Philosophy on Patrick Stevens

A Bitcoin analogy for Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 13:30:00 +0000

I’ve never actually seen anyone write down precisely the way I think about consciousness, so here it is: it’s (gasp!) like a blockchain.

NativeAOT in .NET 9 and Nixpkgs/darwin

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 20:10:00 +0000

How to get a NativeAOT build using nixpkgs

Mary's Room

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 23:30:00 +0100

Last weekend I was in a discussion ostensibly about whether the mind is nonphysical. Much of the discussion ended up as a rather polite shouting match about Mary’s Room. Here is what I actually believe about it.

My objection to the One Logical Leap view

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A large chunk of the reason why changing someone’s mind is so difficult is the fact that our deeply-held beliefs seem so obviously true to us, and we find it hard to understand why those beliefs aren’t obvious to others. Example:

A: A god exists - look around you; everything you see is so obviously created, not stumbled upon! B: No, that’s rubbish - look around you, everything you see is easily explained by understood processes!

Prerequisites for hypothetical situations

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Usually when I discover (or, more rarely, think up) a thought experiment about a moral point, and discuss it with an arbitrary person whom I will (for convenience) call Kim, the conversation usually goes like this:

Me: {Interesting scenario} - what do you think?

Kim: I would just {avoids point of scenario by nitpicking}

Me: You know what I meant. {applies easy fix to scenario to prevent nitpick}

Kim: Well then, I’d {avoids point of scenario by raising unrelated moral issue}

The Multiple Drafts view of consciousness

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading one of Daniel Dennett’s books, Consciousness Explained. Aside from the fact that the author has an incredible beard and is therefore correct on all matters, he can also write a very cogent book. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett outlines what he calls the Multiple Drafts approach to explaining consciousness; this blog post is my attempt to summarise that view in a couple of short analogies.

Dennett starts off by providing evidence that our time-perception is somewhat malleable: we can interpret two dots of different colours (appearing separated by a short distance in time and space) as a single moving dot that changes colour abruptly at some point. The key puzzle here is that we perceive the colour to have changed before seeing the second coloured dot. Dennett then outlines what seem to be the two mainstream points of view on how this happens.

A framework for discussing "pricelessness"

Fri, 12 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes some people argue that certain things are “priceless” - that is, worth an infinite amount of money to them. I posit that what this really means is that it would take work and uncomfortable imagination to evaluate the worth of that thing to them.

The example that triggered this framework was my evaluation of how much my sense of smell was worth to me. (It was late at night and I couldn’t get to sleep, so I just let my mind wander around for a bit.) I was unable to quantify the amount I would pay to keep my sense of smell, but it is certainly finite, as the following thought experiment demonstrates.