Posts tagged phenomenology

Our notions of what it means to have a mind have too often been governed by assumptions about what it means to be human. But there is no necessary logical connection between the two. There is often an assumption that a digital mind will either be, or aspire to be, like our own. We can see this at play in artificial beings from Pinocchio to the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But a machine mind won’t be a human-like mind — at least not precisely, and not intentionally. Machines are developing a separate kind of interaction and interrelation with the world, which means they will develop new and different kinds of minds, minds to which human beings cannot have direct access. A human being will never know exactly what it’s like to be a bot, because we do not inhabit their modes of interaction.

via http://reallifemag.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-bot/

Due to the general legal prohibition and modern cultural taboo against psychoactive chemicals, the academic discipline of Philosophy has left a potentially bounteous field of enquiry virtually unharvested. The aim of this text is to introduce readers to an unimaginable universe of cognition to which ingestion of such molecules will open the portal. This universe can modify and augment Philosophy itself: psychedelic phenomenology is fuel for Philosophy.

via http://www.philosopher.eu/texts/philosophy-and-psychedelic-phenomenology/

Thomas Thwaites is “currently investigating what it might be like to be a goat”