Canada is a Failed Dandelion ft. Peter Watts
Peter Watts, author of Rifters, Blindsight, Echopraxia, and other books Riley and Dan will not shut up about, joins us to talk about hard science fiction, marine biology, and sentience. We also try to account for our eternal question: just what *is* Canada, and how should we think about it?
Comments (5)
Ok this discussion blew my mind and I haven't stopped thinking about it. Kinda crazy I haven't really come across this topic before but maybe I listen to too much Boonta Vista these days. Do you have a list of the works discussed? I guess I could just listen to it again but any other recs would be great
Mid episode, I'm fairly confused about why you insist on drawing a distinction between the "subroutine that calculates the optimal reactions, decisions, etc." and 'consciousness'. Those are the same thing. It's just because we've given this phenomenon a name of 'consciousness' that we think we can go and search for it, find the consciousness section of the brain, just behind the amygdala. But it's simply an emergent behaviour of all of those decision making processes.
To expand slightly, the man in the Chinese Room would not be conscious or capable of speaking Chinese, but the room itself, along with whatever systems it possesses in order to map input to output and powered by the motor force of the man doing the processing, would be conscious, and it would speak Chinese. You can't distil out the consciousness bit and be left with a purely mechanical decision making process.
Oh shit my dad is a Feldenkrais practitioner! I will say one on one feldenkrais sessions are nice, it's like massage therapy kind of. I think the training is a little more wacky.
knew Dan and Riley were secret podside affiliates