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Daniel M's avatar

A major aspect of postmodernism as I understand it (and please jump in, any art historians or the like who know better than I do) was a response to the mechanized nature of modern life and especially the way mechanized societies marched into two catastrophic world wars. To analyze and deconstruct the place of the human within a machine, which points the focus at impersonal forces. I don’t know Skinner’s motivation, but who knows, this may have been in his mind as well. That would make the scientific turn away from consciousness itself a consequence downstream of technological changes and the way those technologies were integrated into society. By way of comparison, I agree with you that AI is likely to have a similarly major impact on how we view ourselves, our interiority, and our relation to the world. We’ll see exactly how, but I expect it to be weirder than “merely” a consciousness winter.

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John D. Westlake's avatar

I've been fairly vocal about the unlikely prospects for a scientific theory of consciousness, absent a major conceptual upheaval on par with Copernicus or Darwin.

The present status quo is committed to physicalism/materialism, reductionism, and a form of naturalism knitting them together (which includes certain anti-metaphysical claims and claims about the authority of science, in addition to the preceding) which makes it logically impossible to speak of subjectivity, consciousness, or properties thereof without literal magic.

No one will squeeze the blood of mind from a material stone. And that is the entire problem with a scientific approach as things stand. I don't believe we ever exited the consciousness winter. The legacies of behaviorism and logical positivism have haunted cognitive science and AI since McCulloch and Pitts. Jerome Bruner lamented how cog-sci turned into computationalism and information theory after the post-behaviorist cognitivist turn. These theories are physicalist from their founding philosophical and conceptual assumptions.

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