Recent content by Psychodelirium

In my experience, people who think that "a lot needs to be revised" in EP "in the light of such studies as those done with the !Kung" are not people who are terribly familiar with the field - familiar, that is, with the (mostly critical) rhetoric, but not with the science. I've tried to expand...

I swear... You are like a wall.

[?] Dare I go on? Good Goddess almighty. Someone needs to hit the books.

I'm confused.

Absolute? What's that?

[/b] I have a cat. He's morbidly obese. :frown: Well, I don't really agree with that. Questions about the "purpose" or "function" of this or that are asked and answered in biology all the time, and not surprisingly, such questions help us capture certain patterns of relations in the...

You'll have to ask the cat.

Yes, well, unfortunately, the only way for humans to get to the truth is to have different points of view and to talk about them.

Oh dear Eris, the irony. Please do take the time to get a rudimentary grasp of the topics before you start with the commentary.

Apparently, in your race to find a new label for what I have once called "psychological contextualism", but what we may as well call "externalism" and leave it at that, you have overlooked the fact that "radical behaviorism" is a label that is already in use, a label applied to views of the...

It's getting increasingly difficult nowadays to figure out just what it is that people mean when they throw around the label "behaviorism". Generally speaking, though, one hears a certain sort of story, a story about the fall of behaviorism and the rise of the cognitive revolution. Behaviorists...

But users' idiosyncratic input historoies aren't programmed into VR simulations. What is programmed are the VR responses to possible inputs. This is precisely why a VR program that was as good as the Matrix would run into combinatorial explosion while trying to figure out how to respond to the...

Not at all. Suppose you go to a VR lab in Australia, where a bunch of programmers explain to you that they are testing a new video game. They wire you up, push a few buttoms, and you suddenly discover yourself in the middle of a dungeon with a sword in your hand. In this situation, it would be...

You might find while reading Dennett that he is much more interested in "practical" constraints than he is in "principled" constraints. I think Dennett is basically a functionalist, so I can't see any reason why he would say that Matrix scenarios are impossible in principle. But what does...

Pretty much. The point Dennett was making (as I recall - it's been a while since I read CE) was that a simulation that was rich enough to fool us would run into combinatorial explosion while trying to match valid world outputs to valid user inputs. This renders Matrix type scenarios impossible...