threebeornothreebe

Supongamos que conociese un encanto que trajese mi felicidad, pero a condicion de compensar con la infelicidad de alguien desconocido. Usaria esa magia? Claro que no. Porque? Porque no podria vivir ni disfrutar sabiendo que en realidad mi felicidad implica el sufrimiento de otra persona, y eso por mi culpa. Supongamos entonces que el encanto tambien genere el olvido de que uno es el responsable de esa infelicidad. Lo usaria? Tampoco. Porque? Porque no puedo, en el presente soportar esa idea! Pero no sera lo que sucede hoy precisamente? quizás algún encanto recitado en otras épocas haga que yo sea (bastante) feliz, y que otra gente sea infeliz en otras partes del mundo. Trabajamos para no recordarlo; quizás no seamos responsables directos, pero el hechizo existe y se llama economía de mercado...

Sometimes one thinks: "if I were this person..." or "if I could do such and such" or "if things were this other way...", etc. What do we really think when we consider these counterfactual universes? I mean, what is interesting about this kind of reasoning is that somehow one can imagine a parallel reality in which some things are different from this one; but is this at all possible? My thesis here is that in certain cases it may be a logical mistake, a fallacious belief that things "could be different". I mean: suppose that I ask you to imagine what if 1+1=3. You may answer that you cannot consider such thing as possible, and that you cannot find a way to "imagine" it. Suppose now that I ask you to imagine a regular polyedhra with 21 faces. You "bear with me" that it may exist, but this is not just a mathematical conjecture: for a moment you believe in its existence, in particular if you don't know about the regular polyhe...

If I knew everything (I mean everything , from theory to practice) about how to make a computer for instance, starting with raw materials (sand, water, etc), how long it would take for me to actually build one? What is the actual bottleneck? the speed of my motion? the decision making? And what if I know that too (I mean, exactly what decisions I have to make, so there is no waste of time for planning), then could we estimate the time it would take to this modern "Robinson" to build his laptop with GPS and wireless connection and send an email to the distant civilization that would come to help him?

If you are lucky enough that you can choose what to do for living, then you have to dedicate yourself only to those things that you like and that you are good at (both goes hand in hand): you will be happy and you will make other people happy. The rest may be a waste of time. Hence the importance of knowing yourself, your tastes, your weaknesses and qualities. I wasted a lot of time dreaming of being a theoretical physicists: it was a chimeric dream, since I am not sure I really would have liked this kind of work (I do like Physics, which is not the same), plus I am not good enough to play the game (again, both are sides of the same coin: if I were good enough, I would surely liked it; and you cannot really like something if you cannot play with it at easy). I am lucky enough that I have quite a great freedom in choosing what I do for living now; then, I discovered only very recently something I am good at, something I like, and it's doing things that some people call media art, ot...

From time to time, we are all (philosophical?) zombies! In fact, we are most of the time consciousless: most of what we do, we just do without really being aware of. Why then it looks like to ourselves as if we "are" there all the time? well, perhaps for the same reason that, at any time, it looks like to us that we are "seeing a perfectly detailed and total" image of the world with our eyes: because the potentiality of eliciting consciousness is there at any time: we can "switch" at any time a routine of "self awareness" so as to describe (to ourselves and to others) our current experience - but this does not mean that this routine is always on - nor that it need to be for us to "function" efficiently. We are not continuously scanning our actions, or at least not all the time with the same level of self-attention. Internal or external stimuli can switch this process on and off (cf. attentional self-less concept proposed in my boxedEg...

The starting point for some philosophers of consciousness is the "evidence" that there is a world out there, and a mind in here, and that in between there is the body that shapes and mediates the perceptions of that world (Locke?). I don't agree at all with this model of phenomenology. I will explain why, but instead of directly attacking what may look like the core of the model (the distinction between a mind and a world), I will first try to challenge the evidence that we can actually define a "body" at all, that mediates these two other "things". Let me proceed with a little (silly) thought experiment. Imagine that you are cutting some paper with a pair of scissors. You move the scissors confidently, the paper is being cut smoothly, you can feel it being cut, just as if the scissors were a prolongation of your hand. Yet most will agree that the scissors are not part of their body, but just a tool that extend it's capabilities - the range of poss...

They claim not to be dualists; for them, the basis of consciousness and conscious phenomena is to be found in complex brain processes... So far so good (but note already that I said the basis of consciousness AND the "conscious phenomena", i.e., the qualia). However, they believe that there exist a minimum set of neural circuitry capable of eliciting the phenomenological experience of consciousness. They seek to isolate this minimum set of circuits in a methodological way, chasing it by systematically reducing the territory in the brain that seems not to be implicated in the phenomena of consciousness. At this point, I believe there are two kind of researchers: those that understand that the goal of this procedure is to get them closer to an explanation of consciousness because the procedure would more or less efficiently help them isolate a very complex but somehow  functionally autonomous "high-level processing center", and those who probably are not ab...