William James at Cern (1995)

As a committed pragmatist of the, "Richard Rorty-Harold Bloom Book Snop Sort" I feel the world would be much better if every scientists and technician had as their required reading the works of James, Joyce, Dewey, and if they are North American Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Technical excellence flows from moral expansion.

"Ethics is transcendental" -Wittgenstein

> The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest…

The rest of the essay talks about selection (and taste as selection) including in terms of art.

But I wonder what this means for AI consciousness, vs consciousness as, say, mere self-awareness, vs whatever we define sentience to be. An AI running a constant stream of thought: would that be, by the definitions here, conscious? And the selection or focus, something we’ve seen appear in agent systems especially as a result of multiple agents (we humans may not be ‘solo’ in our own heads either): could that view mean complex LLM-based systems could indeed be conscious?

William James was a rather staggeringly good writer and had a lot of good insights. It's always intriguing to me to see how people cycle back to his work over a century later.