They cover the topic from a lot of different angles and do a good job of prompting the kind of conceptual groundwork you need in order to delve deeper into the subject.

so how can you not know about bayes theroem, or different reasoning skills? i'm quite happy to say that its a personal interest of mine. i enjoy reading articles and books on psychology, i'm far from an expert in the field... but i know enough not to go around screaming about biases and balance in a public forum where it promises to have none of those.

And yes there are people who have done research into this kind of thing...

https://www.amazon.com/Judgment-under-Uncertainty-Heuristics-Biases-ebook/dp/B00D2WQFP2?ie=UTF8&keywords=judgment%20under%20uncertainty%20heuristics%20and%20biases&qid=1374586297&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Maybe this was already obvious to you, in which case apologies, but those are very broad topics. What kind of level of aggregation are you thinking of? Neural engineering sounds a bit more neural network-y, rather than large-scale human cognitive processes, which would involve measurement methods like EEG and fMRI that won't tell you much (broadly speaking) about the way networks of neurons do computations. You also have local field potential or clamping measurements, where you're looking at what specific neurons (or at least way smaller scales) are doing, which is more animal research. And there's computational modelling which is (relatively, to my knowledge) as yet hardly connected to the usual methods of measuring brain activity.

That said: I read this as an intro to neural networks, http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computational-Neuroscience-Thomas-Trappenberg/dp/0199568413 and remember liking it, but I was coming from a psych background so I don't know if it would be rigorous enough for you. For the biology / anatomy, the classic is http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/dp/0071390111/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=17R09KD62178HQ06E1VJ.

There's a paper by Wang (1999) with an integrate-and-fire neuron model that I implemented as a toy model that helped me get to grips with the computational side of things. I can't comment on how influential it is theoretically.

That's uh... a pretty broad topic. I thought this book was a pretty interesting take on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct-Reinforce-ebook/dp/B004GHN26W

​

Shermer would never suggest that there are "absolutely, positively" no aliens. But that's a different position than claiming there might be extra terrestrial intelligence in the universe (after all, humans are proof that it's possible). I think what he's talking about is how easily some people accept the tales of UFO visitations and abductions, usually without proof. He wrote about this in depth in his book The Believing Brain, which I highly recommend. In the book, he claims that the brain is a "belief engine" and explains why.

Playing devil's advocate: your use of the word "essence" could be taken as question-begging. Who says you have one, and what is it?

But to answer the question, the brain's clearly got a lot to do with it, but many thinkers would say that the body is also important. See Mind in Life by Evan Thompson, for example. I don't know whether I'd go as far as Thompson does, but I think you can make a good case that a lot of our thinking about the brain and the mind is still influenced by the Cartesian split between the rational soul and the mechanical body.

Forget a Hollywood movie, there are entire philosophical treatises devoted to what Karl cleverly sums up in that one sentence. Here's a good philosophical exploration of it.

Loving the feedback--thank you! I've also found a couple of highly rated books regarding observations on cetacean intelligence and social structure:

Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Dolphins and Whales https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226503410/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Za1YxbZZHJTBV

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins https://www.amazon.com/dp/022632592X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Kf1YxbNSC7VFD

I suggest getting (Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks: A Workbook for Managing Depression and Anxiety)[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01M0ILKMQ/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492347094&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=7+weeks+cbt] The book helps with depression and helps you to identify your vaules and align your actions with these values. Identifying your values is a good start when nithing brings you joy. The book also does a lot to help with climbing out of depression.

The next question is, of course:

Why must it happen slowly? Assuming the emulation is perfect (and barring physics), why couldn't it happen instantly?

Of course - it continues to go deeper. If you liked GEB - then check out:

http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912/

>In many cases, there's no particular object that you're thinking about, unless we classify concepts or ideas as 'objects'.

In those cases, we are referring to patterns that we can detect.

All that means is that we have a "circle detector", which just means we have neurons that can detect a circle.

Same as how I have "dog detector" neurons. Its the same thing.

>But concepts and ideas appear to be abstract objects, not concrete physical things.

Not as far as I can tell.

It seems we can describe this stuff physically.

>I'm not talking about neurons when I talk in the abstract about cars. This is just obvious.

"this is just obvious" is not an argument.

>If you want to learn more about the prospects for reducing the semantic to the neurophysiological, you should read Putnam's Representation and Reality. I think it'll do a lot to bring you up to speed; I remember finding it helpful, at least.

You're welcome to present whatever is relevant from that in your own words.

Humans do confirmation bias really well, and educated ones do it even better. Read:
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GHN26W/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_RUjPybEGBFJ8D

The author of that article recently released another book called The Believing Brain which covers agenticity, among other things, in great detail. I'm in the process of listening to the audio version and I recommend it.


Also, here's a link to a video where he covers an outline of what's covered in the book.

I apologize for the x-post, but it appears /r/cogsci doesn't allow self.posts, so I submitted it again. Sorry, but methinks relevant to /r/cogsci.

Given that Daniel Dennett has recently published a book on thought experiments called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, I thought it would be good to show one of Dennett's most famous intuition pumps.

This section of the movie is based on Daniel Dennett's though experiment first published in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology and reprinted in his famous compendium with Douglas Hofstadter, The Mind's I.

The original paper is available here and elsewhere online.

The movie itself is a documentary and dramatization of several themes in the book The Mind's I and includes an interview with Douglas Hofstadter earlier on (a name that should be familiar to many /r/cogsci folks)

The cogsci-relevant parts of the movie are a bit dated, but still relevant nonetheless.

Here are two excellent books in this very subject:

The Believing Brain and Why People Believe Weird Things both by Michael Shermer, the head of the skeptic's society.

There is one passage which describes what you are talking about to a "T"

>In 1620 English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon offered his own Easy Answer to the Hard Question:

>The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate … And such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, although this happened much oftener, neglect and pass them by.52

>Why do smart people believe weird things? Because, to restate my thesis in light of Bacon’s insight, smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

From: http://www.michaelshermer.com/weird-things/excerpt/

and

From: http://www.michaelshermer.com/2002/09/smart-people-believe-weird-things/

Alanzo

This is a nice place to start. Here is another free online asset.

MATLAB for Neuroscientists will probably come in handy.

Theoretical Neuroscience is a classic.

Then we have Fundamentals of Computational Neuroscience.

I was trying to remember another book title (it's hard when they all have "whales" in it), and stumbled across this, which looks reeeeeally interesting. I haven't read it, but the summary looks really good.

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

>but I do see something that I'm 90% sure people who consider themselves religious can't see.

You mean like experiencing the Holy Spirit?

Yea, a few of us figured out that is a brain process. Michael Shermer recently wrote a whole book about it.

Short answer - don't believe everything you think.

An introduction to philosophy of mind I liked very much is by Susan Blackmore
https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Introduction-2nd-Susan-Blackmore/dp/0199739099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486244346&sr=8-1&keywords=susan+blackmore


You could also find a good bibliography in these 2 sites
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/

https://inpho.cogs.indiana.edu/taxonomy/2370/view.html

Most of us are unconscious several times in every 24 hour period, hopefully while safely in bed, so with so much discontinuity in our consciousness there is no reason to assume that today you possess "the same consciousness" as yesterday, but nor is there much of a reason to deny it either. It's a very typical metaphysical dilemma, in that it seems at first to suggest two distinct possibilities, one of which must be true and the other false, but on reflection it turns out there is no way (even in principle) to distinguish between them, so we may have been tricked by the appearance of a dilemma, but which just gives us two different ways of describing or approaching the same thing.

A common approach to creationism is to note that it describes an infinite set of possibilities: the universe might have been created at any instant in the past (even seconds ago) and you along with it, with all your memories in place so as to fool you into think the universe is much older. Much as fossils of dinosaurs are supposed to be a trick (put there by Satan?) in the more popular kinds of creationism.

Pretty much any idea that is likely to occur to us about minds/memory has occurred before to a lot of people and hence has been extensively written about by philosophers. Has anyone pointed you toward this book yet? It's a classic compendium of stuff along these lines.

I would highly recommend these book to help draw out the debatable distinction:

>Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Alva Noe, 2009)

>Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Evan Thompson, 2010)

If you are interested in this subject I would highly recommend David Chalmers "The Conscious Mind".

This book is basically dedicated to answering the question, "why do people believe things" and points out several ways in which people trick themselves into believing only what they want to believe and how it results in ignoring facts that do not fit with their pre-conceived paradigm.

It is full of science, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the topic.

There is a book that goes through this scenario by accepting the Everett explanation of quantum mechanics: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Real-Demystifying-Paradoxes-Bradford/dp/0262042339

I recommend that you don't read it: it will suck you in and torment you. Just enjoy life mate.

These are a few I tend to mention:

• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone.
  
• This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes and The Tao is Silent, by Raymond Smullyan.
  
• The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, edited by Hofstadter and Dennett.
  
• Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes.
  
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright.
  
• Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang.
  
• Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome.
  
  You should read all of them! I can elaborate some if you'd like, but, really, only to the degree that it'd take to get you to read them; at that point they can speak for themselves far better than I can for them.

I'd suggest Good and Real by Gary Drescher. Also take a look at lesswrong.com, especially the sequences

Sometimes I wish I could forget having read this stuff just so I could enjoy reading them for the first time again. Enjoy!

Consciousness: An Introduction, by Susan Blackmore, is great. http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-An-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/0199739099

…ou alors peut-être que l'auteur s'est intéressé à l'état de la science sur le sujet ?

Si tu t'intéresses au sujet (et que tu parles anglais), tu devrais lire ce petit livre. Il n'est pas écrit par un journaliste mais par un chercheur spécialiste du sujet (lui) et est la meilleure introduction que j'ai vu sur l'état de la recherche sur l'intelligence pour le grand public. Ça devrait te faire reconsidérer ta vision des choses.

Have you checked out r/LucidDreaming? It's more about techniques for gaining greater conscious control, and AFIAK there's little in the way of consciousness research along the lines you bring up (since no-one can even agree on how to define consciousness, we really don't have a place to begin); but it is fertile ground for speculation.

Though it has little material in the way of lucid dreaming, The Mind's I is a classic collection of accessible essays on consciousness from empirical perspectives; and Dream Work is likewise a classic on LDing.

> But we're talking about whether or not there's something nonphysical about me being able to read and listen, right? Different things can get me to think about the same object?

In many cases, there's no particular object that you're thinking about, unless we classify concepts or ideas as 'objects'. But concepts and ideas appear to be abstract objects, not concrete physical things.

> As far as I'm concerned, you're talking about something phsyical: neurons.

I'm not talking about neurons when I talk in the abstract about cars. This is just obvious.

If you want to learn more about the prospects for reducing the semantic to the neurophysiological, you should read Putnam's Representation and Reality. I think it'll do a lot to bring you up to speed; I remember finding it helpful, at least.

> Of course it's contested, but so is evolution. If anyone would like to link me to any serious evidence, I would be delighted.

Here's a book on the subject from about 15 years ago. The author has written a lot on related topics since, and has also published more recent articles since on many of the problems discussed in the book.

What an ass. There's already a perfectly good cog sci/philosophy of mind book called "The Mind's I." It's a collection of essays edited by Hofstaedter, the guy who wrote Goedel, Escher, Bach.

http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290264547&sr=8-1

I really enjoyed this book...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/0805091254

I recommend some books to you:

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785

http://www.amazon.com/The-Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self/dp/0465030912

Your sense of self, your "I", your mind, is produced by your brain, which is a physical structure that is not destroyed and remade during sleep. This is why you remember what happened yesterday. "You" are a pile of grey goo in a skull.

A good book that expands on this is The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

I don't think the subjective self (what I think you are calling "mind" here) is something separate from the physical brain (standard Cartesian Duality), but rather, is a property of it.

Couple of books I can recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy/dp/0195117891
https://www.amazon.com/Neurophilosophy-Toward-Unified-Science-Mind-Brain/dp/0262530856

The Richard Haier book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence, he mentioned.

https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/538634aee4b0b15c0516a524/t/583cb4a8c534a59807bbec47/1480373417496/the-neuroscience-of-intelligence-preview.pdf

You may be interested in the books Optima for Animals and Vehicles.

As /u/Das_Erlebnis said, there's tons of literature in the philosophy of mind. Check out some books, e.g. Chalmer's [The Conscious Mind] (https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy/dp/0195117891/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8) and Dennett's [Consciousness Explained] (https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MK07ERGEZ7B8NBW6JBS1).

Edit: I'll add Nagel's essay [What is it like to be a bat?] (http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf) to the list.

Check out Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Thompson, 2007).

Really interesting work on this subject.

It might have been the good and the real by Gary Drescher.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Real-Demystifying-Paradoxes-Bradford/dp/0262042339

The first couple of chapters of "Good and Real" are helpful here.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Good and Real - each could be considered a canon of rationalist thought on evolution of humankind and ethics respectively.

Listen to this man, he is exactly right. Have you ever read this? Constructs this exact argument very well.

This book might help you understand some things

You should read The Mind's I by Dennett and Hofstadter. There are a couple of essays that discuss this very problem, and they pose some interesting questions as to where in the brain the consciousness exists and how you might go about simulating it.

i recommend this book, written by an academic, since you dont seem to be up to date on the psychometric literature

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493545072&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligence+stuart+ritchie

I agree with the other posters who suggested Dennett and Hofstadter... They also collaborated on a book called "The Mind's I"

Another suggestion would be "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software"

I recently finished the book The Emotional Construction Of Morals by Jesse Prinz Book and he has some interesting points about Evolution and Morality.
His points are definitely more for arguing against such a claim, one of his arguments specifically says that just because something is evolutionarily good or ensures survival does necessarily imply optimization but rather effectiveness (Two similar but different things). Therefore evolutionary processes are poor examples of moral optimization.

He definitely refers to some authors who argue that point though.

This book is decent It also has a chapter on Ayn Rand objectivism as a cult.

Also see another book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/1250008808/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=128C3144EKDPV7SQPYRY


Among the Truthers is also not bad.

> I am a Strange Loop


Hofstadter also wrote The Minds I, which is another interesting read.

Seconding this choice, since this book is more about science and skepticism rather than atheism.

The Believing Brain is another good one.

Science will probably never be able to answer this question, it is really more the realm of philosophy. There are many people who have many very different interpretations of what consciousness even is. A good introduction to the variety of different thought on the subject is this [book.] (http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-An-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/0199739099) I can assure you though, none of your suggested origins really addresses the tough problems we face when we try to wrap our heads around the issue.

The easiest read you're going to have on this is Stuart Richie's Intelligence: All That Matters

In the scientific literature there is an r-factor of between .5 and .8 for the genetic heritability of IQ, with the rest being environmental factors - predominantly non-shared environment. The variance between .5-.8 in the relationship between heritability and IQ comes largely as a matter of when people are tested. Child IQ leans closer to .5, suggesting greater (nonshared) environmental effects, while adult IQ measures closer to .8.

If you want a really serious look at this, and if you actually gave a shit, you'd read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

BTW, here's Blackmore's book on the US version of Amazon.

Customer reviews on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/110746143X/ref=acr_dpproductdetail_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

> There's close to no serious ethicists who defend it in modern day

Whoever told you that has not been paying attention to developments in ethics over the last 450 years, since the publication of work by Sextus Empiricus and Michel de Montaigne.

Here are some modern papers, books, and articles by or about serious ethicists who defend relativism:

• Moral Relativism, by Gilbert Harman, a prominent philosopher and ethicist at Princeton.
  
• The Emotional Construction of Morals, a book by Jesse Prinz, professor of philosophy at CUNY.
  
• Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response, an article about Jesse Prinz's position
  
• Foundations for Moral Relativism, a book by J. David Velleman, professor of philosophy at NYU.
  
• Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism, by David B. Wong, professor of philosophy at Duke University.
  

>I'm guessing that every possible interpretation of a system would have to be conscious by extension, which is unrealistic IMO as it would mean that everything is conscious in an infinite number of ways.

Gary Drescher suggests that's not a problem because only some interpretations can possibly matter to us (he also refers to Dennet's intentional stance, but that I don't know anything about yet).

I lived / am living a very similar version of your interior life.
My therapist said something quite smart once. "Problems arise when life is asking you for something that you don't have." I found this statement scales up, down and sideways.

I would reccommend professional help. Talk to someone who will just 'hold you where you are'. Not question it or try to counter it. It sounds simplistic but saying how you feel and having someone NOT try to fix you actually has a fixing effect.

I would also reccommend working through this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depression-ebook/dp/B01M0ILKMQ

Bad news is that this is hard work. Good news is that if you want to fix things you can. This is weather and weather changes.

https://smile.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Try reading actual experts, since Murray is a political scientist like me with no qualification in IQ.

This book could be what you're looking for. It's more of a survey of IQ research in general, not HBD, but it does touch on racial differences.

"The Mind's I"

Read this. It's a bit long, but includes many very thorough discussions of exactly what you're asking and proposing.

You'll need this

this may answer some questions.

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/0199739099/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1312576766&sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254

Braitenberg Vehicles

If you're into this kind of stuff, I'd suggest you this:
https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912/ref=sr_1_15?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494269217&sr=1-15&keywords=daniel+dennett

You may be thinking of 'Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology':

https://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-Braitenberg/dp/0262521121

 

It describes "Braitenberg vehicles":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by V. Braitenberg

Mind's I edited by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofsteader

A Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julien Jaynes (This is completely debunked, but mindblowing all the same).

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David Chalmers

The Republic and Other Works by Plato
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
God's Equation by Amir D. Aczel
The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett
*Shakespeare's Sonnets by Stephen Booth

The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul- edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.

The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1250008808?pc_redir=1398041151&robot_redir=1

Occam's Nightmare by S Peter Davis
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1304030180?pc_redir=1397838233&robot_redir=1

For real:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262042339/ref=ord_cart_shr?ie=UTF8&m=A2Z2CSK1PH6GOI

> Well I do know a lot of research and mathematical breakthroughs are being made here and there. Particularly from people in the community like MIRI, independent contributors like Gary Drescher and Judea Pearl, etc. But maybe you had a different idea of productive investment. The idea of an AI Cold War is a very real and dangerous prospect that I think will be of greater concern in years coming.

Do you mean an AI cold war between American state backed tech firms and Chinese state backed tech firms?

>It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior. Quite apart from this, analysis is more difficult than invention in the sense in which, generally, induction takes more time to perform than deduction: in induction one has to search for the way, whereas in deduction one follows a straightforward path.

Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology

the main proponent of dualism in contemporary philosophy is david chalmers. his defining work is "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory," but you can also read all of his papers for free on his website. he has also at some points argued for panpsychism, but his core commitments still lie with dualism.

yes, he and his arguments are usually taken very seriously in academic philosophy. for example, here's a video of him at a conference on a boat, with other big name philosophers of mind such as dennett and the churchlands.

i guess i should also mention that the kind of dualism that chalmers argues for is not the classic cartesian substance dualism, but rather a weaker form of dualism called property dualism

here's a useful sep article about dualism

> What is consciousness?

Since neuroscience started to research this topic seriously, there's no more reason for mysticism. There's textbooks about it now. I personally read Dehaene's book and it cleared up all of my confusion.

> What's does the "hard problem" consist of? From what I can tell,
> Chalmers thinks its a confounding problem that we can't understand
> what the experience of feeling pain is like, say, in terms of brain states.

It's more than simply that. But, because consciousness is such a slippery topic to talk clearly about, it's not easy to briefly describe it in a way that communicates the points clearly. Whether you agree with Chalmer's views or not, I think he does a pretty reasonable job of stating the "hard problem" (I read his The Conscious Mind), and his description is pretty lengthy.

> He seems to think that by looking at the brain of a person who's in pain, we should
> be able to know what their experience of feeling pain is actually like. I dont share
> this kind of concern

No he doesn't. It's more the opposite.

> And Chalmers leans toward consciousness being fundamental, I believe

It's not entirely clear what exactly should and shouldn't constitute "fundamental", but I don't think that's true. He's say that it's not something "physical", basically meaning not something that can be understood in structural or functional terms, but that doesn't necessitate it being fundamental.

And BTW I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Chalmers, I'm just trying to clarify what his position is.

Matter and energy are not all there is - there is also information. Information is real - it can be measured, created, destroyed, duplicated, modified and transmitted over huge distances. It is not supernatural, but it is what makes the difference between a dumb machine and life (or an intelligent machine).

Consider a Beethoven symphony. This does not have a physical existence, but it does exist. It has representations in the physical world - dots and lines on a piece of paper, vibrations in the air, grooves or microscopic holes in a plastic disk, arrangements of magnetic fields on a tape or hard drive. Even a pattern of neurons firing in someone's head as they play the music back in their mind. The symphony is not any of those things - it is in the pattern that they represent. The symphony is the information that each of them encodes.

Similarly, my consciousness is not my physical body or the energy that the body consumes, but the pattern of neurons in my head, and the dynamics of the way the neurons interact. I am information.

The difference between my minds "I" and a Beethoven symphony is that there is only one encoding of me, so if my body dies then I die with it. To destroy a Beethoven symphony you would have to destroy all the millions of different encodings that are out there.

Maybe someday we will have the technology to make backups of our consciousness, but I don't expect it will be in my lifetime.

Edit: For more on this viewpoint and on lots of alternative views, I recommend reading The Mind's I by Douglas Hoffstadter and Daniel Dennett.

Check out Rob Brotherton's (2015) Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. He specifically focuses on the psychological components.




Another book worth checking out is Michael Shermer's (2012) The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How we Construct Beliefs and Reinforce them as Truths. While the book touches on a wide number of topics beyond conspiracy theories, it addresses much of the psychology underlying the belief in conspiracy theories.

The smarter a man is, the smarter are his rationalizations.

You don't have to be stupid to keep the faith.

I understand your perspective and in a perfect world it might have been correct but the reality we live in is not like that.

Arguing that those who believe are stupid is a lost battle.

Read Michael Shermer’s "The Believing Brain" I'm sure it will ease your hate. We have such a short time here on earth. It would be such a waste to use it on hate.

As Kanji said in Ikiru: "I can't afford to hate people. I don't have that kind of time."

TL;DR Like us error theorists deny that slavery etc. is moral; they just have different reasons. For relativists, on the other hand, slavery is wrong relative to our moral framework, which is why we shouldn't do it; and yes, for them, we can still criticize slavers!

You raise an excellent question, which [moral relativists] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/) like [Jesse Prinz] (https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Morality_is_a_Culturally_Conditioned_Response) have done a lot of work towards answering. In fact, your point is one of the biggest objections to relativism: if morality is merely relative, how can we justifiably criticize or object to slavery, misogyny, holocausts, etc? why shouldn't we just do what we want, whether or not it hurts anyone? After all, relative to our moral framework, such actions could be justified.

If you want, check out the Prinz paper linked above, or even better his book [The Emotional Construction of Morals] (http://www.amazon.ca/Emotional-Construction-Morals-Jesse-Prinz/dp/0199571546), as well as the SEP article for the relativists' answer: relative to our morality, slavery etc. is wrong, which is why we shouldn't reenact it. And even though morality's relative, that doesn't prevent us from criticizing others or defending our views - relativism doesn't imply 'anything goes'!

To answer your question, though, [error theorists] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/) can oppose horribly immoral crimes like slavery just as much as anyone else; like us, it rejects that slavery is morally okay, just for different reasons (because moral judgments are errors). See Richard Joyce's [The Myth of Morality] (http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/2001025740.pdf), his paper [here] (http://personal.victoria.ac.nz/richard_joyce/acrobat/joyce_2007_morality.schmorality.pdf), and Ricahrd Garner's [Abolishing Morality] (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10677-007-9085-3#page-1) for a fuller explanation.