Thermostats were invented by the Dutch genius Cornelis Drebbel (aka de rebel) around 1600, based on alchemical principles.
This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos).
I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course.
His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years.
Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel.
He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters.
He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
I really don’t like the part of philosophy which takes some word from the natural language and tries to deduce a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions.
I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
I don't think this is it. There is definitely a lot of philosophy that tries (and consistently fails) to construct formal definitions of some "true ontologies". But this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about.
The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.
Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
> this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about
That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
No, on the contrary. Mathematics is about structures within, using its own language. Natural language is completely separated from mathematics (although most mathematicians use natural language to communicate mathematics).
The title is a play a famous philosophy paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?":
> Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5]
[…]
> The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective".
I don't understand why consciousness is considered mysterious anymore. We know intelligent systems broadly work by learning, updating and querying a predictive world model. For accuracy, a sufficiently powerful system must necessarily start to include its own state and potential actions in this world model. This creates a recursive self-knowledge that produces self-awareness. The ongoing process of analyzing and acting upon this self-model is consciousness.
It's considered mysterious because of the hard problem of consciousness. Describing a mechanism that could be considered analogous to consciousness "from the outside" is pretty easy (just do self reference).
But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious.
That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard.
We who are prey argue consciousness because we are able to ask, "What is it like to be the hunter?"
But the hunters still eat us.
The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones).
None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus.
Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.)
Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves.
Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?
Thermostats are a great toy model for introducing feedback systems in control theory and individual neurons are analogous in a lot of ways that are interesting to think about.
Much of biology and biomes relies on negative feedback loops. The fact our body stays at 37C within +/- 0.5C is pretty remarkable. We already know what it's like to be a thermostat... because we are all thermostats.
Depends on your interests. Chalmers is probably the most influential philosopher of consciousness, and I find the most reasonable. The article definitely shouldn't be dismissed off-hand, but it may be a bit difficult to appreciate as is, as it's more of a brief comment in a lot wider discussion.
Good starting point to the topic is Chalmers' "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness".
Readit News
This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos).
I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course.
His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years.
https://drebbel.net/2013%20Drebbels%20Athanor.pdf
This is pre steampunk — alchemy-punk?
Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel.
He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters.
He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.
Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
For who? It’s wonderful for creative thinking [1].
It’s unproductive to deliver _new_ facts.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/louis-kah...
> Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5]
[…]
> The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious.
That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard.
More information can be found at https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
But the hunters still eat us.
The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones).
None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus.
Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.)
Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves.
Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?
But this article ain't it.
Good starting point to the topic is Chalmers' "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness".
https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42548641 - Dec 2024 (80 comments)