I find it unreadable so I can't comment, but I am interested to obtain a general understanding of his themes and subjects. — Tom Storm

The 'Dilthey review' version of The Concept of Time is exceptionally readable 100 pages. It's excellent on how existence is primordially enworlded, bodily (tool use), social, and linguistic -- basically the opposite of the fantasized boy in the bubble. It is still a bit foggy on the role of death, which is arguably glued on as a spiritual extra, but I think that's because it's not so easy to articulate how facing my death liberates me from the culture I was thrown into. There's a hint that we are already looking back on our lives as if we are dead and our story is being told. Do we want to be conformist creatures not worth remembering ? This is never stated so bluntly. But it seems that something (the void perhaps) gives us distance and therefore leverage against the otherwise semi-automatic conformity.

Is there any humor in Heidegger? — Tom Storm

Sometimes. He could be savagely sarcastic.

As I understood Bach, consciousness is nonmaterial...a 'dream' created by the brain (or somehow thrown up by a non-dream deeper-than-dream stuff-in-common called 'matter.')

I agree with your point on education.

I tend to find death-facing machismo a significant ingredient in the early Heidegger. 'Comforting' philosophy, including a safe/technical/theoretical is understood as a 'sinful' indulgence or cowardly escapism. Much more can be said, but is this one way to get a grip on his basic heroic pose ? And is this itself a useful way to approach a thinker ? As a kind of knight whose sword is pointed at a complementary dragon?

Of course people might 'cheat' and say that it's an unconscious fear that animates all aspects of our lives, etc. — Tom Storm

Right. I think Becker's book is brilliant on the whole, but it lacks a sense of humor. I do think that humans tend to seek contact with some form of immortality. In other words, transcending the 'dying' (vulnerable) animal body is something like a general description of culture. On a very simple level, this is learning not to soil yourself at school. On higher levels, it's getting something world-historical named after you.

In my view, there is no genuine escape from the flames of time, and perhaps we've evolved to seek status in our own generation, which might involve an anticipated future value calculation, etc.

Do you think this terror is ubiquitous? — Tom Storm

I think most of us don't feel this terror very often. I do find it plausible though that 'growing up' is, among other things, a taming of this terror. Is childhood a largely forgotten magical world full of monsters and goddesses? I sort of remember it that way.

You are welcome.

I don't know if Bach discusses emergence explicitly. On a philosophical level, he seems to be doing something similar to Kant or Hegel, though informed by contemporary science. The way I can make sense of Bach (a more feasible version in my opinion) is to stress that experience is the self's and not just the brain's interpretation rather than creation of reality. In this view, we all interpret the same reality more or less differently, with some of us explicitly working together toward a less foolish interpretation than yesterday's best guess. Bach might use 'matter' to represent some theoretical 'thing-in-itself' stuff that tends not to work very well upon discussion. I stressed not-just-the-brain because the accumulation of insight requires the externalization of experience (ink on paper in libraries, for instance, but even an oral tradition, leaping from mortal body to mortal body, will suffice). This sedimented/historical 'cultural' or 'spiritual' layer of the human being seems to me as important as the hardware, and I think Bach would agree.

Have you by chance looked into Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death ? Its core is an 'existentialized' psychoanalysis (Rank and Kierkegaard most explicitly.) The terror of being a dying animal is foregrounded, along with various responses to that terror. While Heidegger is only mentioned in passing, it's hard not to think of a certain version of Heidegger in which facing death heroically is at the center.

Deathbed interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtmD9og3ZTQ

Relevant to Heidegger and death: "What bothered me was I was living by delegated powers."

While it may sometimes be a mistake to anthropomorphize the machine on the basis of a superficial similarity between its behavior and human behavior, it may likewise be a liability to dismiss the remarkable cognitive abilities that it clearly exhibits on the ground that they are being achieved by seemingly "mechanical" means at a lower level of analysis or implementation. — Pierre-Normand

:up:

It seems to me that both systems are stupid the more one zooms in. Do you know Dennett's
termite mound as a memetic host metaphor ? Anyway, there does seem to be a hardware and algorithmic difference of some kind, at least in terms of how much data is needed by each system. But I'm no expert. I'm coughing up reconstituted common sense like the bot, I guess. (Seriously, the bot does suggest how thoughtless much of our own talk is.)

The human mind is different, it forms extremely rich ideas from quite poor sense-stimuli, and forms hypothesis that are often quite substantially underdetermined given the evidence. — Manuel

:up:

Good point ! I say that in the context of not seeing why it's impossible in principle for engineers to eventually achieve a more human-style intelligence, perhaps even in silicon.

Greetings, all !

The bot says : It is important to note that my responses are generated through sophisticated language processing algorithms, and I do not possess self-consciousness in the same way that a human does.
While I believe that the bot is correct (or rather that what is said likely true), there's something curiously thoughtless about this assertion. How could the bot know this ?

The bot is trained on human chatter of course, so it's apparently just repeating the common sense assumption that bots lack true consciousness, which for some might simply be the lack of qualia. Whether qualia actually make sense as entities we all share (for how could we know?) as humans is another issue. Perhaps the bot should both be credited for and blamed for regurgitating the common 'sense' (sometimes sensible, to be sure) of the internet (of the mob.)

So would you be able to avoid emergence (weak or strong) with your fuzzy version? — Eugen

I don't see how to avoid some kind of emergence in a plausible story.

Have you seen Stuart Kauffman ? Does complexity tend to beget complexity ? Is emergence even to be expected ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVL2Y5z2jLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWo7-azGHic&t=2737s

Hello, friend ! I've watched those interviews with pleasure. In my opinion, you understand the gist. Bach is great, but I do not think he has quite slain the ancient metaphysical dragon. The brain that supposedly tells the story, presumably really existing as matter, must itself be part of that story. So the brain is the product of the brain and the sense organs are the products of the sense organs? The story falls apart. I still think Bach is a genius. Metaphysics is just hard. A less metaphysical and more frankly fuzzy version seems feasible though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyrPMVMb-Uw

Greetings, fellow philosophers ! Heidegger is frustratingly elusive at times. How ought one understand the ontological difference ? One approach: "What most properly throws us into terror or wonder is not how but rather that the world is. But what allows us this distance from the whole of things ? ... How do humans manage to experience the strangeness not of this or that anomaly but of the being of the world itself ?" Is grasping being something like grasping the world as a "finite whole" ? Something like grasping the world as a unity that need not be but nevertheless is ? The brute fact of a passing show ?