Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness: From Cartesian Duality to Markovian Monism
This essay addresses Cartesian duality and how its implicit dialectic might be repaired using physics and information theory. Our agenda is to describe a key distinction in the physical sciences that may provide a foundation for the distinction between mind and matter, and between sentient and intentional systems. From this perspective, it becomes tenable to talk about the physics of sentience and &lsquo
Von der KI-Ethik zur Bewusstseinsethik: Ethische Aspekte der Computational Psychiatry
Zusammenfassung Ziel Ermittlung ethischer Probleme, die sich aus KI-Forschung und Computational Psychiatry für die psychiatrische Forschung und Praxis ergeben. Methode Begriffliche Analyse und Diskussion ethisch relevanter Projekte innerhalb der Computational Psychiatry. Ergebnisse Die Computational Psychiatry verspricht v. a. einen Beitrag zur Verbesserung von Diagnostik und Therapie(-prognosen). Ethische Probleme betreffen u. a. den Umgang mit Datenschutz, Folgen für unser Selbstverständnis sowie das Risiko der Biologisierung und der Vernachlässigung des bewussten Erlebens. Schlussfolgerung Es ist erforderlich, sich jetzt mit möglichen Anwendungen der KI und Computational Psychiatry zu be…
Ethics of Beliefs
This paper deals with the concept of positive learning (PL). The main goal is to provide a working definition of PL on which further refinements and extensions can be based. First, I formulate a list of desiderata for a definition of PL: I argue that a working definition of PL should (i) make the involved epistemic norms explicit, (ii) be flexible, and (iii) be empirically tractable. After that, I argue that a working definition of PL should focus on three basic epistemic norms (which I call Evidentialism, Degrees of Plausibility, and Non-Arbitrary Updates). Drawing on work on the ethics of belief and Bayesian inference, I highlight theoretical and empirical challenges that already follow f…
Perceptual Presence in the Kuhnian-Popperian Bayesian Brain
Anil Seth’s target paper connects the framework of PP (predictive processing) and the FEP (free-energy principle) to cybernetic principles. Exploiting an analogy to theory of science, Seth draws a distinction between three types of active inference. The first type involves confirmatory hypothesis-testing. The other types involve seeking disconfirming and disambiguating evidence, respectively. Furthermore, Seth applies PP to various fascinating phenomena, including perceptual presence. In this commentary, I explore how far we can take the analogy between explanation in perception and explanation in science.In the first part, I draw a slightly broader analogy between PP and concepts in theory…
Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness
In \textit{Being No One}, Thomas \citet{Metzinger2003being} introduces an approach to the scientific study of consciousness that draws on theories and results from different disciplines, targeted at multiple levels of analysis. Descriptions and assumptions formulated at, for instance, the phenomenological, representationalist, and neurobiological levels of analysis provide different perspectives on the same phenomenon, which can ultimately yield necessary and sufficient conditions for applying the concept of phenomenal representation. In this way, the ``method of interdisciplinary constraint satisfaction (MICS)'' (as it has been called by Josh Weisberg, \citeyear{Weisberg2005consciousness})…