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Ned Block
@De_dicto
Silver Professor, Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science
New York
Joined May 2009
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    New paper: Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? Free link until November 26th: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRvW-… 1/
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    My best friend in elementary school and high school, Jimmy Waller, was killed by the Klan in Greensboro NC on November 3, 1979. He was a doctor who had joined a doctors' march against the Klan. Finally the Greensboro City Council has voted to make an official apology...
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    There is one obvious fact about the ONLY systems that we are SURE are sentient: their information processing is mainly based in electrochemical information flow in which electrical signals are converted to chemical signals (neurotransmitters) and back to electrical signals. 1/2
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    Noam Chomsky's 50th birthday celebration in 1978. Chomsky in foreground to the left, @elizablock in the lower right corner, me in the large glasses next to @elizablock
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    Replying to @De_dicto
    If fish are sentient, it is because of their neurobiology, not their facility in conversation. @garymarcus, @patchurchland
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    Zenon Pylyshyn from almost exactly a year ago, the day after Thanksgiving 2021. Zenon was part of our 50 year tradition of Friday Thanksgiving. Also pictured left to right, Georges Rey, David Rosenthal, Janet Fodor, Susan Carey, Anne Telford and me.
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    Current theories of consciousness are 'meat-neutral', but if specific physical substrates are necessary, AI may never achieve consciousness. Understanding whether consciousness depends on computational roles, 5/
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    academic.oup.com/cercor/advance… Analysis of recordings of conversations with the only carefully studied bilateral human blindsight patient reveals that he knows he is seeing red without, apparently, perceptual phenomenology of redness/1
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    Replying to @De_dicto
    We would be foolish to suppose that fact is unimportant.2/2
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    Replying to @hakwanlau
    This letter is self-contradictory. It both claims that IIT makes no predictions and complains about how implausible those predictions are.
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