Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes.

with recursive self-representation

informational states that are about its other internal states. Further self-monitoring allows a zimbo to have and use information about those very self-monitoring states, and so on, indefinitely. A zimbo, in other words, is equipped with recursive self-representation—unconscious recursive self-representation, if that makes any sense.

But a zimbo is special, a zombie that is also blessed with equipment that permits it to monitor its own activities, both internal and external, so it has internal (nonconscious) higher-order

Figuring out what to credit and what to blame is one of the knottiest problems in AI, and it is also a problem faced by natural selection.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

Sturgeon’s Law is usually put a little less decorously: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of experiments in molecular biology, 90 percent of poetry, 90 percent of philosophy books, 90 percent of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics—and so forth—is crap.

In a computer model of creativity there should be junk lying around that your creative processes can bump into, noises that your creative processes can’t help overhearing. The spontaneous intrusion of that little noise from the next room may tweak what those processes are doing in a way that is serendipitous, or in a way that is destructive, but ei

It turns out that all the “magic” of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, “re-entrant,” reflexive information-transformation processes ranging from the nano-scale biochemical cycles within each neuron, through the generate-and-test cycles of predictive coding in the perceptual systems (see Clark, 2013,