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R. Scott Bakker | |
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 Bakker at SFeraKon 2009 | |
| Born | February 2, 1967 Simcoe, Ontario, Canada [1] |
| Occupation | Philosopher/Novelist |
| Genre | Science Fiction/Fantasy |
| Website | |
| rsbakker | |
Richard Scott Bakker (born February 2, 1967) [1] is a Canadian fantasy author. He grew up on a tobacco farm[ citation needed ] in the Simcoe area. [2]
The Second Apocalypse is a fantasy series written by Bakker. The series includes three sub-series titled The Prince of Nothing, The Aspect-Emperor, and The No-God. The series was originally planned as a trilogy, but when Bakker began writing the series in the early 2000s he found it necessary to split each of the three novels into its own sub-series to incorporate all of the characters, themes and ideas he wished to explore.
ThePrince of Nothing trilogy was published between 2004 and 2006, while The Aspect-Emperor series was published between 2009 and 2017. The No-God has not been published at this time, and Bakker has not confirmed a release date.
While working on the Prince of Nothing series, Bakker was prompted by a crux of events to write a thriller dealing with the cognitive sciences. [3] He produced a near future science fiction novel involving a serial killer whose knowledge allows them to influence and control the human brain. This book is called Neuropath and was published in 2008.
Shortly before The Aspect-Emperor's second book, The White-Luck Warrior, was published, Bakker released a second novel outside of his main fantasy series. Titled Disciple of the Dog, it features the private investigator, Disciple Manning, who suffers from a condition reminiscent of hyperthymesia. The story revolves around Disciple's recounting of a case involving a missing girl, a cult, and the small-town drama of Ruddick. It was published in November 2010. Bakker has planned a number of follow up novels to Disciple of the Dog, including The Enlightened Dead, [4] but due to the first novel's poor reception and very few reviews the sequels have not been pursued.
Bakker also has a number of unreleased works in progress, aside his fantasy opus, most notably Light, Time, and Gravity as well as an eventual anthology of short stories, Atrocity Tales, set within The Second Apocalypse fantasy narrative. [5] A draft of Light, Time, and Gravity was released serially on Bakker's blog, Three Pound Brain, but has since been removed. It is described by a defunct Amazon.ca link as a "novel told from the perspective of a suicidal English professor, recalling his experiences as a seventeen-year-old working on a Southwestern Ontario tobacco farm in the summer of 1984. Part essay, part narrative, part present, part history, Light, Time, and Gravity is a kind of Notes from the Canadian Underground, a portrait of our culture’s abject failure to create a genuine Canadian identity, as well as a stinging indictment of Canada’s literary and intellectual elites." [6]
Two other unreleased works of fiction in progress include the SF novellas Semantica and The Lollipop Factory. The former has been referenced by Bakker a number of times on his blog [7] [8] [9] and is described by fans as a "rumoured title set in a world where nootropic and neurocosmetic techniques have created a class division between those with enhancements and those without, where superhuman Tweakers rebel and are hunted like animals by an oppressive government." The latter, The Lollipop Factory, has only been mentioned once by Bakker in a Reddit r/Fantasy AMA in 2017. [10] Aside that it is a "short SF novel," nothing is yet known about this title.
As The Prince of Nothing trilogy was being published circa. 2003-06 and Bakker experienced his initial rise in popularity, he participated frequently with fans at the now read-only Three-Seas forum. During this time Bakker consistently began to formulate and popularize what would eventually become the foundation for his Blind Brain Theory and Heuristic Neglect Theory then focusing on how studies of human cognitive biases generally and eventually on their impact on academic Philosophy and the greater humanities.
In 2008, Bakker published Neuropath, [11] a near future SF psychothriller which thematically continued Bakker's elucidation of human cognitive biases and their implications regarding human meaning, purpose, and morality, whatever form they may take. While the narrative events of the book make for a compelling thought experiment, Bakker included as an Author Afterword a short essay regarding the blending of factual and fictive premises therein and the eventual advent of the narrative's villain in our own world. The essay marks Bakker first formal mention of his Blind Brain Hypothesis, beyond its use in the narrative proper.
Narrative aside, in the Author Afterword Bakker sources two real world examples concerning illusory consciousness, the inner human experience of temporality and the imperceptible limits of field of vision. In the essay, as in the book via the character Thomas, Bakker argues that the human sense of the "Now," this very moment, might be symptomatic of perceptual thresholds akin to the human inability to perceive beyond the field of vision, certain colours outside within that field, or the perceptual blind spot caused by the lack of receptors in a portion of the back of the eye. Bakker cites the inability of consciousness to experience and perceive but a sliver of all the brain's processing as indicative of consciousness experience being totally illusory, rather than only sometimes in some contexts. As per the world of Neuropath's narrative, Bakker also argues that in time non-invasive brain scanning, via something like the narrative conceit of "low-field fMRI," may result in an entirely new scale of institutional manipulation, moving beyond efforts of associative conditioning given the wealth of data prevalent real-time brain imaging could provide. Finally, central to the essay is Bakker's assertion that the scientific method and its progress would eventually yield unfathomable insights into human behavior and cognition such that the existence of the narrative's villain and his futuristic brain–computer interface are inevitable in real life as well.
Shortly thereafter in 2008, Bakker presented The End of the World As We Know It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse [12] at Western University's Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, which was rebutted by then students Nick Srnicek and Ali McMillan. The title of Bakker's lecture, familiar to readers of Neuropath, references the Semantic Apocalypse, a theory attributed to one of the protagonist's professors.
Bakker begins the talk with a call to writers in the audience to reach beyond the confines of academia and their peers and instead write to challenge audiences who don't share the author's values and attitudes. He then summarizes again the narrative underpinnings of Neuropath's world where the technologies of neuroscience have reached technical and social maturity and prevalence.
The Semantic Apocalypse continues with a number of secondary arguments concerning pessimistic induction and what Bakker calls "Cognitive Closure FAPP." Regarding the former, Bakker explains that in all arenas historically science has replaced "intentional [or folk] explanations of natural phenomena with functional explanations." For Bakker it follows that this will inevitably extend to the brain and human cognition. On the latter, Bakker suggests that human culture and society have continually ignored the facts of our cognitive biases without due consideration of their impact. This gives rise to what Bakker refers to as the "Magical Belief Lottery:" the ignorance of a growing battery of confirmation biases concerning how humans rationalize behaviour and thought leading to conviction in long-held intentional or folk explanations of humans and their place in the world.
Building on his elucidations from Neuropath's Author Afterword, Bakker presents the metaphor of the Blind Brain Hypothesis as a magician's coin trick. By Bakker's argument the brain has evolved to process a prodigious amount of perceptual information regarding its local environment tracking natural objects with causal histories. Coin tricks through sleight of hand or misdirection exploit the brain's need for that causal history, confounding the brain's ability to process the coin's causal history. Given the central assumption of Blind Brain Hypothesis, that "information that finds its way to consciousness represents only a small fraction of the brain’s overall information load," humans are likely likewise unable to account for the causal history of thoughts and behaviours. It supposes that our conscious awareness of information processed by the brain is preceded by what Bakker calls here information horizons. Again Bakker draws upon the analogy of the eye's perceptual thresholds, this time highlighting that half of all the retinal nerves process information exclusively from the receptor rich fovea, and also extends that metaphor to speculate about the information horizons of our temporal field and the experience of the "Now."
Finishing his lecture and corresponding transcript, Bakker speaks on the money invested into using the advances in neuroscience to improve marketing techniques. Bakker also uses a metaphor on alien cognition describing beings whose brains and nervous systems had evolved to track their brain's causal history.
In April 2012, Bakker added to Three Pound Brain a link to a draft of a paper he called The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory for the Appearance of Consciousness. [13] [14] The Last Magic Show was the first cumulative result of Bakker's efforts on Three Pound Brain and consolidated many terms invented or cited and appropriated across the previous two years of philosophic inquiry and analysis. The draft marked the first formal mention of Blind Brain Theory, as evolved from the Blind Brain Hypothesis. In his abstract Bakker describes the paper as addressing "[p]uzzles as profound and persistent as the now, personal identity, conscious unity, and most troubling of all, intentionality, could very well be kinds of illusions foisted on conscious awareness by different versions of the informatic limitation expressed, for instance, in the boundary of your visual field."
The title of Bakker's paper, A Blind Brain Theory for the Appearance of Consciousness, reflects his assertion therein that the Blind Brain Theory serves as a vehicle to describe and distinguish the features of how conscious experience appears to self-reflection rather than the actual specific systems and functioning underlying consciousness. To begin, Bakker imagines an explanatory vehicle he refers to as a Recursive System, the brain architecture which has evolved to track even more the basic architecture of itself, possibly akin to the relationship between the frontal cortex to the rest of the brain. Bakker suggests two parts to a Recursive System, the system "open," all the information processed by the brain, and the system "closed," referring to the information accessible to consciousness. The basic assumption regarding the existence of a Recursive System implies a limit on the information available to the RS-closed, conscious awareness, which Bakker dubs Informatic Asymmetry and its Asymptotic Limit. As specific examples Bakker refers to the cognitive psychology literature citing change blindness and inattentional bias (cognitive bias), wherein there are clear divergences between the information processed by the brain and information from the self-reports of perception.
As Bakker continues he expands on Informatic Asymmetry and the Asymptotic Limits of different Recursive Systems writing of information horizons, "the boundaries that delimit the recursive neural access that underwrites consciousness." Describing consciousness as encapsulated by the global limit of information horizons, Bakker highlights consciousness' inability to perceive any absence of information, that is processing outside of the RS-closed, as in some anosognosias. The information provided to consciousness is perceived as sufficient because the RS-closed is unable to track the discrepancy of the information processed by the whole brain. Bakker returns to the Coin Trick analogy from Neuropath's Author Afterword, using the magician as an extended explanatory metaphor to further elucidate Asymptotic Limits of specific Recursive Systems and the Asymptotic Complex of encapsulation regarding the experience of persistent global sufficiency, from where the paper almost certainly gets the former part of its title.
As before, Bakker builds on previous exposition reframing the experience of "the Now," with a portion of the draft directly referencing an older blog post. [15] Likewise, he again uses the example of the visual field to propose a similar temporal explanation for the conscious experience the Now. Blind Brain Theory, Bakker writes, argues seemingly natural occurring anosognosias but maintains that this becomes ultimately problematic for our experience of identity and intentions.
Further elaborating, Bakker cites the phenomenon in psychophysics known as flicker fusion (or flicker fusion threshold), the point at which consciousness perceives a light as steady. This phenomenon is widely exploited in the modern human environment from light bulbs to screened devices and brings about similar explanatory power akin to Bakker's use of the visual field metaphor.
Nearing the close of The Last Magic Show, Bakker delves into the highly speculative implications of Blind Brain Theory's argument for the appearance of consciousness regarding the use and reference of Intentionality in academic philosophy, as well as, the very underpinnings of humanity's scientific and philosophic endeavours, logic and math, the latter of which might reference an earlier essayistic work posted to Three Pound Brain. [16] He also writes of the "First-person Perspective Show," which almost definitely precedes his draft paper, The Introspective Peep Show. In the footnotes of The Last Magic Show, Bakker mentions that threads of his consideration have found themselves in every novel he's written, but that specifically "[o]nly Neuropath deals with the theory in any sustained manner." Bakker also takes care to distinguish Blind Brain Theory from eliminativism generally, in that, his theory "allows for a systematic diagnosis of the distortions and illusions belonging to the first person perspective."
A proposed anthology of Three Pound Brain's essays and articles named for a fictional book that appears in Neuropath, mentioned on Three Pound Brain in April 2013. [17] Later in September, 2013, Bakker later posted a draft essay possibly serving as the last piece to be included in Through the Brain Darkly. [18]
An essay published on Scientia Salon, November 2014. [19] [20]
A near future SF short announced on Three Pound Brain, November 2015, [21] and released in Midwest Studies in Philosophy. [22]
An anthology of essays published in September 2016 examining "the importance of Nietzsche's thought for decoding the vicissitudes of our digital age" (Keith Ansell-Pearson); Bakker contributed a chapter based on the talk that he presented to the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western -- a conference which he had regularly attended in London, the final year of which took place at The New School in New York City..
A paper published in Cosmos and History , January 2017. [23]
While an earlier draft of On Alien Philosophy was published on Three Pound Brain, August 2015, [24] Bakker ultimately published the paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Feb 2017. [25] [26]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of it. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: "Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds?" The problem is that knowledge of other minds is always indirect. The problem of other minds does not negatively impact social interactions due to people having a "theory of mind" – the ability to spontaneously infer the mental states of others – supported by innate mirror neurons, a theory of mind mechanism, or a tacit theory. There has also been an increase in evidence that behavior results from cognition which in turn requires consciousness and the brain.
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge.
Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. He compares consciousness to an academic paper that is being developed or edited in the hands of multiple people at one time, the "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness. In this analogy, "the paper" exists even though there is no single, unified paper. When people report on their inner experiences, Dennett considers their reports to be more like theorizing than like describing. These reports may be informative, he says, but a psychologist is not to take them at face value. Dennett describes several phenomena that show that perception is more limited and less reliable than we perceive it to be.
Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.
The Prince of Nothing is a series of three fantasy novels by Canadian author R. Scott Bakker, first published in 2004, part of a wider series known as "The Second Apocalypse". This trilogy details the emergence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, a brilliant monastic warrior, as he takes control of a holy war and the hearts and minds of its leaders. Kellhus exhibits incredible powers of prediction and persuasion, which are derived from deep knowledge of rationality, cognitive biases, and causality, as discovered by the Dûnyain, a secret monastic sect. As Kellhus goes from military leader to divine prophet, Drusas Achamian, the sorcerer who mentored Kellhus, comes to realize that his student may well be the harbinger of the Second Apocalypse.
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain that appears to be "speaking" and a second part that listens and obeys—a bicameral mind—and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he makes the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. It is closely related to functionalism, a broader theory that defines mental states by what they do rather than what they're made of.
Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.
The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.
Imagination is the production of sensations, feelings and thoughts informing oneself. These experiences can be re-creations of past experiences, such as vivid memories with imagined changes, or completely invented and possibly fantastic scenes. Imagination helps apply knowledge to solve problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.
Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which argues that the conscious mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system, but also what occurs or exists outside the subject. It is contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges from neural activity alone. Externalism is a belief that the mind is not just the brain or functions of the brain.
The Dehaene–Changeux model (DCM), also known as the global neuronal workspace, or global cognitive workspace model, is a part of Bernard Baars's global workspace model for consciousness.
Ideasthesia is a neuropsychological phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Ancient Greek ἰδέα and αἴσθησις, meaning 'sensing concepts' or 'sensing ideas'. The notion was introduced by neuroscientist Danko Nikolić as an alternative explanation for a set of phenomena traditionally covered by synesthesia.
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