Hangzhou Lovin’

Ha, Iowa

don’t read this unless you like rambling passages about philosophy of mind

ok, so i can’t sleep, so here i smy basic philosoph on the hard problem of consciousness. Ok so there are two problems that i think peopl ehave looked at the wrong way, these are the humonculus problem and the zombie problem.

I’ll start with the zombie problem. To put it briefly, the zombie problem states that conciousness is a special part of reality because it is possible that there could be zombies who are functionally the same as normal people but experience none of the mental life of a normal preson. The problem with this is that when you get down to fine behavior, ie brain states, this gets a little ridicolus. Because people stop just being a black box, you have brain states that directly coincide with concious states. So in order to claim that there is a difference between concious people and zombies you must claim that there is something special about conciousness, that it is it’s own kind of special logical thing.

What i want to claim is that zombies are a logical impossiblity. That is that anything which has the physical manifistaion of human conciosness, a working brain. The reason for this is that the only explainable thing about consioucness is it’s logical structure. Like when you call something green what you are actually taking about is it’s logical place in your preception and how that relates to your understanding of that relationsip in english. It all gets a little complicated because it gets mixed up with emperisicm and philosphy of language. so to put it bluntly without any real justification, our percieved conciosness is just the logical structure that our mind takes.

This makes sense about when thinking about simple shit like the shape of a triangle, but what about something like color. How is this simply a logical structure. Color seems like a primal quality, but one that seem totally aribitary. It seems like three is no reason for green to be green or for red to be red, and it is easy to imagine another person who has the colors all mixed up. However, if you look at the neurological processing you see that it is a very complicated process. there is a reason there are primary and secondary colors and why colors have the dimensions of hue and brightness that they do. These relations are simply to complx to be grasped in the mind like a simple geometric shape like the triangle. Furthermore, there are people who’s perception of color is different than normal people, those who are colorblind. The fact that their conscious preception is affected in regular ways that follow the logic of visual processing in the brain is more evidence that perceptions are logical processing.

I’m not really sure how logically sound this is, i make a big jump from perception mirrors neurolgical processing (exactly) to perception is neurlogical processing. but in my gut i feel it’s right, because the only alternative would be to posit some new kind of existence that solely only in consciousness and this just dosn’t make sense.

So the other problem is why do we percieve consciousness in the first place? why do colors and sounds and other sense impressions have such a raw quality that we want to give special meaning to. The reason for this is that, there is a humunculus in our brains, (and i don’t mean the sense or motor ones). This is come by by a solution to the problem of the humonculus.

This was presented in some book by daniel dennet I read. it basically goes like this. In order for consciouness to be there, you need somebody to be looking at the consiousness, that is you need a little man in your brain looking at all your sense impressions. Dennet said the problem with this was that this hits an infinte regression problem, because every humonculous will need to have another homunculous in it’s head in order for it to work.

But this is just not true, there only be need one humunculus. And that is the systems in our brain that run our attention, short term memory systems and other processes that are essential to conciousness. These are seperate from our sense organs and there only has to be one level of consciousness for them to work. How this works I have no idea, but there certianly is a unity of consciousness in humans and it is up to neuroscience to figure out.

I’d also like to point out something that pisses me off. People always say they did something uncousciously when in fact the just did it and didn’t remeber it or didn’t need to access their memory to do it. The classic example of this is when you get home after driving from somewhere and you can’t remember any part of the drive. This dosn’t mean that you were unconcious of the drive when you were doing it, but merely that you didn’t store it to short term memory. The same thing when people het so good at a skill that the say they can do it unconciously. No you do it conciously you just don’t need to access your memory to do it so you don’t notice it as much.

well i’m sure no one understood that, but i’m being an insomniac tonight. next up in my philosphy: my metaphysics, philosophy of language, why i’m an atheist and ethics.

I’m in the news

via jamie who was begging for this link like a Dan Washburn wannabe

Man everything in america is too sweet, you can’t get a drink in the store that’s not sweet unless it’s bottled water, and who want’s to drink bottled water when i already live someplace i can suck the sweet stuff right out of the tap.

And what’s up with all the “asian” restuarants I see. What the fuck is asian food? Is there european style food? Shit’s ridiculous if I want some dim sum I’ll go to a cantonese place, if i want sushi i’ll go to a japanese place, if i want pad thai I’ll go to a pad thai place. But guess what, I never want Handrolled curry lemongrass wasabi wantons with thai nut suace infused with sichuan peppercorm, cause that would taste like shit. Plus those places are so full of yuppies.

I hate yuppies, partly because i secretly envy them, but mostly cause they have such shitty taste and spend so much money. I went out with my folks to this Vietnamese/french place in chincago that was stinking of yuppies. The food wasn’t that bad, the problem was that it was neither vietnamese nor french, it was fucking “asian” wich pissed me off. For one thing they didn’t have one vietnames style curry on the menu, which is fucking ridicoulus, plus they didn’t even serve french bread which is what real vietnamese do. And their rice noodles where weak. But i could tell all the fucking yuppies in there thought they were back in saigon in 1946 talking about how great their shares of Michelin were doing.

Fuck, it’s like bubble tea. Which in china is 12-25 cents and is just something you have to warm you up in the morning, while here in the US it’s fucking 5 dollars a cup and all these scednster girls go crazy over it. You should never spend more then 5 dollars a drink unless it has alcohol in it. And that is the lesson of today.

Plus some good sites

Freeware links, muchos useful

the best vacation story ever

So the rebpub’s are now arguing with that Nixon pulled out of vietnam too early? And the press reports this with a straight face?

I’m only watching the colbert report for my news from now on

MY WOMAN

35 year old Woman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United StatesLooking For: Men for a pen pal

Profile for bigazzntits4dayz
I AM A LARGE GURL WITH REDDISH BROWN HAIR GRAY EYEZ AZZ HIPS AND TITS 4 DAYZ IM A FRIENDLY DOWN 2 EARTH LADY WHO LIKE HORROR MOVIES WALKING CUDDLING RELAZING WATCHING TV PLAYING ON THE PC IM NOT IN2 1 NITE STAND IM A LADY EVEN IF IM NO ANGEL WHICH IM NOT AS I ALWAYZ SAY NO 1 IS PREFECT AND IM SURE AM NOT iI AM LIVING WITH SOME 1 BUT NO WORRIES ITS OVER BETWEEN ME AND HIM SO IN MY BOOK IM SINGLE IM JUST NOT GOT ON MY FEET YET BUT I WILL HOPEFULLY BY NEXT MONTH

Ideal Person:IM LOOKING 4 BLK MEN ONLY WHO IS ATLEAST 30 TOO 50 ONE WHO KNOWS HOW 2 TREAT A LADY DONT TREAT HER LIKE SHE SCUM OR A DOG WHO RESPECTS HER 4 HER NOT TREAT HER LIKE A MAID OR A PIECE OF AZZ THERES MORE 2 THAT R U HIM ONLY SERIOUS 1 NEEDS 2 REPLY NO FAKES MY PLUSES R BALD AND BOXERS BUT NOT A MUST BUT MUST HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR ON HIM CAN U BREAK ME FROM MY EGG SHELL