Apparently, the assumption of dualists is that when competent philosophers and scientists agree to give talks at their “conference”s, then their views suddenly become scientifically credible! I am attempting to thwart this misdirection by the following open letter to two researchers whom I deeply respect:

Greetings Prof. Dennett and Prof. Markram,

I am an AGI researcher and a somewhat amateur philosopher. I was both astonished and relieved to see your names on the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” 2014 conference speakers list. I am an avid follower of your research, as you challenge many misconceptions about cognition and the brain. If you would not mind me requesting, in the name of good philosophy, could you please make sure that you solemnly and decisively denounce all forms of dualism, especially the more arcane/cryptic forms, such as property/predicate dualism, as unscientific (not scientific hypotheses) during your talks? It is quite possibly an unmatched opportunity to show to the greater intellectual community that the “philosophical work” of people like Chalmers and Hameroff is at best farcical. I would be most grateful if you would take a stand against pseudo-science. It is sorely needed, as I believe the pseudo-scientists are plotting to make it seem as if their views are respected by physicalists — a similar attempt was made recently at an event called Global Future 2045.

Here are my publications on the matter, should you wish to investigate
more why I have taken the pain to make such a request out of the blue:

Eray Ozkural, A compromise between reductionism and non-reductionism.
Worldviews, Science and Us – Philosophy and Complexity, University of
Liverpool, UK, 11 – 14 September 2005 link1 link2

Eray Ozkural, What Is It Like to Be a Brain Simulation? Artificial
General Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 7716, 2012, pp 232-241 link1

Regards,

An Open Letter to Daniel Dennett and Henry Markram on TSC 2014 Conference

examachine

Eray Özkural has obtained his PhD in computer engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara. He has a deep and long-running interest in human-level AI. His name appears in the acknowledgements of Marvin Minsky's The Emotion Machine. He has collaborated briefly with the founder of algorithmic information theory Ray Solomonoff, and in response to a challenge he posed, invented Heuristic Algorithmic Memory, which is a long-term memory design for general-purpose machine learning. Some other researchers have been inspired by HAM and call the approach "Bayesian Program Learning". He has designed a next-generation general-purpose machine learning architecture. He is the recipient of 2015 Kurzweil Best AGI Idea Award for his theoretical contributions to universal induction. He has previously invented an FPGA virtualization scheme for Global Supercomputing, Inc. which was internationally patented. He has also proposed a cryptocurrency called Cypher, and an energy based currency which can drive green energy proliferation. You may find his blog at http://log.examachine.net and some of his free software projects at https://github.com/examachine/.

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