Workshop Proposal for TSC April 2024
Science and Human Consciousness
Proposed Workshop for TSC 2024
Carl H. Flygt, San Jose State University
A. Valentina Brill, San Jose State University
We cannot turn back from the applications of science, even when irresponsible. Let us then apply the methods of science to the depth of human affairs. We need not retreat in those sectors where science has already advanced. It is necessary only to bring our understanding of human nature up to the same point. B.F. Skinner, 1953
Consciousness as the-voice-in-the-head, as intentionality, as behavior, can almost certainly, through meditation and its attitudes, be extended materially. Subjective nature, which is perceptually (and therefore semantically) quite subtle and replete with unexpected revelation, can plausibly be imagined as world-creating, even cosmogenic. What conjoined meditative exploration and controlled experiment, purposed to solve consciousness, seem to be lacking is merely a theory of conversation, the most pervasive and the most foundational feature of human society.
We now have semantic engines that cooperatively perform relevance and coherence better than most humans do. We propose to extend this performance, stepwise and with forethought, into the social real world with a view to redeeming it generally. We propose to develop a conversation engine, a commercial project with a value initially difficult to calculate, introducing it contemporaneously and carefully by means of older forms of public relations and social media.
Conversation rests ultimately in its human-to-human use, in the biological capacity for aboutness. What matters about conversation is not so much the biology at work inside it, which is probably global, brainwise inhibition of the impulse to act, but what the 800-millisecond biological pause does with it. In the context of consciousness or aboutness, otherwise known as thinking, we’d like to explore what humans can do with it during a 1.5 hour workshop.
After an hour of conceptual treatment with verbal remarks, a slide show and Q&A, we plan to break, reset and return to perform a conversation for each other. The point of the workshop is to draw attention to the importance of the Searlean/Skinnerean background, purported to be a necessary condition which floods the brain as an orientation frame from the onset of consciousness through to its cessation. The workshop to that point will have attempted to fix a uniform background of aboutness in the brain of everyone who comes back into the room. An effort will have been made to shape this background on Skinner’s Walden Two principles of ordered emotions and total serenity.
At this point, with half-an-hour to go, the algorithm will take over, and the performers, ideally five individuals, will attempt to sustain universal satisfaction moment by moment for a fifteen-minute duration. After that the participants who observed (who witnessed) will take center stage and attempt rapidly to draw conclusions about what happened. In the best possible case a small committee will as a final gesture be formed to draft a report on the proceedings and even draw forward-looking conclusions about the viability of the exercise as a model for a future program of research.
