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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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Leaving the Church of Materialism

03 Feb 2026 - 03 Feb 2026
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    • Granted: Marvin Minsky's moral failings are a dumb reason to change your view of the fundamental nature of reality.
    • Not really, my religion is what it has always been.
    • Here is Marvin's view of the mind: it is basically mechanical, causal, and fundamentally so. Minds are produced by processes of mechanical causality. These are basically computational, which is to say, they are both mechanical and symbolic at the same time. This doesn't mean minds are unreal or that consciousness doesn't exist, just that all that is produced by this mechanical process.
    • What isn't real is a pre-existing, immaterial, controlling mind (god). We got rid of that and don't need it. Between evolution and computationalism, we have a perfectly mechanical worldview.