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■ N 1958, American science fiction legend Isaac Asimov wrote a very short story called "The Feeling of Power." In it, lowly technician MyI ron Aub discovers that he is capable of duplicating the work of his computer by multiplying two numbers together on a piece of paper. Amazing! This miraculous discovery makes its…
The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system—religious or humanist—in which the human mind is the center of the universe. There is a tendency nowadays to think of the world in which we live as an artefact of mind or language: a human construction. For Lovecraft, human beings are too…
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us…
You see, in this day of amazing technology, lightning fast communications and constant, exciting innovation, there is nothing that comes close to role-playing. That's because we utilize the ultimate computer, the one that can think for itself, imagine and dream - the human mind. No machine can match it. No machine can…
When I talk about religion, I speak for myself alone. Any statement which attempted to express a consensus of scientists about religious and philosophical questions would miss the main point. There is no consensus among us. The voice of science is a Babel of diverse languages and cultures. That is to me the joy and…
I cover my ears when Tawaddud shouts the Name. By now I have a fairly good idea about how it works. Extreme fractal compression of some kind, a self-referential loop inside a story, forcing the target brain to iterate it all over again, bootstrapping a new mind inside it into existence. How it is possible, I do not…
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However…
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However…
Mathematics is one of humanity’s great achievements. By enhancing the capabilities of the human mind, mathematics has facilitated the development of science, technology, engineering, business, and government. Mathematics is also an intellectual achievement of great sophistication and beauty that epitomizes the power…
Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human “computers” like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely…
The worlds of academia, high fashion, religion, and modern art produce sublime wonders, and sometimes monstrous absurdities. They can afford such creative freedom because their systems of self-regulation and self-perpetuation are insulated from the mun- dane pragmatics of the outside world. Their autonomy endows them…
Even if the survivalist theory could take us from the world of natural history to our capacities for invention, commerce, and knowledge, it cannot account for the more ornamental and enjoyable aspects of human culture: art, music, sports, drama, comedy, and political ideals. At this point the survivalist theories…
It has never yet been supposed, that all the facts of nature, and all the means of acquiring precision in the computation and analysis of those facts, and all the connections of objects with each other, and all the possible combinations of ideas, can be exhausted by the human mind. The mere relations of magnitude, the…
It is to the press we owe the possibility of spreading those publications which the emergency of the moment, or the transient fluctuations of opinion, may require, and of interesting thereby in any question, treated in a single point of view, whole communities of men reading and understanding the same language. All…
This fortunate circumstance, still more than political freedom, wrought in the human mind, among the Greeks, an independance, the surest pledge of the rapidity and greatness of its future progress. In the mean time their learned men, their sages, as they were called, but who soon took the more modest appellation of…
Such is the origin of almost all the religions that are known to us, and which the hypocrisy or the extravagance of their inventors and their proselytes afterwards loaded with new fables. These casts seized upon education, that they might fashion man to a more patient endurance of chains, embodied as it were with his…
The only sciences known to savage hordes, are a slight and crude idea of astronomy, and the knowledge of certain medicinal plants employed in the cure of wounds and diseases; and even these are already corrupted by a mixture of superstition. Meanwhile there is presented to us in this epoch one fact of importance in…
Every thing tells us that we are approaching the era of one of the grand revolutions of the human race. What can better enlighten us to what we may expect, what can be a surer guide to us, amidst its commotions, than the picture of the revolutions that have preceded and prepared the way for it? The present state of…
We shall expose the origin and trace the history of general errors, which have more or less contributed to retard or suspend the advance of reason, and sometimes even, as much as political events, have been the cause of man’s taking a retrograde course towards ignorance. Those operations of the mind that lead to or…
The Human Cognome Project was an academic research venture to reverse engineer the human brain, paralleling in many ways the Human Genome Project and its success in deciphering the human genome. The HCP was a multidisciplinary undertaking, relevant to biology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, artificial…