"Hanging together" doesn't impose as many assumptions as "having specific foundation". It's a very distinct philosophical stance to assume that any kind of human knowledge has a specific foundation, and a naive one at that.

The message is very subtle, but much closer to reality than most of the other suggestions here. The difficult part is that it requires letting go a lot of views to which we are very attached. Not your typical feel-good motivational book.

That's a full-on nihilistic postmodernism. The fact that words mean something only in reference to other words doesn't have to mean that they are useless. Quine and other pragmatists (Buddhism does the same) argued otherwise - that concepts/theories derive meaning or truth-value from how useful they are in the real world (as a network, rather than individually).

Treating all philosophers as a one camp vs science is mistaken. Whatever any particular scientist or engineer say, there always will be some philosophical assumptions behind it. It's always better to make them explicit rather than be in the dark. The best scientists in history were pretty deep in philosophy as well.

Eg. Tononi is both philosopher and a scientist. He's clearly on Chalmers' side philosophically, he perceives consciousness as something fundamental, MUCH more fundamental than learning. He posits that even stable systems (so with no learning at all) can be conscious. Which makes a lot of sense from phenomenological point of view. He also adds a theory of how specifically consciousness may be related causally with the physical world. That's the scientific part.

Silvers, on the other hand, and the whole RL thing is not concerned with consciousness AT ALL! It's a completely different problem. Actually it may be the case that most of the learning processes in human mind are unconscious!

"There is no consciousness in itself, just consciousness of something. Learning is what ties together agent and environment..." Exactly - if you define learning as a relationship between a system and its environment, you don't need anything else (like cosciousness), just the actual and potential interactions.

Late Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others would be on the same page with you here, so again, let's not throw the baby of philosophy out with the bathwater. These observations were made in the first half of XX century. They apply perfectly to the naivete of old school symbolic AI (and a logical positivism philosophical stance behind it), as captured by Hubert Dreyfuss, who described all the problems with it from philosophical (phenomenological specifically) standpoint in "What computers can't do" and his more recent paper ( http://cspeech.ucd.ie/Fred/docs/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf ). RL seems to be step in the right direction in this perspective. However...

"[Learning] ... it's the building force of consciousness."

Well, this part just doesn't make sense. You want to focus on explaining learning? Fine. Do some work on RL, it's enligthening for sure. I completely agree that it's fascinating how new concepts emerge in AlhaGo around some specific baord configurations. It changed people's understanding of the game. But please, don't conflate it with consciousness. And if you do, be open about it and name your position in terms of Chalmers' recent paper. Is it some form of illusionism? Only then we can have meaningful conversation about your actual position on what consciousness is.

Whatever is the relationship of concepts and sensations, however these two aggregates relate to each other and evolve in the mind, consciousness seems to be something more fundamental. Are you saying that AlphaGo is already conscious? If not, can it be made conscious? How? By adding more CPU? A webcam? We can't escape these questions.

Here's him explaining why the problem is hard and how it could be approached, in the middle of some kind of artifical jungle: https://youtu.be/Vl8J3K_ZLkg?t=5m50s

The clearest example of the meta problem is Daniel Dennett, another prominent philosopher, who not only doesn't agree that the problem is hard, but also insists that the consciousness itself is illusion, so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place. Quite mind-boggling statement to most people, including HNers, as far as I remember from other threads related to the subject.

The 'our Russian allies' part sounds a bit strange. Are you aware that the Soviet Union started the war on the Hitler side? What's amazing is that in modern Russia most people don't believe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_in_World_War_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

There are three types of knowledge in Buddhist tradition - information you acquired from others, information you intellectually grasped and finally information from direct experience, insight. Each requires some amount of the previous kind to form.

You're right that we are not in direct control of our minds and we don't understand it directly as much as we think we do, but we can understand some important general causal principles which allow to learn how to influence the mind through the right causes.

So it's not about not thinking at all, it's about right kind of thinking. We need thoughts, right constructs, to point the mind in the right direction. As in the raft simile - only on the other shore we can let these skillful constructs go.

By being strict one can realise the limits of the very cognitive tools we use. Godel and Quine come to mind. The concepts are limiting, but that's all we have in philosophy.

The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

For instance Rumi composed all his verses in a specific rhythms (obviously lost in translation) that, when sang and danced to, were meant to induce a specific states of mind.

Buddha explicitly said that metaphysical questions are orthogonal to the problem of suffering that he was solving (or just meaningless).

To make things even more complex, there are some similarities between teachings of the Buddha and western pragmatists.

The main problem (or the most fun part) in such discussions, is that there's no common ground to make such inter-paradigm comparisons. We always have to pick one of these viewpoints as a base and compare it to another one from that perspective.

- singletons

- getters/setters everywhere (but not in favour of public fields, which just as much introduce tight coupling, but 'tell don't ask' style which allow to localise functionalities prone to change)

- introducing interfaces upfront - it goes against Reused Abstraction Principle or Rule of Three (discover rather than design abstractions, apply interface only when you have at least 3 classes that would adhere to it)

Both OOD and functional programming try to reach loose coupling and composability by different means. All these 'patterns' have usually some more sane general architectural concern standing behind. It would be interesting to know whether old school procedural approach allows you to achieve all those architectural benefits in large scale applications.