The awareness of conscious experience is an after the fact phenomenon. Let me explain (caveat: I don’t know what I’m talking about. Bear that in mind, as you should for everything you hear and read) We think we have free will or control over our immediate conscious experience. It’s an extremely useful concept. It appears to work like this: I…
Consciousness is an open space where thoughts, sensations, emotions, sights, sounds, feelings appear, as well as awareness (mindfulness), which is also an appearance in the same space. We can’t, and don’t, pre-think each thought we’re going to have. Each thought appears like a quantum particle in the quantum vacuum. However, it’s not random. There is a “flavour” to conscious experience…
More on consciousness. I write about general AI so I do think about this stuff a lot. However, I’m not a neuroscientist, I haven’t spent decades in a cave in the Himalayas. I’m an ex-physicist, science fiction writer who knows nothing. Keep that in mind. Let’s take as given that consciousness is a construct and all sensations, sounds, sights, emotions,…
I’m fascinated by consciousness. My books include general AI so I need to think about what it is. Short answer: I have no idea. Just using the thing to investigate itself is odd enough, right? Consciousness is a construct that everything appears within. That is, sensations, feelings, sights, sounds, emotions, feelings (if they are different from emotions—I’m unsure) and thoughts.…
Don’t you hate marketing speak? It’s a loud, chaotic battlefield where the combatants fight to the death to merely gain the attention of some distracted, disinterested person picnicking on a grassy hill to the side somewhere. The solitary person occasionally glances in the direction of the fighting and they frown, which drives the fighters nuts with the potential of attention.…
First Gods I’ve let loose the first three books of the First Gods series: Awaken, Community, and Habitat. But only the ebook versions in the Amazon Kindle store. It’s been over ten months since the manuscripts were completed but I’ve been waiting on editing and design. Is that a reasonable timeframe for three books? I have no idea. It seems…
I have a bad feeling about this For everyone that has read any history, or even paid passing attention in High School, this must instil a familiar, horrifying feeling. Each age thinks they’re different and unique. I don’t means years, I mean stage of civilisation. Maybe part of it is the state of photography until recently. The world of the…
Why would you care? Well, it’s always interesting, if nothing else, to see how other people do the things you do. Perhaps some small parts of their routines may be useful. Even in a negative sense. The scientific method is like that, finding out what doesn’t work (for you, with writing) is a valid result. I don’t use a quill…
When Daxx began working as a theoretical physicist, gravity had been solved. It was spacetime curvature. Time itself was a relative thing, depending on where you were in a gravity well or how fast you were travelling. The discrete nature of the constituents of the universe had been well described. They also had odd properties that depended on the observer.…
Novelists consider their writing method to be either an outliner (they make notes on plot, plot progression, character changes, etc) or a pantser (a seat of the pants writer who starts with a blank page and just, well, writes). They argue which is better. Outliners consider a pantser ambitious. Do pantsers really think they can write a first draft that…