#chalmers — Public Fediverse posts

#KenHenry ‘s most relevent words in his Guardian article are not about tax reforms but instead they are about the scourge of #Capitalism in large letters: “…towards investing in real restoration through shifting the responsibility for nature repair to precisely those industries that have caused the damage. Australia has spent many decades writing cheques against accounts it does not own, taking from the “natural capital” of future generations … “

So while Henry supports #Chalmers ‘ latest budget for its courage, modest as it is in imo, and accuses #GriftingCorporations of ecological genocide (rightly so), there is no finger pointing to #Labor ‘s continued financial and legislative subventions of the #FossilFuelIndustries and #ExtractiveIndustries responsible for worsening an already oversubscribed budget, withholding rightful sovereign revenue and raping a land never ceded.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2026/may/13/australia-budget-2026-jim-chalmers-economic-reforms-tax-changes-future-generations

How do you turn quantum physics into a company – and who dares to try?⚛️
// Peter Hörstedt – CEO Arkeon Technologies

Quantum computing is set to be the next major technological revolution – after AI. Billions in investments are flowing worldwide, and first commercial applications are drawing closer.
Peter Hörstedt co-founded Arkeon Technologies as a spin-off from Chalmers University of Technology – developing tools that make one of the most complex steps in quantum computing scalable and industrially viable.

// At #Waterkant26, Peter talks about the Swedish deep tech journey: how do you spin out a quantum innovation from Chalmers – and what does it take to turn lab research into a scalable company?

18 – 19 June 2026 // Waterkant Festival - MFG5 Kiel // GET YOUR TICKETS NOW.
https://www.talque.com/go/ticket/acLVSX2j1VHLqMuRtTn0/shop

#quantumcomputing #deeptech #spinoff #entrepreneurship #innovation #chalmers #quantum #waterkant26

Carlo Rovelli:

“The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body. But this contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language.“

There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ - NOEMA

https://www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness

#consciousness #HardProblem #Chalmers #philosophy

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

Part one of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.

My random thoughts about #FOSSnorth: https://talkweb.eu/openweb/4523/

#foss #fossnorth2026 #goteborg #gothenburg #fika #chalmers

This sounds like a really interesting PhD course at Chalmers: “Functional Programming and Climate Impact Research”, by Patrik Jansson:

https://github.com/DSLsofMath/FPClimate

After completion of the course the student should be able to:
Use functional programming specification / implementation / formalisation as a way of understanding new domains
Understand a selection of topics in Climate Impact Research
Effectively use Haskell and Agda for formalisation

#Chalmers #FunctionalProgramming

@mojo @HardBeingGreen @Devorppa
#PaulKeating was no #GoughWhitlam but #AnthonyAlbanese isn't much of anything. I hope that #JimChalmers can be better than #Keating
#AusPol
#chalmers
#Labor

@HardBeingGreen @Devorppa

Agreed — Chalmers feels like the only one with a hint of reformist ambition left in Labor. He studied Keating closely, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll prove to be the next Keating — our last real hope for a bolder Australia.

#auspol #chalmers #keating #labor #paulkeating

Also important: another instance of #Chalmers love of off-budget measures that add to contingent liabilities but don't appear in headline #budget balance. This is terrible policy and will come back to bite us #auspol

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/04/albaneses-feelgood-5-deposit-scheme-will-only-add-fuel-to-australias-housing-fire

@abcfeeds I still think #albo is going to shaft #chalmers in this. He has form and he hates upsetting the rich.

#SteamedHams but #Chalmers gets to see the #Aurora #Borealis #yt

https://youtu.be/GtzPfRVcS1Q

🤣🤣🤣 #lol

“Le macchine sono solo strumenti”, dicevano. “Non potranno mai provare emozioni”. Ebbene, la matematica ha appena contraddetto secoli di filosofia. Un nuovo modello computazionale suggerisce che la coscienza artificiale non è solo possibile, ma addirittura inevitabile: una tappa naturale nell’evoluzione tecnologica. Non parla di “se”, ma di “quando”. E quel “quando” potrebbe essere più vicino di quanto pensiamo.

#robot #pensiero #coscienza #chalmers #westworld

https://www.futuroprossimo.it/2024/09/la-coscienza-artificiale-e-inevitabile-uno-studio-sfida-chalmers/

#StuartHameroff - Toward a #Science of #Consciousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnmpw9nvTl8

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Qualia #Awareness #Self #Brain #Neuroscience #Neurology #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumPhysics #WaveFunction #WaveFunctionCollapse #Decoherence #Penrose #RogerPenrose #Microtubules #HardProblem #Chalmers #DavidChalmers #Computation #Synapse #Panpsychism #Dualism #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

Interesting job opportunity for an Associate Professor or Assistant Professor in Heat Transfer at #Chalmers #University

#academia #academicjobs

https://www.chalmers.se/en/about-chalmers/work-with-us/vacancies/?rmpage=job&rmjob=12775&rmlang=UK

Missionaries

Every man is a missionary, now and forever, for good or for evil, whether he intends or designs it or not.

~ Chalmers

slip:4a1360.

https://noplasticshowers.com/2024/01/16/nye-in-rio-de-janeiro-janeiro-hotel/

I have a 💡 idea. Let's fund it completely by just withdrawing some minor subsidies from fossil fuels. It'd be win-win: no taxpayer impact, renewables get funded, and old fossils get an incentive (less profit) to move their investments from carbon to renewables.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-23/australian-taxpayers-to-subsidise-renewable-energy-projects/103138990

Also, the article has a rather unfortunately-placed and worded subheading.

#auspol #carbon #renewables #fossilfuel #chalmers #ABCAustralia

#Chalmers backar från demonstrationsförbudet (även om det finns en del detaljer att reda ut). https://www.dn.se/sverige/chalmers-backar-tillater-politiska-manifestationer-igen/

Bra text om hyckleriet från Chalmers och Utbildningsminister Mats Persson (L)

"När dotterbolaget till Elbit skulle ställa ut på Chalmers tekniska högskola hördes protester. Det hölls även en tyst ljusmanifestation för Palestina, som företrädare för universitetet säger var lugn. Men det fick Chalmers att bli nervösa. Nu förbjuds politiska manifestationer, till och med affischer, på campusområdet."

Sverige belönar israeliskt företag med miljardaffär
https://www.aftonbladet.se/ledare/a/mQoRE1/regeringen-gillar-nar-kritiker-tystas

#svpol #chalmers

Ej nedplockad politisk affischering på #Chalmers 👍

Det här är så illa! Att studenters fredliga initiativ hindras och misstänkliggörs

"Isabelle Jarl säger att kåren inte fått någon kritik för att studenter känner sig tystade. Samtidigt har Isra Barham blivit kallad till ett möte med universitetsledningen och menar att hon känner sig just tystad och utsatt."

Isra samlade in namn för Gaza – då införde Chalmers demonstrations­förbud | Dagens ETC
https://www.etc.se/inrikes/chalmers-stoppar-politiska-demonstrationer?utm_source=rss

#svpol #israel #gaza #chalmers #censur #yttrandefrihet

Om jag vore student skulle jag dra ihop en otillåten politisk manifestation på Chalmers för rätten att hålla politiska manifestationer på #Chalmers.

Tunga reaktioner på #Chalmers manifestations-förbud
https://dagensopinion.se/artikel/tunga-reaktioner-pa-chalmers-manifestations-forbud/

@Anders_S @rasmusfleischer @httpster
Begreppet "allmän plats" är ersatt av "offentlig plats" i de flesta sammanhang.
Jag har länge arbetat inom utbildning och enligt min erfarenhet har allmänheten i allmänhet en överdriven uppfattning om att "skolan" är en offentlig plats; Skolor är inte offentlig plats.
#Chalmers är dessutom en privatägd skola samt vad jag kan se uppdelat på fyra olika områden. För jävla dåligt beslut ledningen har tagit. Hoppas de ändrar sig. https://maps.chalmers.se/#a85a8be2-4ff6-4e39-9880-c2adb2a7626f

Jag hade väntat mig en uppsjö indignerade inlägg om #Chalmers Jag är besviken.

Materialet grafens bidrag till samhället
I tio år har Chalmers koordinerat EU:s största forskningsprogram någonsin – Grafenflaggskeppet med en budget på 1 miljard euro. Nu summeras arbetet med att få den tunnaste formen av kol – grafen – att ta klivet från labbet till att göra nytta i samhället.
https://blog.zaramis.se/2023/08/29/materialet-grafens-bidrag-till-samhallet/
#Ekonomi #Energi #EU #Fysik #Kemi #Medicin #Neurologi #Chalmers #CTH #Forskning #Grafen #Teknik