Dave Chalmers: ...by the one and the only Baba Brinkman
So please welcome Baba with his "rap up" for the conference
Dave Chalmers on day one stepped to the stage and did the honours
To initiate the conference, he sparked it
off with
A straight delineation of the main problem
The hard problem: how should I phrase it?
The easy problems are linked to mechanisms
For instance, it's an easy problem to explain
my sense of rhythm
But the hard problem is...
Well, according to Don Hoffman's bizarre concoctions
All physical reality is a perceptual construction
With infinite conscious agents in a metaphysical
conversation
Constantly making reality manifest through
observations
And in the face of this radical idealism
With incomprehension spread across the face
of the people listening
Dan Dennett slapped his cards on table like
"realism!"
"So, where is the hard problem?" Dave Chalmers
asked
And Deepak [Chopra] replied: "Read the Upanishads
Consciousness isn't something only mammals have
It's a non-local field and you're one of its habitats
The universe is made of pure consciousness
Realizing itself through organic processes
And observer-independent reality is impossible
And that's my refutation of all western philosophers!"
Deepak was cocksure and he thought that he rocked worlds
Until he got smacked in the head by John Searle
In a battle of east vs west with rocks hurled
Two sides never connecting, only talking in circles
John Searle's example of objective reality
Was five fingers, yeah! He proved it pentadactyly
The best philosophy is always practiced interactively
That's a powerful narrative center of gravity
See, I like an academic who can really knock heads
The rapper Nas said "Hip-hop is dead"
And the philosopher Ned Block said
"The global neuronal workspace
Explanation of phenomenal consciousness is dead"
 
So what is it like when your mind hasn't quite
developed?
It's like psilocybin, it's like tripping on psychedelics
That's right, being a baby is like being on drugs
So what's it like to be a baby on drugs?
Now, on the fourth day of the conference
The day dawned with a peaceful morning
A beautiful experiment conducted by Petra
Stoerig
A blind visual cortex can see with a sound
recording
So now Stevie Wonder's got new qualia forming
But it soon descended into warring factions
and point scoring
That's just my theory-informed distorted impression
Based on Russel Hurlburt's randomized reporting
Fragmented with passionate multifaceted deep
divisions
I felt the need to purge my mind, like bulimic
women
Searching for the meaningful ground but it
was hidden
Like a maple leaf in a Mary Peterson image
I tried to pinpoint the moment that brought out the divisions
It think maybe it was when Christof [Koch] tried to start his talk without permission
Chalmers the Australian busted him like "Mate, what's the big idea?!"
Christof was like: "I am German, ze trains run on time 'round here!"
From then on, it was fractious
Christof even said that consciousness lives
in neurons and synapses
In cortical regions where connectivity's quite
plastic
He got that from Francis Crick, so it's dynastic
Christof's experimental methods are quite drastic
Lesioning the cerebellum leaves you stumbling and ataxic
Proving the cerebellum doesn't have any "C"
Or proving the cerebellum is absent from the
hospitality suite
Christof has a mouse brain hooked to a maze
And he pays the mouse in sugar just to look at his face
But that is far from a narcissistic behaviour
Because Christof is only here to proclaim
the existence of a saviour
A disciple like John the Baptist, only truly
as holy
As the Messiah he's matched with: Giulio Tononi
Giulio was proclaimed yesterday by a crazy man as god's revelation
I'm not joking, it was the gospel of integrated information
Generated by a system of mechanisms in a state
Which constrain the past and future in probabilistic
ways
IIT is a great theory, I fully recommend it
Even if my personal Phi is too low to comprehend it
Love it or hate it, trash it, attack it or defend it
Max Tegmark rates it highly for "substrate independence"
And the fact of his rating it must've gave it head start
Cause even money doesn't talk louder than Max Tegmark
So, all he said about quantum was 'it's too warm and wet, it's gotta be wrong'
And a billion dollars in research funding was gone?
And Stuart's been really holding a grudge about that all along?
Only now Stuart's got his own savior: Anirban
Bing! That's the moment when subjectivity
happens
Bing! Microtubules are the center of the action
Bing! Quantum reduction and then... something happens
Bing! Planck-scale space-time geometry patterns
Bing... Oscillations on top of oscillations
With phase vibrations and quantum resonations
And yeah, as an artist I find it quite funky
But... are you sure we haven't entered into Deepak country?
I mean, I'm just a rapper and my style is new school
But I'm not as new school as a microtubule
I know the field is open and nobody really
knows the deal
But ten to the twenty seven operations a second
Just seems like overkill
My consciousness is not that complex
I want food I want friends I want booze I want sex
And a hundred billion neurons and a thousand synapses each
Sound to me like enough to capture "C"
With petaflops, but I love an underdog though
And I love to see a lot of different breeds at a dog show
So I'm gonna give props to Hameroff for his chops
Even if I'm more into Christof's stuff than his stuff
Now, on day five, the conference is dying
From above I can see the table where it's body is lying
The feeling is real, I'm not just delirious
We can step outside and have an out of conference experience
