"We cannot assume that because it works in our culture, it will work in another culture," he says.
Read More ›
“Neural tissue grown in a lab cannot have intentionality unless it has sense organs,” Egnor says, “But such manufactured intentionality can only be about concrete things, not abstract things.”
Read More ›
The computer sim universe seems to be a way of dealing with the massive evidence of the fine-tuning of our universe without invoking traditional philosophy or religion.
Read More ›
The convincing film was great for Tom’s Twitter feed but less great for what it says about our judgment as viewers. We believe too much AI hype.
Read More ›
If man can be copied by a wholly material process, I need to rethink things. If he cannot be, materialists need to rethink things.
Read More ›
One potential solution could be the rise of edge computing, which distributes all data as close to the edge as possible.
Read More ›
Avoiding having to judge between currencies "solves a political problem for Facebook, but I don't see that it solves problems for anyone else," Bartlett says.
Read More ›
As Ted Gioia makes clear in his discussion of jazz, swirling a bit of randomness into the mix will not help.
Read More ›
Quite simply, the need to see humans as equivalent to animals has now spread to the need to see us as equivalent to plants.
Read More ›
The ability to clone a rational man is a straightforward prediction of the materialist view of man, and the inability to clone a rational man is a straightforward prediction of the immaterialist view.
Read More ›
The study found that our dislike of almost-human bots is a “hardwired” natural reaction to something that doesn’t seem quite right.
Read More ›
“Experts” should not be confident that they understand the value propositions of gig jobs better than the individuals doing the gigs.
Read More ›
At first sight, the number of options might seem bewildering. The key question is: Will you ignore the coming job disruption, fear it, or treat it as an opportunity?
Read More ›
In Haiti, 40% of the population (eleven million) still depends on subsistence agriculture. But cell phones allow them to leapfrog many traditional stages of technological development.
Read More ›
Contrary to the dogma of hypothesis testing, it is possible to do after-the-fact pattern analysis while limiting the probability of false positives.
Read More ›
Yale University neurologist Steven Novella posted recently on the science of growing brain tissue in the lab. It’s interesting stuff, but then we come to the jumbled metaphysical musings that conclude his post: There is a layer of weirdness to the very idea of brain tissue in a vat, because I think we are naturally uncomfortable with the very notion that our consciousness is the result of a clump of tissue shuttling ions around. It breaks the illusion that our brains evolved to have, a very compelling and persistent illusion – namely that the reality we perceive is real, rather than a constructed representation. That internal representation has a strong relationship to physical reality, but the two are not the Read More ›
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor was featured in a short film as a supplement to the Science Uprising series. There, he mentions four researchers who have shed light on the non-material mind nature of our minds: Wilder Penfield (1891–1976): Some of the earliest evidence came from neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who was the pioneer in epilepsy surgery in the mid 20th century. Penfield operated on over a thousand epilepsy patients while they were awake (under local anesthesia), and he stimulated their brains with electrodes in order to identify epileptic regions for surgical resection. He carefully recorded their responses to stimulation. In his book Mystery of the Mind, (1975) Penfield noted: “When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying Read More ›