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When you use Alexa to find a table at your favorite restaurant, you and she are both aware and responsive as you discuss eating, even though Alexa has never felt the texture of a crunchy apple against her teeth, the effervescent prickles of sparkling water against her tongue, or the gooey pull of peanut butter against…
When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic--"High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L"--a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never…
For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly…
http://theweek.com/article/index/214732/do-girls-like-pink-because-of-their-berry-gathering-female-ancestors
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11346470-connectome
There is no end of hypotheses about consciousness, particularly by philosophers. But most of these are not what we might call principled scientific theories, based on observables and related to the functions of the brain and body. Several theories of consciousness based on functionalism and on the machine model of the…
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about—yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries…
It is with our entire past ... that we desire, will and act ... from this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person ... that is why our duration is irreversible.
I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as…
Is self-awareness what constitutes a self? Self-awareness can be altered by psychoactive drugs, electrical stimulation, political or religious propaganda, even advertising.
"Die? Can a machine die?" "I can cease to exist, sir. Call it by whatever word you wish. I am old. Not one sentient being in the Galaxy that was alive when I was first given consciousness is still alive today; nothing organic; nothing robotic. Even I myself lack continuity." "In what way?" "There is no physical part…