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the-last-last-hope

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[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle Near the end of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery (1988), Rincewind the wizard finds himself in the Dungeon Dimensions, a dark realm of “skewed images” and “weird curvature.” He observes a number of Things clustered aro...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Firstly, weird fiction has its own place in how we understand the relations between literature and science in this period. Fin-de-siècle weird fiction, I argue, was often doing remarkably bold work by plunging into some of the same ontological and epistemological quagmire...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Perhaps it didn’t help that Lovecraft (for good reasons) titled an influential survey essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” rather than, say, “Weird Lit-erature.” It probably also didn’t help that Darko Suvin’s strategy in the 1970s for elevating science fiction as a ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Machin makes the important point that few, if any, definitions of the weird are other than variations on this quotation, which articulates the weird vividly without tying it down. Neverthe-less, for my argument about weird fiction’s relationship with science, it is worth ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Weird tales can also be motivated by an urge to convey “the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy.” Implicit in the weird aesthetic is the potential for the phenomena breaching natural law to generate admiration and wonder, ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: It has been suggested that weird fiction of the early twentieth century represents a parallel to high modernism: a “pulp modernism,” responding to the same cultural crises as high modernism, “shadows the modernist avant-garde and replicates its autocritique of mo dernity ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: A hierarchy was established that has never really been overturned, in which rational scientific principles could be used to explain the world mechanically and bend “nature” to the service and dictates of humankind. For example, Enlightenment efforts to classify and unders...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Elana Gomel considers spiritualism as doomed to failure because of its attachment to conventional science, fatally underscored by “a schism within its own defining concepts in the oxymoronic view of materiality, expressed in the movement’s defining trope of ‘natural super...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: For “despite its reputa-tion, ‘materialistic’ is precisely what 19th-century physics was not. Instead of taking matter to be the fundamental stuff that the world is made of, physicists were driven by an attempt to find out what matter itself U eally was. ” Nevertheless, t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The novella demonstrates, not least, what was al U eady weird about late nineteenth-century science (in this case, psychology and psychical research) through its representation of Hyde as a character and in the construction of the narrative itself as unstable, eluding sec...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In The Island of Docıo U Mo U eau , “The Derelict” (1907), and “The Voice in the Night” (1912), monstrous creatures are presented as real theoretical, if extreme, possibilities. Moreau’s Beast People and Hodgson’s mould and fungus creatures belong to terrestrial environme...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Machen’s 1890s fiction did much to establish the terms of the weird tale in th...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In place of that coherent self is a conception of human consciousness that sits much closer to that of the weird, open to the possibility of multiplicity and contradiction, resisting stable and absolutely determined answers. Jekyll and Hyde is widely recognised as a text ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Gish relates Hyde to “a theory of a ‘normal’ multiplicity of the self that, in this case, takes the form of a good/evil split.” But this binary is normative rather than descriptive, part of Jekyll’s untrustworthy efforts to impose what Jerrold Hogle calls a “grid of intel...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Ontologically and narratologically, Jekyll and Hyde is an unstable, ungraspable, irreducible text, never fully knowable, resisting the fixing of meaning and existing on the brink of the weird. Through its multiplicity, the novella’s rich and varied contributions to litera...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Even more seriously, accepting a modern, materialist standpoint on knowledge is dangerous — it could make the difference between achieving an ecstatic spiritual experience or a dreadful one. Critics have noted ways in which practices of reading and writing were central to...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: They are unwelcome prehistoric irruptions, but their possession and creation of artefacts and their capacity to use symbolic language “signals their participation in the cultural stage of civilization, placing them in the domain of history proper.” The arts, not the capac...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: He proposes a physical, neurological basis for the activities of the mind and spirit, resembling the suggestions put forward by the SPR of receptive nerves accounting for telepathy. Raymond applies, in short, materialist, positivist approaches to an occult experiment in “...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Matheson appeals to the reliability of his senses and the supremacy of his mind; though briefly thrown in astonishment, he soon gets his body under control and calmly observes what is happening. His report is thus to be received as an empirical account conveyed by his “re...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Machen himself seems later to have considered the effects of The Great God Pan as something of a mistake, reflecting on “my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay.” Hence, perhaps, the ambiguous af...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit Weird tales are sites of experiment, narrative laboratories in which alternative systems of knowledge and knowing can be imaginatively tested. The analogy — of narrative as labor...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Huxley’s agenda, ultimately, is to make clear that not only does knowledge not come from body or mind alone, it does not come from God either; he dwells on the physical structure of nose, eye, and ear to emphasise their biological explicability. The stories of the weird t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: One will declare that a table rose in the air, while another (who had been watching its feet) is confident that it never left the ground. The evidence of sight, in this case, apparently could not reliably yield a single truth. Neither could touch: those who seized Home’s,...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Yet he is no conventional materialist scientist and makes clear his discovery derives from interdisciplinary studies leading “wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental.” His researches probe metaphysical questions extending beyond the normal empirical range of conv...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Jekyll gains it immediately, compared to the slow self-recognition of the old doctor who took so long to “reach years of reflection, and [begin] to look around me and take stock of my progress and position in the world” (55), and gains it incontestably: “I knew myself,” h...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Raymond proves his point that the human brain could allow the spirit access to the world beyond the veil, but nothing certain comes of it; whatever ecstatic, terrible truths Mary learns to remain mysterious and hers alone. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, in her exploration of Machen’...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: She, or her body, at least, becomes “what is no longer a woman”; what Dyson glimpses at the window is “the face of a woman, and yet it was not human” (121). There is no language to describe what is , only what isn’t. A similar moment occurs in The Three Impostors : “Miss ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: (55) Roger not only has (temporarily) ownership and control over time, knowledge, and even the elements, he knows emotionally and intellectually that he has it (feeling it, perceiving it) at the same time as he physically experiences it (driving, flying, swimming), in a p...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: His chemically enhanced sensory experiences reveal new knowledge about the world, but also draw attention to the unreliability of empirical observation by presenting multiple sensory realities, co-existing just beyond the limits of everyday awareness. Set within a romance...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Sight, which he saves for last, offers the most profound transformation of his observed world: “the whole of the stable earth seemed to be suddenly set in movement, even the air grew thick with vast overlapping shapeless shapes” (156). What was once constant and empty is ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson Based on the experiences of characters in weird tales discussed so far, a better understanding of weird phenomena requires not a rejection of science, but a rev...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Lloyd from Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is credited by Julia Briggs as “the first mesmeric doctor in English literature, though he had several notable forebears in life.” Mike Ashley cites Samuel Warren’s 1833 Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician as the earliest...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The scientist added to this increased paranormality; professionalization was creating a scientific culture that was more and more unintelligible for a lay audience, and with a lack of understanding comes a sense of mystery and occult. A paranormal scientist would not seem...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Sage Lesley-McCarthy argues that “[t]he uncontested masculinity of Flaxman Low and the other professional psychic detectives is intrinsically connected to their status as trained occultists, rather than ‘dabblers’ in the mystical.” Weirdfinders accordingly develop their m...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: “The invisible is the real,” says Low of the haunting thing in “The Story of Baelbrow”; “the material only subserves its manifestation.” In this story, an “elemental psychic germ” connected to the ancient barrow upon which the house is built grows into a “helpless intelli...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: It exhibits an illogical kind of immaterial solidity: the pressure of what he later calls “spiritualised matter” (590), a failed absence, a presence that is not a presence. Consequently upon the ontological distress this causes, Low’s knowledge and will both temporarily f...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: I focus mainly here on the first story, “A Psychical Invasion,” which outlines Silence’s background and the methods he uses in the six cases that unfold. Blackwood’s conception of the more-than-visible world was a realm not of (human) ghosts or souls but of far greater po...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The hermetic secrecy suggests an occult training like that offered by the Golden Dawn, and Graf describes Silence as “an exemplar of adepthood.” Members believed, Graf explains, “that the knowledge and experience gained by attaining the higher grades actually meant that t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: At the same time, this is a controlling, governing move —what De Cicco calls “an extension (or perhaps colonization) on the part of rational thought into non-normative space.” The impulse towards controlling the occult is legible as part of wider British nineteenth-centur...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In particular, Bann notes the new forms of agency and empowerment that spiritualism lent to imaginings of ghosts. While embodied spirits in the séance might be benign, entertaining, communicative, and affectionate, occultism also understood a greater range of forces and e...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: “The Thing Invisible” raises questions over what is meant be taken as real in Carnacki’s stories; his personal bodily and mental experience in the chapel clearly can have nothing to do with mysterious outside forces, but is almost identical to what he undergoes in the Gre...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The weird is real: modern technology says so. C O nclUs IO n Whether detected by an instrument or experienced by a body, weird phenomena in these tales are demonstrably real. The mysteries often look familiar at first, but under the weirdfinders’ explanations, hauntings a...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells The three stories discussed here —H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907) and “The Derelict” (1912)— use weird strategies to ex...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: All three stories theorise science strangely, generating weird encounters from a reconfigured blend of science and imaginative speculation. The field of nineteenth-century biology itself was marked by some strange theories that made natural history look weirder than it us...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The weird fictions of this chapter have an ambivalent relationship with mainstream science and create, within their heterotopic storyworlds, their own versions of scientific knowledge. PUmas an D Rabb I ts: T HE Horrors an D Hopes of T HE Islan D OF Doctor MoreaU The weir...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Huxley, too, suggested in “On the Physical Basis of Life,” a basic “protoplasm is the clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick.” For Wells, likewise, the direction of mater...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: A side effect of this emphasis is that the strangest of Moreau’s creations are left almost completely overlooked, including by Prendick: his pink rabbits. The weirdest products of Moreau’s experiments are “strange, pink, hopping animals, about the size of cats” (85). Pren...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Perfect transmission of the germ plasm suggested “infinitude,” but also implied a nihilistic “discard-ability of individual bodies for the force of life.” Doctor Moreau ’s ver-sion of evolution allows more space for changes between individuals. The offspring of the Beast ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Narrator Winterstraw observes that a “brown, human face peering at us from between the wrapped branches was of a part with the trunk of the tree; for I could not tell where it ended and the tree began.” Boundaries between the original human and the apparent plant that abs...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This castaway recounts a strange tale of shipwreck, and the gradual assimilation of his and his fiancée’s bodies by a grey lichen or fungus that abounds on the remote island and nearby derelict ship on which they take refuge. The story ends as follows: Indistinctly I saw ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The castaway describes himself and his companion as “outcast souls,” beyond the reach of God or the natural order of the world associated with divine ordinance; sure enough, at the end the nodding mould-man vanishes into a “ghostly and mournful” otherworldly mist (121). T...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Like Doctor Moreau , “The Derelict” suggests that simply reorganising familiar organic structures might produce new living forms and inform fresh understandings of the nature of organic life. The Derelict itself both occupies and exceeds the boundary kingdom. As a mould-l...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood I turn now to my final set of weird scientific borderlands: those around energy physics. The weird tales I discuss by Blackwood and Hodgson are, on the one hand, meditations on ener...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his own” (64). The invader belongs to a state of heat-death, associated with a “glacial atmosphere” and “[s]omething from the region of utter cold” (63). This energy should be unusable, yet Si...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: As a result, what weird tales sometimes end up describing is something resembling a quantum world as much as it does a thermodynamic one. The very fact they cannot (as physicists and Theosophists and others generally could not) reconcile the potentials of the new ideas wi...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In these tales, “last man” figures face eternal night and have the opportunity to find out and report on what the extinction of human consciousness might mean. The vision of an eternity of darkness expresses the horror of stasis and equilibrium along with the horror of an...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: They are mainly along Theosophic lines: “Intra-Cosmic motion is eternal and ceaseless,” Blavatsky declared, “cosmic motion (the visible, or that which is subject to perception) is finite and periodical.” The Recluse has watched normal cosmic motion cease, and now what the...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: ” Hodgson’s enweirded version is tied not just to spiritual betterment but to a tangible physical cause, so that human evolution follows adaptation to a change in environment — in this case close proximity to the earth’s core and thus to the Earth-Current. The Earth-Curre...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Among the legends X reports are the “secret and horrid Doorways In The Night” I mentioned in Chapter , concluded to represent “ruptures of the Æther” visible to the spirit but “hid to the eyes of the flesh” (398). He encounters such a doorway himself: “a door opened upwar...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: After landing, the two men lie on hot sand “in the full blaze of a scorching sun,” while the willow bushes are “dancing, shouting, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands” (130). The Swede promptly falls asleep, while the narrator “wander[s] about in a...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: A local resident, therefore, has borne the brunt of a northern European intrusion into this liminal region. White imperialism gets a shock, but survives. While the Danube journey is not liıeually a colonial exercise, the story counts among “cultural expressions of that id...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Mark Blacklock argues that “the ideas spawned by n-dimensional geometry” offered a challenge to Euclidean geometry that was shocking, but also “provided a rich imaginative framework for recasting physical space.” Impossible as higher dimensions might be to fully imaginati...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Not only is the new reality an uncertain, “quivering” one, but both expanded consciousness and quantum theory, it seems, require and produce a fundamentally new and altered set of conceptual relations with reality, a threshold moment that can never be un-learned. In weird...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: One Blackwood protagonist realises “in how simple a fashion the frontiers of consciousness could shift this way and that, or with what touch of genuine awe the certainty might come that one stood on the borderland of new, untried, perhaps dangerous experiences.” To be cer...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: 1. Between Conception and Transformation. QUESTION: What is the central argument of the passage \"Between Conception and Transformation\" as it relates to the process of transformation and its implications for human understanding?" }, { "role": "assistant", "c...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In this cursory sketch the reader may recognise Hegel’s characterization of Geist or Spirit. Indeed, Hegel was the first to describe the community of rational agents as a social model of mind, and to do so in terms of its function. The functional picture of geist is essen...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Only once intelligence begins to systematically understand its place within the world as an intelligible unity, can it begin to concretely know what it is in itself and what it may become for itself. thoroughgoing analysis of essentially self-conscious creatures : what ac...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: For this reason, functional analysis demands a coherentist view that on the difficulty of modelling something that displays remote intentionality in a medium that only displays fully actual, descriptive structures, and in modelling high-level universality, and, more impor...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Even if we take capitalism as the totality of ways of producing and society as what we perceive to be the totality of social relations, they represent two quite distinct types of totality despite their interconnections. To remain oblivious to these seemingly minor specifi...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The consequence of self-relatedness is that it forces the subject to project outward, to be conscious of a reality which is not an extension of the self but an order in which objects negate back, rendering the thoughts of the subject defeasible (prone to revision) and its...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: As much as it should afford the fully fledged naturalization carried out by the empirical sciences, it should also allow for nonempirical claims regarding the autonomy of reason and the maturation of self-consciousness as such. Naturalization is, therefore, a universal me...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This is by no means a weak interpretation of identity, but rather a strict notion of identity that entails neither fixity nor simple relationality.3 There is no incompatibility between having a precise or strict notion of identity and a notion of identity through change a...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The social manifestation of the demotion of mind to an individual where one can always point to a given cerebrum is what Hegel calls individual, or more precisely individualistic, stubbornness , a consciousness ‘bogged down’ by its own ‘servility’: Because not each and ev...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: As suggested by Peter Wolfendale’s phrase ‘the reformatting of homo sapiens’, sapience is a qualitative change in the class and types of activi ties of sentience brought about by a qualitatively distinct class of activities. Any sentience that comes under these activities...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The kind of self that is required for establishing the necessary link between geist’s conception and transformation is defined functionally by its roles in assuming rational responsibility (judging): using its rational unity to treat one set of commitments as reasons for ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: By providing themselves with descriptions regarding their past transforma tions, and by putting these descriptions into a form that can be historically expressed and assessed, rational selves can develop adequate theories and practices for reorganizing or transforming the...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: • ingredient and freestanding conceptual contents, making explicit the distinction between the content of concepts and the force of applying them, and in terms of the combinations of generative processes required to produce Finally, in its ultimate superior mode, language...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Having presented an overview of mind not as an ideal object but as a social project, we can now shift the focus to the ramifications of developing and partaking in such a project. The import of the functional picture of geist resides in how this picture Essential self-con...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: By assuming otherwise we subscribe to the ideological fixation of the epistemic given — of access to the intelligibility of the world through the supposedly spontaneous intelligibility of our seemings. Yet the advancement of science need not be understood as a series appr...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Specifically, we must establish what kinds of evolved causal structures and what type of social scaffolding need to be in place to sup port rule-governed activities, how they are connected, and at what stage the role of causal mechanisms in determining the rule-governed a...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: AGI is a concept that reflects not only our irresistible tendency to render ourselves intelligible, but also a strong normative ideal for betterment and for the good — the idea of developing something that takes some of our most cherished concepts and convictions (such as...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Global positive Lyapunov exponents can only be obtained from linearized dynamics on the assumption of infini tesimal uncertainties. However, ‘when uncertainties are finite, linearized dynamics involving infinitesimals does not appropriately characterize the growth of fini...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The equation of general intelligence with compression, the valorisation of purely inductivist methods in cognitive science, and the program of artificial general intelligence as universal methods capable of bypassing the problems of epistemic multimodality and semantic co...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: To the extent that we employ these categories to give structure to the world (the universe of data) and to make sense of the experience of who we are in the world, and furthermore, in so far as the extent to which the a priori categories are entangled with the contingent ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The unbinding of reason from experience is a required step in order to expand and reshape our experience beyond what is manifestly essential or suppos edly given to us. This Hegelian program neither impoverishes reason nor disposes of the significance of experience, but i...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: For example, consider the symbolic program of AI (the syntactic picture of the mind), deep learning (neural networks and statistical inference), and computational semantics (computational-logical modelling of meaning representation in natural languages), programs which we...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Aphysical event a in the body Aimpresses its occurrence on a mental state x of the mind X, written a Ax. Dually, in state x the mind infers the prior occurrence of event a, written x\\-a. States may be understood as corresponding more or less to the possible worlds of a K...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: If we were able to adopt this ‘outside view’ then what would our world look like from the perspective of artificial intelligence design? What kinds of basic capacities must these agents have in order to support complex schemas of self-conception and self-revision? And wha...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The wiring or neural structure comprises primary low-level information processing modules, additional higher-level modules for intermediating primary modules, and workspaces through which processed information can be selected and made available to a higher-level global wo...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In short, for the time being, we must resign ourselves to this analogical For these reasons, if handled correctly, this analogical circle is a vir tuous rather than a vicious circle. It describes a species of cas-if’ (als ob ) arguments that play the role of regulative th...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: second a non-analogical linguistic narration — essentially a story of and within language — in which such registers are inferentially caught up. More specifically, the items in the second story are linguistic items that possess semantic features by virtue of the inferenti...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: These two syntheses are the figurative part of the building process To avoid terminological confusion, it is best to provide brief definitions for these recurring elements of the Kantian vocabulary: Sensations are the ‘immediate’ results of the mind being causally affecte...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: But the description is not the structuring kernel of the model itself since the structure contains a diverse range of information regarding the scope, assignment, and fidelity criteria (i.e., constraints which specify the representational, dynamic and resolution or scale-...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: It only contains rudimentary protocol-like transitions or transformation rules rather than proper inferential or objective-conceptual rules of transition, e.g.: mass o f fuzzy grey, contact with the heap o f black — The goal of this comparative excursion was to highlight ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: reserve only for an apperceptive agency. This awareness is merely an attentional mobilization of the global workspace that was introduced earlier. And similarly, the (conceptual) knowledge of the mind-state should not be conflated with this rudimentary awareness of mind-s...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Let us call the registers of items that the automaton encounters in its environment — events which occasion alterations in the internal states of the automaton and which are manifested at the level of the global workspace — impressions. Now that the memory system is fully...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: It is perhaps necessary to mention that, at the level of these selves qua bundles of Humean perceptions, there is no time-consciousness since time-consciousness requires the apperceptive self or the principle of experiential unification. There is only a de facto time-orde...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Our excursion into the problem of transcendental structures or types will take us down the road of that most enigmatic aspect of the world and our experience of it, time. From the analogically posited perspective of the automaton and the nonanalogical viewpoint of the dis...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: One cannot assert that this consequence contradicts our experience, for indeed it seems to be a plausible extrapolation of our present knowledge of the world. Yet, with all due recognition to the caution which must be observed in going beyond the direct consequences of ex...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Accordingly, Boltzmann’s true challenge — not fully appreciated even by himself — now boils down to a much more fundamental question: How can we suggest that an initial microstate can explain a final macrostate, if what is really in need of explanation is the temporal asy...