Status Updates From Intuition Pumps and Other T...

DD Doesn't really like Searle,right? But his take on counsciosness involves lots of hand waving.

But of course, telling zombies apart from conscious humans is easy: folks who claim they cannot understand what is special about consciousness do not experience it, and are therefore zombies. Which of course mean DCD is one. In any SF/horror novel, he'd be in BIG TROUBLE now.

The chinese room diatribe. DD is converting me to a pantheistic belief. He has already convinced me that I have an immortal soul. Not what he intended.

Now DD is apparently resorting to blackmail ("Those who shy from Darwinian thinking woulld do well to consider...they may be cut off from cutting edge research").Memes as metaphysic entities.

Now firmly in reductionist territory, along the lines of - If it plays like Kasparov, it thinks chess like Kasparov - Deniers take not: nobody ever came up with a better algorithm (?)

veered in discussing evolution. DD likes Borges' Library of babel, so he gets points forma that

Is now turned into full fledged promoting DD's view of consciousness (roughly it is an emerging property of pattern matching in biological automata, which I do not find very convincing), giving very not much space, but quite a bit of scorn, to differing points of view. Not to be ensnared in his own counter-advice, uses italics in place of "surely", but cannot escape the implications.

Long interlude explaining register & Turing machines

Tools all but forgotten after the first 50 pages or so, the book is now about consciousness.

More interested in scoring than in tools?