Agency as intentional action (free will?) will be fascinating to explore modeling in #RealisticVirtualEarthForSTEM w avatar bots @ cell/atomic levels re philosophical questions of VIRTUAL consciousness https://www.pinterest.com/sgkmacleod/consciousness/… - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Consciousness… - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/consciousness?m=0… -

Agency as intentional action (free will?) will be fascinationg to explore modeling in #RealisticVirtualEarthForSTEM w avatar bots @ cell/atomic levels re philosophical questions of VIRTUAL consciousness https://t.co/J8RE3t0DlK - https://t.co/Db5qEZRtd4 - https://t.co/loIqqsNkvO -

— scottmacleod (@scottmacleod) April 4, 2019

https://twitter.com/scottmacleod/status/1113834099410518017


*

Where, and how best, to begin 'building out' in a realistic virtual earth with individual human & species' avatar bots - and re brain modeling, both conceptually and actually, for experimentation?

(and re the 'virtual,' agency, consciousness, brain modeling, and heading/traveling to virtual Harbin Hot Springs ...)


* *

HEALTH
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

STEPHEN CAVE
JUNE 2016 ISSUE

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/


*

Appreciating Stephen Cove's focus on free will vs determinism, and analysis of evolutionary biology in these regards.

To riff a bit with this:
when I headed up to Harbin Hot Springs to do ethnographic field work from around 2005-2015, and when all kinds of other northern California folks also head to Harbin, I want to suggest we all do this with 'intentional action' (that is, with free will), and further more that each of our "consciousnesses" (awarenesses), 'gave' us the freedom to make this choice, to begin traveling there, then to soak and hang out.

How might one model this for humans with realistic avatar bots of you and me for brain science (building out of models of fly and mouse brains at the cellular and atomic levels too) in terms of the actual and virtual ... ?


* *
David Chalmers:

"The Virtual and the Real: Philosophical Issues About Virtual Reality"
 Stanford University talk ...
- https://events.stanford.edu/events/698/69825/ -


... which great Stanford talk I attended (and took notes of) ...


*
The "hard problem" per Chalmers:

"Others may seem less tractable, especially the so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it's like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain."

And the "easy problem" per Chalmers:

"Progress may seem likely on some of the so called “easy problems” of consciousness, such as explaining the dynamics of access consciousness in terms of the functional or computational organization of the brain (Baars 1988)."



Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Consciousness

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/


*

riff with hard and easy questions:




* *

Nagel's something it's like to be conscious

"What is it like to be a bat?"


*
riff with this re the virtual
(re the 'virtual,' agency, consciousness, brain modeling, and heading/traveling to virtual Harbin Hot Springs ...)


* *

Colin McGinn's
"The Mysterious Flame"
Chapter 1: http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mcginn-flame.html


*

Colin McGinn Why is Consciousness so Mysterious

https://youtu.be/ALvjBZyCXzA


*
riff with the idea of the metaphor or symbol of consciousness as "flame" or "floating"- and the idea of metaphors in explaining consciousness in general, re the virtual and modeling

(and re the 'virtual,' agency, consciousness, brain modeling, and heading/traveling to virtual Harbin Hot Springs ...)


* * *

Caesalpinia pulcherrima: Knowledge--consciousness * * * (and my idea: put networking video camera computers on neurons inside the head/in the brain - re awareness and subjectivity questions?) * * * "In "What is it Like to Be a Bat?", Nagel argues that consciousness has essential to it a subjective character, a what it is like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism""

https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/03/caesalpinia-pulcherrima-knowledge.html


*
re the 'virtual,' agency, consciousness, brain modeling, and heading/traveling to virtual Harbin Hot Springs ...

Re "Caesalpinia pulcherrima: Knowledge--consciousness * * * (and my idea: put networking video camera computers on neurons inside the head/in the brain - re awareness and subjectivity questions?)" ... for what it's like questions across species (and transmitting the data wirelessly into a realistic virtual earth at the cellular and atomic levels),

a new "hard problem" emerges ... namely actually designing and implementing this information technology of networking camera on brain cells ... (or perhaps Chalmers''easy problem' becomes another 'hard problem')


*
How might one best add such networking video camera computer arrays with internet connectivity on neurons inside the head/in the brain - re awareness and subjectivity questions ... in humans with realistic avatar bots of you and me for brain science (and in octopuses in water, in flies (re Tom Dean's brain modeling at Google/Stanford) in bats (with flight and echo locations) and in mice brains at the cellular and atomic levels too) in terms of the actual and virtual, the physical and the digital ... ?


While one might somehow explore surgical approaches (difficult with octopi), I'd think that inviting such individuals and species to ingest capsules or similar with molecular / nano-scale video cameras, or at the cellular level too, would be a less invasive, and possible non-harming approach.

*
Re the
Actual/Real - Virtual
Physical - Digital

Whether such "networking video camera computer arrays with internet connectivity on neurons" experiments could work, and then provide virtual approaches to beginning to explain "what it's like" to be an organism" or "if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism" would emerge in the 'building out' of these methods and approaches.



* *

Agency as intentional action (free will?) will be fascinating to explore modeling in #RealisticVirtualEarth w avatar bots @ cell/atomic levels re philosophical questions of VIRTUAL (as if) consciousness https://www.pinterest.com/sgkmacleod/consciousness/ … - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Consciousness … - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/consciousness?m=0 …-

Agency as intentional action (free will?) will be fascinationg to explore modeling in #RealisticVirtualEarth w avatar bots @ cell/atomic levels re philosophical questions of VIRTUAL (as if) consciousness https://t.co/J8RE3t0DlK - https://t.co/Db5qEZRtd4 - https://t.co/loIqqsNkvO-

— scottmacleod (@scottmacleod) April 4, 2019

- https://twitter.com/scottmacleod/status/1113834542169636864 -

*
In my book "Naked Harbin Ethnography:                
Hippies, Warm Pools, Counterculture, Clothing-Optionality & Virtual Harbin," I define the virtual in terms of "as if" with regards to multimedia representations ...




~ http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg ~ https://twitter.com/HarbinBook ~ http://bit.ly/HarbinBook ~

*
So such a "networking cameras on neural cells transmitting into virtual brains of a variety of species and individual humans - with language - in a realistic virtual earth" as people consciously heading up to Harbin Hot Springs - which for me is an example of agency or free will - both actually and virtually, approach, would generate vast new amounts of data that could be used to further explore consciousness re questions of freedom virtually. STEAM brain researchers might even be able to model some of this data from networking cameras on brain cells about consciousness re the images or metaphors of a flame or floating (e.g. the symbol of a lotus floating and how this represents consciousness in the brain).

> to "Harbin Consciousness Church," nee or formerly known as "Heart Consciousness Church" (HCC) - and which is incorporated as a non-profit legally in the state of California - where the consciousness word, linguistically, offers another Harbin angle to understanding such brain awareness processes, and re choosing freely to travel to Harbin and soak in the warm pool, for example.

"Soaking in the warm pool" consciousness at Harbin is something I'm seeking to understand and explain in terms of neuroscience (re my book NHE, and creating a realistic virtual Harbin for actual-virtual comparison), so understanding or explaining how consciousness works would be key to this research.


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Eternal Flame Falls: Agency as intentional action (free will?) in #RealisticVirtualEarth w avatar bots @ cell/atomic levels re philosophical questions of VIRTUAL (as if) /Consciousness @WorldUnivAndSch & traveling to virtual Harbin Hot Springs @HarbinBook https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/04/eternal-flame-falls-agency-as.html~

Eternal Flame Falls: Agency as intentional action (free will?) in #RealisticVirtualEarth w avatar bots @ cell/atomic levels re philosophical questions of VIRTUAL (as if) /Consciousness @WorldUnivAndSch& traveling to virtual Harbin Hot Springs @HarbinBookhttps://t.co/8Ro140lphY~

— scottmacleod (@scottmacleod) April 5, 2019

https://twitter.com/scottmacleod/status/1114198894932418560