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As part of the spring 2010 Take Your Brain to Lunch Lecture Series, Martha Farah, Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences in the Department of Psychology and Director of Penn’s new Center for Neuroscience and Society, led conversations with Penn faculty members about the brain. In this video, Susan Schneider, Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and Assistant Professor of Philosophy, discusses Future Brains: How Might Our Great-Great-Grandchildren Think (and Will They Still Be Human?).
It's always interesting to hear the kind of questions you hear from audiences that are just becoming acquainted with these ideas. These are smart people---I will grant that to just about anyone who will at least RECOGNIZE the existential issues raised by singularitarian speculation. Some are just precious. They're decent questions, but so restricted in scope that it's a dead giveaway someone is trying to seriously address the issue for just about the first time.
I noticed one woman toward the end of Q&A seemed desperate to convince herself that neural enhancements would not make people smarter. Well. That was kind of funny.
Dr. Farah seems a little disingenuous. That's probably overstating it. It's probably just a consequence of her pedagogical stance as a professor. She doesn't say, "I'm a transhumanist." She says, "I'm INTERESTED in transhumanism." When she encounters that purple skepticism that some people exhibit toward transhumanist ends, she says, "I'm not ADVOCATING." No, she's just conducting a discussion.
And professionally, I presume that is so. It's the approach I might take with an audience that I can EXPECT will have a range of attitudes and likely responses. I would try to put a degree, at least, of separation between myself and transhumanism. Otherwise, I might be concerned with being written off as a crank, and lost the skeptics before I'd a chance to begin.
Then again, I MIGHT be concerned with things like that. It would probably have to do with how much I had to risk professionally.
Hmm The clip does seem to crash at the sheer mention of the singularity for some strange reason, (at both sites)? However, I did like the way that Martha Farah would ask a profound and thought provoking question and then continue to nod nonchalantly whilst crunching on ice : I could not help but giggle. :0]
"Computational minds", "activation patterns", "symbol processing algorithms", "amalgam processing engines", "mind-uploading".. geez these guys are crazy aren't they?
"Patterns on patterns"??
<b>Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy</b>
"Perhaps no other classical philosophical tradition, East or West, offers a more complex and counter-intuitive account of mind and mental phenomena than Buddhism. While Buddhists share with other Indian philosophers the view that the domain of the mental encompasses a set of interrelated faculties and processes, they do not associate mental phenomena with the activity of a substantial, independent, and enduring self or agent"
1.1 The No-self doctrine
"In one of his earlier discourses, the Buddha declares that we ought to regard any form of sensation and consciousness, whether "past, future, or present; internal or external; manifest or subtle...as it actually is...: 'This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am'" (Majjhima NikÄÂya I, 130)."
2.3 The five aggregates
"The Buddhist tradition conceives of the human individual as consisting of five types of aggregates that serve as the bases of what we ordinarily designate as persons:
(1) material form or body (rūpa);
(2) sensations (vedanÄÂ);
(3) apperception (samjña);
(4) volitions or dispositional formations (samskÄÂra); and
(5) consciousness (vijñÄÂna).
This aggregated view of persons informs all aspect of Buddhist thought and is indispensable to any account of cognition. Thus, in replacing the agent or cognizing 'I' with a play of causal factors resulting in momentary cognitive events, the Buddhist tradition treats the cognizing agent as merely another way of referring to the embodied and dynamic functioning of the five aggregates. The specific nature of these aggregates is the subject of the Abhidharma descriptive analytic (see §3). Following Vasubandhu's Treasury of Higher Knowledge (AKBh ad I, 14:16), the five aggregates may be defined as follows:."
Intrigued?
More here.. >> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/
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