Man, this kind of philosopher (continentals?) really speak a different language. (Note: I am not calling myself a philosopher; I don’t consider myself to be one. )

What do they mean by using the world as its own representation? I buy that “the world is the only perfect representation of the world” in that it is the only thing that corresponds perfectly to it, but I am not the world, the world in its entirety is not a mere module/component of my decision making process, so how can I use it as my model of it?

I can, of course, observe things, and respond to these observations. And I can even write things down about the world, and by doing so record in the-part-of-the-world-outside-of-myself things about the world, to use later. But presumably this is not what is meant.

In order for me to respond to perceptions, or to learn how to respond to certain kinds of perceptions in certain ways, something needs to change in me or my mind or my brain (I am not expressing a position here on whether or not any of those are the same thing). It seems to me that if one has any beliefs about the world, one has a model of the world. Just, by virtue of the meaning of the words? But, like I said, these philosophers appear to speak a different language, so perhaps they mean different things by “model”.

This appears to make a big deal about unconscious action,

— err, that might not be the right phrase. What I mean is action which is not a decision made through deliberate reasoning and thought. Like if one noticed one has dropped something and moves to catch it. Or like if one sees something moving quickly towards where one’s head is, and quickly gets out of the way. Unlike say, if one is going through steps in some line of explicit reasoning. —

and about how things like that would have to be implemented first, with deliberate reasoning built on top of it. And, ok, but in anything we program, where would you draw the distinction? In everything we’ve made so far, we generally expect that it has no more conscious experience than a flowering bush (unless you expect GPT3 to, which I doubt, or if you subscribe to IIT and think a big grid of xor gates is more conscious than a person), so that can’t really be the distinguishing factor.
If whether it is comprised of sequential steps is the issue, then that would seem to rule out anything on a cpu, but I don’t think that is what is meant, based on how the author speaks favorably of some of the work.

If it is based on whether it has some data structures which it like, crawls through, and has conditionals ,

I mean,

what I’m trying to say is that we do not have awareness of the firing of individual neurons in our brains, nor do we necessarily have awareness of things a single level of abstraction above that, but why couldn’t parts of our cognitive processes in some ways resemble deliberate reasoning, while being at a low enough level that we are not aware of it?

Ok, maybe that isn’t particularly plausible, but I think it still points to a way in which it seems ambiguous to me how the author means to make the distinction. I apologize for my inability to express this clearly; it seems that I am not clear to myself either.

Anyway.

A joke I once saw was that a continental philosopher achieves enlightenment when everyone else responds to what they say with “I don’t know what that means.”, while an analytic philosopher reaches enlightenment when they respond to what anyone else says with “I don’t know what that means.”.

edit : It looks like what they are saying in the end is, "use continuous things coupled together, instead of discrete things"
and, uh,

meh? Ok sure, "neural nets yayyyyyyyy." ???? (well, except like, continuous time neural nets instead of the discrete time ones. whatever.) I don't get it.