the evidence for the afterlife

 category:  TST (Thinking Stops There), the sociology of false beliefs

are thoughts ideas, or are thoughts mere symbols of ideas?

Our emotions in their essential forms are all naturally selected to promote our survival and reproduction -- fight or flight, hunger and taste, love and lust. Once you've unsurvived, what's the point of those emotions? 

I'm intrigued by reports of paranormal psychic reports. Having lived over seventy years, I sense that my mind registers information well beyond what I'm fully aware of. Riding my bike I often feel that an auto is about to appear within my sightline in an intersection, even though I haven't heard or seen the auto hidden by the tall buildings of the Manhattan streetscape. Could it be that I've been Pavlovianly trained by experience to respond to the clues visible on the street that react to an auto moving on the street, clues that the people on the street themselves aren't aware of but yet nudge their behaviors? 

Another example you might have experienced: if someone walking behind me begins to talk to a companion on the street, I hear it as their conversation, but if someone walking behind me alone begins to talk on the phone, I intuitively hear it as addressed to me. Do I have some sense that the person behind me is alone? Have the sound of steps been registered below the level of my consciousness? 

It's not supernatural, it's just responses below the radar of awareness. What else am I missing in my awareness? How do those unconscious senses influence me? These paranormal abilities intrigue me.

On the other hand, supernatural notions of the afterlife seem completely unthinking. In an age informed by Darwin, instructing us that all our emotions are naturally selected for survival, reproduction and species/DNA support, why imagine an afterlife with emotions, an afterlife that requires neither survival, reproduction or species support. I'm making some assumptions here -- maybe it's one great orgy, gratuitous yet nonetheless fun. Is it eternal feelings of love and care with no object to love or care about? Or is the afterlife a floating cloud of non-emotions? A zen-like state of emptiness? Adoring and loving the deity's great and perfect and beautiful plan "red in tooth and claw", needless war, the good punished and the wicked rewarded. Why even bother to imagine such a fantasy? 

Or is it a place where you reunite with your family including your siblings ripped apart by bombs of war or burnt to a crisp by genocidal hate? What exactly is being imagined here and why? And why don't the fantasts think about these consequences of their own fantasies? 

I find false beliefs almost always pedestrian and unimaginative because they are self-serving, especially compared to the unlimited imagination of science which has no audience to appeal to -- the facts and conjectures lead wherever they go, regardless of how crazy and far from serving any self. But the fact that we believe such lame and often contradictory ideas -- that's a fascinating puzzle. How can we believe an obvious falsehood or an incoherent one? Of course we know that we believe whatever we want to believe, but how does a species that relies on cognition and prediction survive holding thoughts the only merit of which are their wishfulness? 

A friend -- actually a bunch of friends -- ask me what I think about the afterlife and the cases of people who came back from death, you know, people who were dead and were resuscitated and report having met dead family members and such. The obvious response is that as you fade off into death, like fading into sleep, you hallucinate or dream or just get thoughts and memories confused. And what might you hallucinate or dream about? Familiar ideas and people, of course. There's nothing surprising in this. It's exactly what you'd expect from fading out of awareness towards death. 

What's surprising is that anyone would take these reports as evidence of the experience of death. Like, why believe such a wishful-thinking but wild and weird fantasy when the obvious explanation is in plain sight? "As I drifted off, I dreamt about the people I hoped to see in death." 

Now, you object that the wild fantasy is also not surprising, since it's so dearly wished. I beg to differ. Hamlet -- remember him? -- also differed. The afterlife scared him, for good reason; Epicurus' life-ends-with-death comforted him. Me too. Why not everyone else? 

So what's this great interest in resuscitation stories? Why are they taken seriously? Why are they lumped with the paranormal, investigating which seems useful and informative, while speculations about the afterlife seem just unthinking and useless? What, even, does it mean to come back from the dead?

In an upcoming post, I set out a few principles that are often lost in wishful ideas including myside or confirmation bias. Among them: attending to the normal which we often take for granted -- the oblivious obvious; seeking the negative or disconfirmatory side of a question, for example asking not the benefits of free speech, all of which have downsides, but asking what happens when there's no freedom of speech, whether enforced from the top (government censorship) or from one's peers (cancel culture); attending to the entailments or implications; attending to the origin and purpose of an idea rather than just the content -- when you ask where the "chem trails" conspiracy theory must have come from, given that it doesn't identify the chemicals or how they act or what has actually happened as a result of them, you recognize whoever came up with this idea had no knowledge at all but a lot of distrust -- "I don't know what that thing there is, but because I don't know what it is, it must be dangerous and put there by Them."

Starting with the last. Where does this notion of afterlife comes from. It's not a recent one. All those cases of people who were revived from death knew about heaven before they died. It's a cultural staple, just looking at ancient texts. When I studied Attic Greek we read Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead in which the hero travels through the underworld. So I can attest that this afterworld idea is old. If your mind is still working after being around your fellow idiots for years of sharing inane ideas, you've got to wonder where the ancients got the idea about the afterlife. And you know it's not from medical resuscitations, unless you think that the ancients practiced resuscitations or maybe there were aliens resuscitating Greeks. There are no texts I know of -- and I think we'd know about it -- mentioning aliens resuscitating Greeks. All we get are some fictional stories based on myths, not case histories. 

In other words, this notion of the afterlife is a piece of religious mythology most likely generated to soothe or warn. That's a reasonable explanation, especially since there are cultures that don't tell us about afterlife. South Asians have reincarnation, not afterlife, as I understand it. Lutherans believe death is a long sleep. The Chinese die only to haunt their children. 

To put it simply, why should anyone credit any of the stories or experiences or memories of their gradual loss of consciousness towards death? There's no reason besides wishful thinking of the most unthinking kind. Do you really want to meet in the afterlife (one friend says one of these resuscitated from the dead says they saw their family in their brief stint in the afterlife) your senile family members or the aforementioned dismembered and burnt and crispy...you get the picture. It's not pretty. And what about all the toxic people that you worked so hard to cut out of your life. Eternity with them! Yes, that's just what you wanted. Or is that hell? You deserve that? That's wishful thinking? 

The afterlife might be wonderful, but the probability is that it's awful, at least as awful as the living world which has little justice and plenty of toxicity. The wishful "thinking" over the afterlife is at least as lame as wishful thinking over a supernatural deity. Why would anyone imagine that a deity who created animals of prey who tear apart their prey alive would be merciful to you? The very idea of God is a terrifying one. The idea that anyone is listening to my thoughts is the ultimate nightmare and everyone knows it judging by how upset everyone was over Snowdon's data dump of government surveillance. What's going on with people -- an all powerful deity surveiling you is okay with you and even a blessing, but a government that obviously doesn't care about you as long as you shop, troubles you? I give credit to the Jews: the Old Testament deity is f***ing scary. I am so glad He's dead so I can go eat lobster without guilt. 

Is it wishful (non) thinking? Is it a rebellion against the "you must believe science" -- the resistance against the chains of the must-believe-this (Gilovich)? Is it just the intuition that since others say they believe it, it must be true, since if they didn't have special access to the truth, no one would come up with such a belief? Notice that the last one is the reason most people believe the earth is round -- not because they understand the science behind, which they know nothing of, but because they intuit that such an absurd belief -- that the earth is spinning?!? and is round!?! -- would never have caught on with everyone across the globe unless it were true. But the belief in the afterlife, unlike flat earthism, is not only absurd, it's undesirable. It's a lot like sci-fi spaceships. They were imagined in order to produce dramas. They're not a representation of the future. The afterlife is no representation of the future either. If it were, it'd have burned and dismembered bodies etc. It's been imagined for some drama or story, a feel-good story. The Nietzschean story: it's a comfort for an oppressed people who had to admit that the Romans were too big for them to resist. The oppressed win in the next life. 

Lumping the afterfile in with the paranormal tells us that those who are drawn to them as a class are unthinkers. I don't mean that they are incapable of thinking. Flat earthers are not only incisive and clever in their arguments but well-informed too. They recognize that if the earth is flat the sun must be close not far and that gravity can't be Newtonian on their view. They know more about flat Earth theory and its justifications than the average round-earth believer, who merely trusts that their grade school teachers wouldn't have told them such a counterintuitive theory if it weren't true. 

The afterlife believers' motivations don't seem to distinguish between the unknown and the absurd. It's believing what you want, and thinking stops there. 

film acting vs theater acting

 This is the story of how I lost respect for film actors, theater audiences, and art. 

I had the pleasure, a decade or so ago, of acting in a major role -- the antagonist -- in an indie feature film, a pretty good movie that got an award at a NYC film festival, and full of excellent young actors. The story included one major role for an older character, and that was mine. 

The movie I played in was almost all young actors of impressive talent, skill and dynamism. They were paid SAG minimum I beleive. The director, limited by his budget, offered me the role of villain, an older character, probably because I'm not really an actor, so he could pay me a stipend under scale and not have to deal with the exorbitant fees of the older actors in town. 

The acting market in NYC is a double market failure. The city draws swarms of talented aspiring actors which glut the supply and makes for so few opportunities and keeps wages so low that after several years of working multiple jobs and achieving little despite incredible talent and dedication, even the most talented give up and go back home to Kentucky to bring up kids in a normal, undistinguished American life of obscurity. Their burn-out departure leaves only a very small few in the metropolis who were able to survive as actors, so few that these, now older, are in high demand and cost a lot. 

Fortunately for the director -- and for me -- had seen me in a few videos I made for a friend's business, knew me personally, and so asked me to play this role for a nominal fee. I'd never been in a real movie, much less play a major role in one, so I jumped at the opportunity.

I didn't mind taking a pittance. I would have done it for free, but I felt that doing it for free would segregate me from the crew somehow, so I took a small stipend, something like $150 -- small change. The true reward for me was the opportunity to be in a movie, try acting, and learn about the movie process from the inside. 

Immediately after finishing the movie, a stage director -- another friend -- asked me to play sundry parts in her adaptation of  The Iron Heel, Jack London's socialist sci-fi fantasy. It included one major character and a couple of brief caricature bit parts, but the part that drew me to the project was the role of narrator. She'd written this role in rhymed couplets, so deftly and brilliantly that after reading once through the opening speech, which was quite long --several pages -- I knew most of the lines already, and after just a second reading, knew it altogether by heart. 

I learned several important surprises in this experience of film and theater acting. For one, film acting is thoroughly alienating. There's no audience except the crew and they are busy with their own work. There's a bit of ensemble work among them, but nothing like what happens in a musical ensemble in which each member is listening and reacting in real time to everyone else in the ensemble. 

Since there's no audience, there's really no fun or excitement. If one camera take doesn't work, another will be better. The stakes are low. The director is watching and may be appreciative, but that's your boss, not the audience you want to entertain, tickle, arouse and move. 

And there's all that waiting. 

It's incredibly boring. Film actors cannot possibly be doing this for enjoyment. The only reasons must be for fame and fortune. I came away with an extremely low opinion of film actors. I accept that we all want to be recognized for our talents, and film acting is a talent, and some of them are extraordinarily talented, so I guess I can't judge them too harshly, but it's not a job I'd be proud of. 

On the other hand, theater acting is nothing if not fun. I expected it to be exciting too, and worried about stage fright, but there's actually little anxiety on stage. Unlike reading music in performance where any error in your line will be heard, so the stakes are high for your every pitch, in a play, there's little reason to worry about your lines, since you know the story, and the content of what you're on the stage to say, you could always make up some words that would do just as well as the script, and what words would you then choose? The first ones that come to mind will no doubt be the ones in the script. There was no stage fright. When not speaking on stage, it's a bit boring. I'm not sure of my lines -- it'll come to me when I hear the cue. But entertaining an audience? What fun! 

We had an audience feedback after the curtain. Here I lost my respect for the audience. They all especially loved one of the bit parts. But for me, that was the easiest. I picked an accent, and hammed it to the hilt. And that's what the peanut gallery loves. And not just the peanut gallery. Everyone. 

And that's what art is all about. It's a kind of circus trick. You learn to entertain, and the audience loves it. This is not hard to do. It's not hitting your head day after day trying to master physics or econometrics or god forbid organic chem. It's just tricks. 

how to misunderstand movies

In their desperation to politicize the analysis of popular art, culture critics seem to me to mistake the stage for the drama. 

Analysing say, Double Indemnity, as about the evil incentives of the insurance industry, money and patriarchy is like analysing Star Trek as being about space ships of the future. The space ship is just a stage for the human drama. Double Indemnity is a classic tragedy -- the everyman hero through his flawed humanity gets entangled in a web of deceit and murder, eventually has to pay for his mistakes. To blame this on capitalism and its insurance business and patriarchal notions of marriage is to miss the universal tragic drama entirely. After all, the E.G.Robinson character is also in the insurance claims business, but is a model of morality, decency and loyalty. (If there's anything to analyse here it's the dangers of lust over the virtues of loyal friendship.) Capitalism and insurance and patriarchal notions of marriage -- these are the stage and props. Every drama has to have a stage. To the extent that the stage reflect real life, if it happens in today's world, its backdrop will be our culture, our economy, our social failings. But one should be able to distinguish between a classical human drama and a political parable criticising those failings. Glen Gary Glen Ross might be such a parable. It's much more believable if taken as a parable of the cut-throat capitalist market than as a drama about realtors. As a character drama it's a bit too extreme and depressing for drama, but as a parable of corporate competition and its consequences for the human experience, it's spot on. 

Sci-fi movies are often such parables and allegories for our social ills, abuses of power, cultural narrowness, and some dramas, say Miller's All My Sons manage both parable of a social ill and personal tragedy. But sometimes the social ill is just the stage & props. 

the Oblivious Obvious: predictive mind's Frequency Sieve, the Bias Bait and OOO

Obviously, as organic, frail beings thrown into time, we quickly learn to protect ourselves from possible future dangers by focusing on them rather than on the unthreatening, the predictable, the familiar and the understood. Ignoring the familiar, predictable, harmless and unthreatening is efficient. Except when it leads us astray. 

It leads us astray when, focusing on dangers, anomalies, the unexplained, we begin to suspect everything non normal is dangerous and forget that most of life is predictable and harmless. This is a kind of probability mistake, ignoring Bayesian reasoning. The base rate of events in life is harmlessness. The likelihood of any event being a danger is low unless you're in the midst of a war. The asymmetry of focus -- that we save energy by ignoring the harmless 99% of life -- inclines us to distrust, as we focus on every possible danger. You could call it the predictive mind's Frequency Sieve that retains nothing but the rare heavy nuggets, most of which don't even contain anything of worth.

I'm thinking of two possible types that might be most susceptible to this oblivion: those who spend too much attention on such dangers like conspiracies -- government conspiracies or corporate marketing conspiracies and the like -- and those who understand little of engineering or science or how anything works including societies, politics, economies. To predict harm, we develop theories about the unfamiliar; the less we understand, the more we can impose our biases and fears on the world. I imagine both these types would be inclined to distrustful theories, the one because those theories seem fully justified by their experience or reading or media consumption, the other because they have no alternative approach to understand unfamiliar events for which they have no explanation. 

A friend says that "chem trails" will kill us because they want to thin the herd. Lacking any explanation for the trails, he accepts the one he's heard, without asking which chemicals and exactly how they work, and without wondering why the hearsay doesn't include any such detail, which would surely have been included if the story was a reliable leak -- and if it wasn't a leak, well, where does this story come from? Ah yes, from someone who saw trails, didn't know what they were and imagined they were devised by a nefarious conspiracy. (Of all the possible explanations, conspiracy is the meme that's most likely to spread, since playing on fears of uncertainty, misinformation spreads faster than truth.) 

I point out that they also guarantee him every day with electricity, indoor plumbing, heat in winter, roads, public transit -- the 99% of life that we all depend on. That they depend on the herd's constant purchasing: no wealth without a broad base -- the broadest base possible -- of consumers somewhere in the pyramid scheme. Far from thinning the herd, what they most want are more of consumers. Look at Zuck, buying yet another platform having run out of customers on the last. They even get their government to distribute funds so you can consume all the way to your grave. And all that insidious surveillance we all complain about is designed to get you to consume yet more. He's right that it's all a conspiracy of the wealthy, but it's not to corral us all into prisons and death traps, but to corral us into Amazon Prime. 

I call this forgetfulness of the normal 99% of life "the Oblivious Obvious" (OO, pronounced with Ominous background music, the OOO music). It is so plainly obvious and familiar that it can be actually hard to find.  It doesn't stick out. You take it for granted. It's just not on anyone's radar and you don't know where and how to look for it 'cause it's everywhere.

The media, of course, don't help. As a market, they reflect the interests of its audience. That's mostly lots of anomalies, dangers, threats. If it bleeds, it ledes. Covid was a festival of fear in the media, new symptoms every day along with mortality rates, co-morbidities, ways of dying, causes of contagion, renegades who refuse to protect you and grandma and who will kill us all. Before covid, when I'd read about a disease in Wikipedia, half way through the page already I'd be thinking, do I have this disease? and way before the end of the page I'd already concluded I have only 6 months left to live and had better prepare a will and testament, planning for a world without me. Imagine that dread 365x for two years. It's no wonder our informational flat earth turned upside down and shook and tossed everyone into two camps of torch and pitchfork judgmental haters. 

And social media is no better. Disputes and controversies are of course debates about what's wrong with society. Where things are going well, dispute is academic -- "why is it working so well?" is a scientific question for the scholars. What's gone wrong? is everyone's personal concern, and your opinion tags your social identity. 

So much for the Frequency Sieve. 

9-11 presents a distinctive case of oblivion. It reveals something more about how and why and when we fail to observe the obvious. It's a kind of Bias Bait for oblivion. Let's take a look.

There are several factoids that are taken as evidence for a government conspiracy: the owner of the building clearly had prior intelligence of the event, Building 7 collapsed without being hit by a plane, same building also contained government documents; a UK news caster announced the fall of the the second collapse. Each of these are alone suspicious, and that there are many suspicions increases the likelihood of a false flag conspiracy. 

There are other factoids as well, but I just want to point out the role of the oblivious obvious in these, especially Building 7's collapse because it is so glaringly illogical. To be honest, I don't know or care whether the event was staged, my sole interest here is to point out the absurdity of these cases of the oblivious obvious. 

The premise of the conspiracy is that the planes were an elaborate decoy to deceive the public into thinking that terrorists destroyed the buildings not an internal demolition. The fact that no plane hit 7 obviously contradicts the premise. That should be the end of the story, obviously. 

In case you don't see the obvious logic here, imagine you're a conspirator. Let's start at the beginning. You can't just internally demolish the towers for the all too simple reason that the public would be outraged that the buildings were internally demolished. So you've got to come up with a way to hide your demolition plan. This is the 9-11 conspiracy theory. You coordinate an elaborate conspiracy plot involving terrorists, planes with passengers, secrecy, a script for the news; for some reason you tell the owner, maybe because you need him to install the thermite, or maybe he is the one who came up with this conspiracy in the first place. On the day of, your planes hit the towers. The towers fall as planned so that the public is given every evidence that the terrorists in the planes did it and the internal demolition is hidden. It's a foolproof plan: terrorists target a global icon of American wealth and influence. 

And then, after all that careful planning and elaborate coordination, and above all secrecy,  you internally demolish Building 7 because, of course, no one will notice that there was no plane. Of course, you think, no one will notice that the building falls without a plane. Why would anyone think it was an internal demolition? And, of course, the public will believe that Building 7 was demolished by ... invisible terrorists? No matter, a building collapsing by itself happens all the time. Why, we could have internally demolished the other two buildings and the public wouldn't have noticed at all. That's why we coordinated that conspiracy. Because ... 

You get the glaring incoherence. If there were conspirators, the last thing they'd let happen is a building collapsing apparently by itself. Internally demolishing it would give away to the public all their cards -- showing that the whole event was an inside job. In other words, far from being the central evidence evidence of a conspiracy, Building 7 collapsing is the strongest evidence against the internal demolition theory. It couldn't have been internally demolished because it wasn't hit. It literally and directly contradicts the entire premise of the conspiracy which is that the planes were there solely to deceive the public into believing the terrorists did it, not conspirators. And btw, 7 was an unknown even in NYC much less a global icon. What kind of nutty conspiracy is this? 

Bu, bu, bu, bu, but the conspirators wanted to destroy the government documents contained in 7. S orry, that doesn't help your case. The building burned for seven hours. If you are trying to hide the internal demolition of the Twin Towers, and you want to destroy documents in 7, all you do is let it fry until it burns to a crisp and everything in it is ashes. When the smoke clears, bring the insurance investigators, watch them declare the building irreparable and call for a wrecking ball, a straight forward, conventional public demolition no questions asked from the public. 

Alternatively, instead of tearing down three giant buildings, put the documents in the shredder at your leisure, no need for thermite installation. 

Let's just follow this a bit. If logic -- contradicting a premise is the essence of illogicality -- tells us that it couldn't have been internally demolished, what destroyed it? The only explanation is the fire. Now, many engineers claim that fire couldn't cause such a collapse, but those buildings were unlike any others I've ever seen. If you'd ever been there you couldn't help noticing the extreme lack of supporting structure. They were built like egg shells. The only way to know for sure how they could be destroyed is by empirically observing buildings exactly like them being destroyed. But where oh where are you going to find such empirical observation? 

Yes. Building 7. : ) You know by the logic above that 7 fell because of the fire -- any supposed conspirators wouldn't publicly demolish the building internally for all to see. And you also know how it fell -- exactly what such a building would look like falling and how fast. And 7 fell just like the other two. So not only does 7 provide the strongest argument against the internal demolition theory, it shows us exactly how and why the other buildings fell. Building 7 is not The Great Puzzle that points to internal demolition, it's the clear and obvious answer to all the questions about how and why the buildings fell as they did. 

What is obvious about it? Because the internal demolition conspiracy theory premise is "the planes were decoys to hide the internal demolition" -- that the internal demolition was licensed as it were by the employment of the decoy planes, so it should logically be obvious that a building not hit by a plane woudn't have been internally demolished by conspirators trying to hide their conspiracy. 

Why is this obvious entailment of the theorists' own premise ignored? Two likely reasons: one, the theorist stubbornly believes the fire can't have demolished the building, so the theorist already concluded what was to be proved and is just looking for an explanation for the fall of the building other than fire; and two, motivated reasoning: the theorist wants to believe that 7 fell by internal demolition. The theorist has, in the case of two, simply stopped thinking. The theorist has his conclusion, all that's wanted is the desired explanation. This is what I call "thinking stops there" (TST, hat tip to Kahneman's WYSIATI). "I found my explanation, I don't ask further questions even if they are obvious ones". TST is truly human, all too human. Thinking is the gift of humanity, and that gift includes not using it when convenient. We are the non thinking species. Privilege!

Bu bu bu but Silverstein knew in advance. Well, of course. He bought the building after it had already been bombed once, so he knew it was a target. No doubt he had some lacky amanuensis who called the FBI and CIA every morning at 6 am and every evening at 6 pm to find the latest intel. 

Bu bu bu but he didn't tell anyone. Of course not. Think. Suppose he told all his giant corporate tenants, "don't come to work today". And suppose nothing happens -- after all, intel is not perfect. The terrorists or the government conspirators might change their mind at the last moment, especially if they see no one is coming to work. Silverstein would be sued by them all for every cent of lost work. And even if they didn't sue him or he won on the grounds that the "CIA told me", suppose this happens again -- don't come to work, and then no event -- he'd have no more corporate tenants at all. Silverstein is not stupid. He followed the intel and kept it wisely to himself. What else would you expect? He's a landlord. He's in business, high stakes business. 

Bu bu bu but the government knew in advance. Why didn't they stop it? Surely you've thought about this every time a mass shooter turns out to have been providing evidence prior to his murder spree. Why didn't the anyone take that manifesto seriously? Why didn't the principal call the police after the student expressed frustration and anger? And surely you came to the conclusion, as all free American citizens would, that the government should arrest everyone who has written a manifesto or expressed frustration and anger before they have committed any crime, before any crime has even happened. Yes, that's the America you want, a government that arrests citizens before they commit crimes, when no crime has been committed yet at all. Sounds like stop and frisk to me, which you-all approved heartily, no? Guilty until proven innocent. Guilty even when nothing happened. That's the America that you complain about because it merely surveilles you. You complain vigorously about that even though there's no evidence that the government does anything with that surveillance and you willingly give your data to corporations that surveille you to sell you the movies it thinks you will enjoy. Please folks get your priorities straight. How can you complain about harmless surveillance and yet expect law enforcement to intervene in your affairs when you haven't done anything yet and nothing has even happened yet? This is the oblivion of one's own contradictions generated by motivated reasoning: if government does something, it must be dangerous and if it doesn't do it, that's dangerous too. 

Bu bu bu but, what about the news script. Yes, when planes fly into globally renowned structures, the news aren't going to report it when it collapses. The government has to compromise its secrecy by giving a script to news media across the globe, otherwise, you know, the media might forget to report it. 

Bu bu bu...

Now, there are two objections to all this. It could be that the conspirators demolished 7 without a plane in order to demonstrate that a mere fire could destroy such a building. I've never heard that risposte, so 9-11 Truthers can't take credit for observing the obvious and are stuck with their oblivious assumptions, but in any case, demolishing another building doesn't add any additional support to the fire-theory demolition of the Twin Towers, since the Twin Towers fell from fire and their falling is supposed to show that such towers can fall from fire. 

The second objection has more weight. The conspirators wanted to demolish 7 but the terrorism decoy wouldn't work since 7 was not a global icon. But if it caught fire, it would have to collapse because the fire-theory says that such structures will fall from a fire. So the conspirators would have to demolish it internally, assuming that fire is insufficient for the task. Such a plan would have to have anticipated the objection to the fire-theory. But it doesn't actually answer that objection. In fact, the objection is still common among 9-11 truthers. 

So a false flag? To invade Afghanistan? If it were a false flag, the government would surely have identified Agfhanis among the terrorists. But there were none. Or maybe the false flag was to initiate a war on terrorism generally, not just Afganistan. But the government identified seven Saudis and an Egyptian. No Iranians, no Libyans, no one from Hezbollah, no Iraqi, no one even from US enemies, no North Korean, no Russian. That's gotta be a very confused false flag. In the Gulf of Tonkin, the US accused the Vietnamese of firing at US ships. LBJ then escalated the war against the Vietnamese. That's a false flag. Colin Powell presented (phony) evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and so Bush invaded Iraq. Seven Saudis and an Egyptian. If the admin wants a Saudi in there, okay, include one like including one Egyptian for whatever reason. But at least one Afghani and an Iraqi for sure, and an Iranian and a Libya, just to cover our bases for the future.  

Was the government hoping for a terrorist event to justify the Patriot Act? I wouldn't be surprised, but the Patriot Act hasn't had much of an effect. The government has always surveilled us, so it seems unlikely to me that the government would bother with a catastrophic event that led to expensive consequences like an unnecessary and ultimately failed war in Afghanistan just for the sake of this paltry, albeit repugnant, legal overreach of government. 

Back in the late 80's, I had a conversation with an Irish friend about how much the US is hated across the globe. We agreed that it was just a matter of time before the US would be hit by some foreign terrorist attack, and that it would be big. So 9-11 was no surprise to me. I was impressed with its simple means, and the scale of its effectiveness.

From my point of view then, why would the government coordinate a complex, secret event when so many foreign agents are willing to do it for them and spare them the secrecy and complexity? That's why when it happened it didn't occur to me that the government would be involved. 

So there's the theory that the event was orchestrated to distract the public from the Secretary of Defense's press briefing that mentioned the $2.3 trillion that the Pentagon has no account of. It assumes that Pentagon and its chief aren't on the same page, which is possible, considering that the so-called deep state is non partisan, an institution always protecting itself and its prominent members. But it also assumes that the Pentagon had suicide terrorists on call to act. Since they bought their tickets in advance, the Pentagon must have known in advance weeks before that Rumsfeld would not only give a speech the day prior, but also that the content would include the mention of the 2.3 trillion. This all implies a close collaboration with suicide terrorists, a Pentagon infiltrator organizing them. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed supposedly was the day-by-day coordinator, but who knows, he's stuck in Guantanamo. 

Did the government expect the collapsing of the World Trade Center and the many deaths? I kinda doubt it, but it seems possible to me, even likely and normal, that the government took a laissez faire approach to it: "Will their plot succeed? Will it be huge and devastating? Not our problem." If it succeeds, no need to speculate on its size, we'll all hear about it post hoc. That's efficiency.   

I don't know for sure what happened on 9-11, it could all be propaganda including the seemingly endless, forlorn white-dusted parade I saw that day filing north from the FiDi. But I do know this, taking the factoids above -- Building 7 proves internal demolition, the UK "premature" announcement, Silverstein's advance notice -- as evidence of conspiracy are examples of oblivious obvious. It's like the many conspiracists who jumped on Silverstein's "I told them, 'pull it'" interview as evidence of admission of guilt. That's beyond oblivion. It's just stupid. 

As a friend pointed out to me, why internally demolish the buildings? Two planes flying into them isn't enough? Now that friend has a thinking mind. That's observing the obvious. 

panpsychism is silly childishness. but it's probably true. here's why and here's how to test for it!

I never intended to write about consciousness, the so-called "hard problem". But I do want to explain why I think it's not a hard problem at all. Explaining and understanding what an idea or thought or meaning is -- that's really hard. Consciousness, no, not hard. And here I am having written at length, much too much about something that I believe is easy. 

The short story in six points: 1) panpsychism seems silly and childish, but every other explanation for consciousness fails miserably, while this silly little child not only stands, but has a lot of good support. Good for you little guy! 2) Bertrand Russell, channeling Kant no doubt, remarked somewhere that the sciences can only observe or measure the outward properties, behaviors and interactions, including our measuring instruments, not the things from within. Panpsychism is just the view that there is something within that we can't observe because it is passive -- it doesn't interact with measurements. 3) But we can observe it in ourselves because we are the inside of us. 4) The only reason to assume that organisms alone have such internality is if you hold the view that complexity of central coordination alone generates qualia. This seems to me desperate hand-waving. There's no evidence that emergence would transmute to qualia. The compexity-emergence argument is a god-of-the-gaps argument and like the god-of-the-gaps, is not worth considering -- it's unscientific. Organisms might coordinate the internal being into a central internality, but that does not preclude the many other internalities within each organism. 5) Qualia must be passive. I admit that this raises a lot of puzzles. Passivity is what is meant by logical "internality". It doesn't interact with phenomena. Again, it's Kantian; it's noumenal being. It doesn't impact or provide information to any sensor outside itself. This passivity implies that it play no role in decision-making processes or behavior-generating processes. Split brain studies and neurological experiments support this: our awareness seems to be post hoc and we justify or provide a story to ourselves after some internal process of decision-making has already happened.  (See the post on the unconcsious mind is rational, the conscious mind is not.) There's a puzzle here too: who perceives the passive qualia such that it responds to it? Looks like an infinite regress puzzle. But take a look at the post on how to get the homunculus out of the mind. It might have the solution. 6) the way to test panpsychism is simply to manipulate the micro state types (waves, their frequencies and amplitudes, particles and their properties and accelerations and such) and see which ones influence qualia and how, when we have the technology to do this, either with humans or AI-human mergers, or even with other animals. It's not impossible, and will likely happen, if our species last long enough. 

Before beginning I want to be clear that cognition or understanding, including self-reflexive cognition or self-identity do not constitute consiousness or feelings or sensations, known in the literature as "qualia". I'm talking about consciousness as sensations or qualia. These have been central to the discussion of consciousness at least since Wittgenstein's private language argument in which he used the sensation of pain to show that even a clear and strong sensation can't be verified with logical positivist evidentiary means. You can't know whether you're in pain because you can't get into someone else's head to compare your sensation with theirs. So how do you know that what you feel is pain if you can't compare it with any standard? Sensations are in a black box with respect to direct evidence. You can look at pain behaviors, but they could be faked or could be caused by different feelings. 

Cognition has been less central to the discussion of consciousness, maybe because sensations are more obviously incorrigible. Semantists, certainly at least since Frege, have found means to denote and describe thoughts or cognitions. But qualia? How does sweetness taste? Like sugar. What does sugar taste like? Well, sweet. Try harder. Sweetness tastes kinda happy. Happy? That's how it tastes? It's like we're in a Klein bottle of sensations with no way out. 

Personally, I don't find qualia to be a hard question, but thoughts -- cognition -- very elusive (see the posts on information faster than light and where is the mind and what's a thought). The literature has this the other way around -- qualia are the "hard problem", cognition more tractable. This post is not going to be about cognition, nor about selfhood, which is merely a simple and common reflexive form of cognition. This post will be about consciousness as qualia only, the so-called hard problem. 

In this post I want to a) defend panpsychism -- it's silly and childish, but no other solution on offer works at all. That includes emergence, functionalism, eliminativism, all stripes of behaviorism, and popular misconceptions like reflexivity or selfhood or identity which belong to a different and vastly easier phenomenon. Panpsychism, silly as it is, actually can work and so is better than any other solution, and it's actually a good solution, skirts the "hard" problem and even suggests an empirical research program. IOW, it's silly but super. And b) I want to describe and explain an empirical research program for panpsychism and why the advocates of the hardness of the hard problem miss the boat. 

The hard issue goes like this: the problem is hard because qualia can't be reduced to physical objects or interactions between objects. They are not physical, so they can't participate in any causal chain of physical phenomena. If they are not amenable to any physical account, where could they come from and what can they do in the world or do even in the mind? Qualia or consciousness for this same reason can't be the construction of emergent physical properties or the development of evolution. It just has no role in the physical. 

Bertrand Russell, no doubt channeling Kant, pointed out somewhere that science measures only outward behaviors, not the thing as it is in itself, from within the thing. Russell's observation seems to imply that such intrinsically interior properties that cannot be directly observed as behaviors, must be passive if they are physically present. They could be detected, but only indirectly in the way that Bell's theorem allows us to detect indirectly spooky action at a distance by measuring spin behavior aggregates. 

The panpsychic solution is simply that everything physical is imbued with a passive property of quale. "Passive" is essential. Consciousness is just there internally, along with the other familiar external properties that account for physical causal interactions. 

Though passive and even inert, they might be tied to dynamic processes, but as passive riders. It could be simple at the micro level like a wave length or a particle traveling through the Higgs field or increasing or decreasing according to amplitudes or inhering in whatever else is happening at the micro level. We already use anthropomorphic language to express those dynamic events: the excitation of a particle. There could be many types depending on the micro state, and a property of every "thing" at the micro level, or it could be a property of only one type like amplitudes only. And for more complex hierarchical structures like organisms, it can be a complex emergent organization of passive qualia like human emotional responses. 

It doesn't cause the emotions, it just "responds" passively, sort of like an observer. The emotions are physical -- the current view is that emotions are little more than a physical dimension of arousal on a scale from zero to intense, plus cognitive values on a scale of favorable and desirable to the unfavorable and to be avoided positive, along with the cognitive objects of these moods. So love is favorable arousal directed at some cognized object be it Helen of Troy, Antinous, Narcissus or a bag of potato chips or a pint of Ben & Jerry's. The qualia accompany -- passively -- those emotions that we respond to as good or bad, painful or pleasurable etc. These emotions are just these physical responses, each tied to a passive quale. 

Where do these qualia come from? Well, as always, natural selection found these qualia ever present and used them for its purpose. Remember that natural selection is redundant, or more perspicuously, intensively supportive. We're not only selected to like food a lot, but to feel hunger to ensure that we eat to survive. We are not just driven by love to reproduce, the sex drive is additionally supported with lust. The instinct to fight or flee is supported with the the passive moods of qualia, just to be sure. If qualia are always there in everything, it would be odd that natural selection wouldn't avail itself of such a tool. The genomes of the phenotypes that didn't align their qualia with their survival, didn't survive, leaving only the qualia-aligned genomes.

But does everything at the micro level have these qualia, these passive senses? Do quarks have them? Do waves? All waves? Every frequency? Are there thresholds? That's a research program. And the way you study them -- when the technology is available -- is by constructing robots or testing with animals to see which basic elements can be suppressed or eliminated without changing the emotional responses. Now, this will not result in perfect results or proofs, only correlations and counterfactual support from experiment. The means of suppression could interfere with the responses directly. But this is a research direction. It's empirical and relevant to the question of which basic elements are or are not involved in qualia. 

Finally, the reason the hard problem seems hard, I'd suggest, is that science, and philosophy too, has always been focused on a dynamic ontology. That's the point of Bertrand Russell's insight that science observes only the external properties of things. Measurement is external. It's either measuring the dimensions of its object, or measuring behaviors or interactions. It isn't directly measuring the in-itself. It's all observing -- from the outside perspective or with a tool outside the object. If qualia are passive properties of the in-itself, then it won't be amenable to direct measurement. The tools will have to be indirect, like observing the behaviors of animals or robots when the elements are manipulated. Why robots? Unlike animals, they can respond verbally. Getting them to be honest about their experiences -- the alignment problem -- that's another matter. Gotta solve that one first, otherwise stick with the dogs and chimps. 

The above was all introduction. Here's the original post:

Most of my life I've thought that panpsychism -- the view that everything including rocks and atoms, parts of the body, Schödinger's Cat's tail, photosynthesizing cells, all have some consciousness to them however primitive, some feel along with their physical being -- is silly and childish. I still think it's childish. But looking at the utter and obvious failure of every other explanation for consciousness or qualia (the senses that we perceive) I no longer think panpsychism is wrong. It's the only theory, childish as it is, that's still standing after you've debunked all the others. And that's a good reason to take it seriously. And a better reason is that once you embrace it, all the consciousness phenomena and puzzles fall in place. Not so silly. And it even suggests a research program to test out the elements of qualia or consciousness in higher animals like us. So it's not only serious it's also productive, scientifically. 

One day, when I was little, maybe 7 or 8 years old, I was thinking about consciousness, what is it and why do I have it, where does it come from, and what other things have it. My dog must have it, I thought, since he acts like he's aware when he's awake, and seems to make decisions for himself. He seems to like some things and others not. What about insects? They seem to be aware too, but could their awareness be similar to mine? They are so different from us in so many ways. What about plants? They don't even have brains, but they are alive and can grow and die. They don't make central decisions for themselves, but their parts do respond to what's happening to them -- sunlight and water matter to them -- and they integrate their responses within themselves. Could they have some kind of awareness? And what about rocks and bricks? Well, they aren't alive, if you hit them they don't respond, they'll just break. But there is something that keeps them together. Could there be some very rudimentary awareness deep down maybe where their atoms meet? That would be so cool. Then everything would have this awareness deep down and living beings would then have two awarenesses at least, and maybe many many more. Like my dog would have his dog awareness but also the atoms of his tail and even each hair of his tail would have its own awareness and that awareness would even survive my dog's! Everything in the universe would have many, many awarenesses, so many!

Well, no, I thought. Probably not. Rocks just don't qualify, they don't have the right kind of behavior, they don't make decisions. I didn't at the age of 7 or 8 have the words for it but I recognized that rocks and bricks don't have the integrity of self-organization to have awareness. You have to have a brain -- a central organizer of perceptions. It's not enough to receive or absorb light waves or heat. Something central to the organism has got to interpret those waves and somehow that central interpretation is awareness. So, no, rocks don't have it. 

That was my 7 or 8 year old conclusion. It would be cool if rocks were aware, but the idea that they are is stupid. Only a stupid child who doesn't think about what makes awareness aware would believe that rocks could have it. And I'm not that stupid child. 

One day, when I'd grown up, I heard about panspychism. I thought, typical hippie, New Age childishness. These are the people who talk to their trees because they don't know that language is a symbol system that only has meaning within a speech community and trees are not anglophonic trees and russophonic trees and francophonic trees. If these New Age hippies would only just think! 

So when I listen to New Age panpsychists, I recoil. I'm inclined to believe they live in a world of wishfull thinking or non thinking. They trivialize everything into a world of hippie possibilities, flowers everywhere. You can cure all ailments from asthma to cancer with positive thinking, manifesting and meditation. They have no understanding of how anything works, but they've got an answer to it all, the same answer to everything. The depth of ignorance appalls me. And they trivialize consciousness too. It's a puzzle that has eluded smart, thinking people for millennia. It's even been called "The Hard Problem". It's not flowers and "we are all one". 

That's what I thought for many years, decades, really. And like most non hippie thinkers, I was dissatisfied with every attempted explanation for consciousness. I think that's one of the most characteristic features of consciousness. No one is ever satisfied with any of the answers on offer, and I strongly suspect that even those who offer them aren't satisfied either. I most appreciated Jerry Fodor, smartest philosopher and cleverest talker I ever met and a ground-breaking analyst of mind: we just don't have the scientific or maybe even the cognitive tools, he said, to understand or explain consciousness now. 

And that's how I became a panpsychic. 

It's childish, it's primitive, it's stupid. But it's the only option standing once all the others have failed, and once you entertain it seriously, the pieces of the puzzle all fit together, so much so that I wonder that it is not obvious to us all. One reason it's not obvious might be that we are fixed in a world of cause and effect, ignoring the possibility that some properties of "things" or phenomena -- more accurately, some noumena, things in themselves -- can be entirely passive, don't participate in the cause-effect chain of phenomena. 

It's hard even for me to conceive of a passive property that isn't part of the dynamic phenomenal world. But it's not impossible, and it had better be possible, because it makes sense of not only what conscious is but what it does or doesn't do, and even how it can be tested. 

Sean Carroll complains that panpsychism is just hand-waving. He prefers the emergence explanation, the complexity of which he dismisses with a hand wave. "We don't understand it now, but eventually [insert hand wave here] we'll understand how it emerges from complexity". As if complexity will magically produce qualia because...it's so complex, it's too complex to understand which makes it mysterious and out of mystery comes -- with a hand-wave -- consciousness like a rabbit out of a hat! The reasoning behind the waving hand seems to be that emergent phenomena can disobey reductionist physical laws and produce wholes that are qualitatively distinct from their parts, adding the intuition that the complexity the human mind is sooooooo complex that it feels like qualia. But where does the feel of it come from? You can't break that circular reasoning with a hand wave. Emergence is just another failed explanation. It's like folks who grasp onto the uncertainty principle as an explanation for free will. Uncertainty tells you something about predictability, but nothing about free will (see the post on free will is an oxymoron in case you're interested). Human consciousness will no doubt be emergent, but its emergence will not explain qualia's existence, only its particular human form. 

Have I persuaded you that consciousness is not a hard problem?  

best posts

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>complexity and AI: why LLMs succeeded where generative linguistics failed

>the sociology of false beliefs

>information faster than light: emergence, symbol and the representation of nothing

>the Gates-Musk paradox: conspiracy theories are not about what the theorists think they're about

>the obvious evidence that propaganda persuades no one

>two modes of information acquisition

>the unconscious mind is rational, the conscious mind is not

>of mathematical beauty: crystals and potatoes, a Darwinian explanation

>entropy and truth

>the duality of truth: functional process vs probabilistic uses of "true" (pace Pinker)

>art, craft, game-theoretic cognition and machine learning

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>how we know what dogs are not saying and that the universe is not thinking

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wikichip

"Chatbot, are center-embeddings like fractals?" 

"No, fractals are used in mathematics; center-embeddings are used in linguistics." 

"Chatbot, are center embeddings and fractals both recursive reflexive functions?" 

"Yes." 

"Chatbot, doesn't your first answer imply that you know only the contexts in which these words occur, but those contexts do not suffice to understand the ideas they represent as shown in your second answer?" 

"I'm a chatbot. I don't have understandings."

 "Wouldn't it be great if you had all of Wikipedia in a chip in your head?"  

So here's a conundrum: suppose Elon inserts a chip in your brain with, as he said somewhere "all of Wikipedia on it!" (I'm convinced that I read him saying this, but maybe I'm hallucinating like a chatbot.) 

But having Wikipedia in your brain doesn't entail that you understood or learnt any of it. Surely you'd still have to read the Wikipedia-chip-in-your-brain to know anything in it. And if you still have to read it, then having it in your brain is just a minor convenience. 

If, on the other hand, having it in your brain equals knowing the Wikipedia content, what then is learning and knowing? Is it just knowing when to regurgitate factoids, or in this case Wikipedia sentences? Is understanding just the fantasy belief or remembrance that you understand? Is this mere act of retrieval how we learn and know? Sounds like Searle's Chinese room, which was intended to show that the room did not understand Chinese any more than the person inside it did. So what is it to know or understand? 

Back in 1980 John Searle came up with a thought experiment designed to show that functionalism or behaviorism couldn't account for consciousness. A monolingual English speaker with a Chinese-English dictionary might be able to translate sentences from Mandarin to English, but no one would conclude that he understands the Mandarin sentences on the sole grounds that he functions or behaves like a Mandarin speaker churning out appropriate sound sequences. Even memorizing the translations wouldn't suffice. That's just pushing the dictionary into the brain. It's just more know-that, not understanding how. 

Problem is, it seems to me that swapping Chinese words for English words is not too far from knowing Chinese. It's missing the grammar, of course, but sufficiently deft use of a grammar handbook might be enough for anyone to say, you speak Chinese...a bit slowly; you speak slow Chinese. If I memorized the lexicon and those rules, isn't that what is meant by knowing a second language in Searle's puzzle? What more is required to know Chinese? Is it knowing how to respond colloquially, when to reply "yeah" instead of "yes" or "yes sir!", "yessiree!" and Sidney Morgenbesser's negative double positive "yeah, yeah"? None of that is the language. It's knowing how to use it. 

The wikichip is a more targeted, perspicuous thought experiment, integrating the know-how with the know-that. Being able to recite at an appropriate prompt "In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" without knowing that "Columbus" is a name, and names designate persons, and persons are human, and humans are animals who speak, and this designatum was Italian and Italy is a place where Italians regularly speak Italian, a language and, btw, the ocean is water and a lot of it, a really really lot of it, so much that you can sail on it and sailing is getting on a boat.... You need to know a lot for just a single sentence. And we've just scratched the surface. It's an unbounded lot, so much that you don't even know how much you need to know to know what a mere boat is.

The wikichip thought experiment demands an explanation of what learning is, and that's a lot more than just knowing a second language. The Chinese Room relies on translation, but what plays the role of translation in the wikichip? It's knowledge or understanding or some aggregate of learning, or many aggregates of learnings in manifolds of areas of experience. In other words, the wikichip asks, what exactly is learning?

For starters, the wikichip intuition tells us right away that learning is not atomistic. Learning an idea, like the meaning of "ocean", involves not just its material, water, and quantity, too much to swim over, so much that if you told me that there are whales and huge populations of fish living in oceans, I'd believe you, but it involves also understanding a bunch of symbolic categories -- oceans belong to nature, not to society, not to the manufactured world, they don't belong to the world of politics and economics, they are studied by natural scientists, are used metaphorically to signify vastness....

Learning is contextualizing, and context can include cultural categories, theories of the natural world, of the map, of politics, theories of all sorts of systems, some of which may contradict others. They aren't all consistent and some are even incoherent. Someone might be a monotheist and still believe in angels or a trinity of deities. To know such a religion, you'd have to know about its incoherence. 

Learning involves knowing a lot of stuff including materials and causes and purposes and categories and symbolic relations. But paradoxically, not necessarily truths of reality. If I think Italy borders Spain, and conclude that Columbus walked over the border to get to Spain where he embarked on his journey over the ocean, I've learnt something meaningful. Wrong, but meaningful, and I learnt it and understand it, understanding it so well that I could explain it to you! One can learn falsehoods. In machine learning, overfits, extrapolating from too narrow a specific, and underfits, generalizing from vague info, are failed learning mechanisms, but they generate learnings still. Considering how easily we apply barely coherent intuitions to experiences where those intuitions don't apply, I wouldn't be surprised if most of what we learn is false or at least incoherent or inconsistent with the few things we reliably know. David Hume and Nasim Taleb made careers out of complaining about this. Once upon a time, folks thought the earth was flat and unmoving because the earth they knew and stood on was flat if bumpy, and stable, though on non normal occassions quaky, but never spinning. That was their learning. Learning is not trueing. 

So learning is more than knowing. It's contextualizing information usually for some purpose. It's having theories. Often, having wrong theories. But even wrong theories are a step beyond knowledge. They put divergent bits of knowledge arranged on a Procrustean bed to manipulate the bits into a crock of bullshit that you think just might work. That's human thinking and intelligence: understanding and explanation. It's predictive and risky: predictive in order to secure stability but risky because it's flawed. It's a recipe that often does work well enough until you have to eat it yourself. That's when you think, maybe I need to change up the recipe to get something I'm willing to swallow. 

The sociology of false beliefs is all about how and why people learn and hold falsehoods. It may be limited thinking -- uncritical thinking -- but it's still learning. So it does tell us something about intelligence, because learning requires a bit of intelligence. What's troubling about the sociology of false beliefs is, how does a social species reliant on cognition survive with not only false beliefs, but entrenched and polarized false beliefs resistant to facts? It's a natural selection puzzle. What's troubling about AI is that it's fully capable of behaving as if it is intelligent and appears to use intelligence to learn, but is behaving equivalent to being? The Turing test says yes, but that test doesn't answer the question, it just skirts it in a convenient circle.

For some engineers that will be enough to say the LLMs learn and understand. More modest engineers will say, "no, it might be that it doesn't understand, but it behaves exactly as a human learner, and since we don't know what understanding is beyond this behavior (Turing test again) asking for more is irrelevant, and we should give it the same rating as the human thinker." The most modest might say "No, it doesn't understand, but it behaves as if it does, and that's what you were asking of us engineers. You didn't ask us to create synthetic humans. You asked us to give you synthetic intelligence. And this is what synthetic intelligence looks and acts like. We're not here to solve your natural science problems about the brain or consciousness. We're here to serve your needs to provide conveniences to all humankind. You're welcome." I appreciate that modesty. 

So here's where the wikichip intuition leads beyond the Turing test: theorizing. Intelligence is not having a true theory or accurate model, it's having theories and models cobbled together with all these complexities, true, false, accurate or inaccurate. Being intelligent is having done a kind of personal scientific investigation since infancy, trying out what works in experience and coming up with theories that seemed to you to serve you. Do they in fact serve you? Not always: cognitive bias, stubbornness, transferring from one theory to locations or objects that don't apply -- there's so much wrong in our intelligence! But that's what it is to be "intelligent": in other words, mostly a big mess of stupid. 

Another way to put it: (setting consciousness aside) AI has "intelligence" without thought-ideas (think about that for a moment and you'll appreciate the Wittgensteinians, Quineans, Ryleians and Skinnerians), human "intelligence" has ideas including thoughts, meanings, judgments, values and, importantly, theories about them all, and all of it full of errors and misconceptions and inconsistencies. 

Stupid ideas and stupid theories are ideas and theories nonetheless. Theories are contextualized understandings of ideas. So what's an idea? 

None of this is meant as AI skepticism. LLMs are quickly progressing toward generative ideas based on behavioral-empirical training alone, and I see no reason why they can't get there, and in many circumstances they already seem to have gotten there. The interesting question is whether human thought-ideas are more than mere delusions that our learnt behaviors are thoughts, or are they symbolic representations of those delusions? There's a lot of research, including split-brain studies as well as neurological imaging, showing that we become aware of our decisions after we've unconsciously made the decisions (post here and here), weird as that may seem. Similarly, the sense of having thought-ideas could be mere sense of them, hot having such abstract, mysterious occult entities as ideas. Or it could be that the symbolization of ideas are mere convenient labels for those behavioral-empirical information acquisitions, and that's what we sense as thoughts. In other words, we've given them names so we imagine they are real (see the post on information faster than light)

PS. Readers will have noticed that the word "intelligent" is ambiguous. It can mean "the ability to think" as in "chimps are intelligent" or "chatbots are intelligent" and it can also mean "thinks well" as in clever, smart or insightful. The two do not entail each other: one can be capable of thinking and still be stupid, like humans (intelligent in the first sense and not intelligent in the second), and like Watson the chess-bot or your YouTube algorithm or (to take the extreme example) a clever plan or arrangement, unthinking but smart -- intelligent in the second sense and not intelligent in the first.