Many people assume that human consciousness arose accidentally many eons ago from animal consciousness and that therefore we can find glimmers of the same sort of consciousness in the minds of animals. But that approach isn’t producing the expected results.
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Consciousness is a slippery concept but the two prominent theories make different predictions as to which part of the brain will become active when a person becomes aware of an image; thus they can be tested by neuroscientists.
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Apple had once positioned itself in opposition to Big Brother. The NBA had been a strong advocate of social justice. But with Hong Kong, they suddenly caved to Beijing. What’s at stake?
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Getting away from constant surveillance and dangerous little bubbles of manipulated information is easier than some users may realize, tech pioneers and experts say. You can make simple changes today.
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Remembering the prophecies for the web in the halcyon days of ten or (better) fifteen years ago is strangely painful and disorienting, like a hangover, largely because we so silently abandoned its ideals.
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The place to begin, however, is with a simple rule of thumb: if a system is convenient, you are probably trading your information for that convenience. If you want to reduce your “digital exhaust,” you will need to do things that are a little less convenient.
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Many are inclined to dismiss Swinburne’s approach without thinking very hard. But it is not as if materialists have a big solution that others are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge.
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The slowing Funk refers to is in fundamental innovations like transistors and lasers. The apparent progress often turns out to be in patent applications for a bewildering array of comparatively insignificant mobile phone apps.
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But there was a lingering problem. To power the world’s vacuums and rice cookers, the Craizins had to be at the source of the action: the home. But no one wanted somewhat smelly teenage gamers hulking around in their homes.
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In a world where the divine touch of extraterrestrial intelligence doesn’t elevate human existence to any level of significance, we are left with Ad Astra: a slow, methodical decay of human significance.
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The Turing test for design in computers relies on the same principles as the detection of design in nature. The materialist can have, in principle, no intelligence in either computers or nature or possible intelligence in both. But he can’t pick and choose.
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But there is not much point in being a traditional Luddite today. You don’t want to smash the robot; you want to bring the price down to where you can own a piece of it.
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In 2002, he received the National Medal of Technology for a number of “pioneering contributions to microelectronics,” which underlies cell phones and computer neural networks.
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AI, says William Littlefield, would get stuck in an endless loop with abductive reasoning, which is an inference to the best explanation or an educated guess. But it plays an important role in creating hypotheses in the sciences.
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The Chinese government may use violent behavior as a justification for obliterating the Hongkongers’ prized freedoms. As a possible precedent, the Uyghur people, as a whole, were painted as religious extremists, even though only about 1,000 people participated in violent protests.
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The fabled Economist also chimed in, sniffing that Smith’s team’s result was “too farfetched for a sitcom”… but didn’t dispute it.
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Claims that a given program has “passed the Turing test” should be treated skeptically because a program can be optimized to pass the Turing test without demonstrating any particular intelligence.
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Graziano's approach is not new. Ancient philosophers thought the mind was fire (not too long after the discovery of fire). Early modern philosophers thought the mind was a machine (just as the machine age got started). Now suddenly it's a computer…
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Professors at prestigious business schools and financial engineers with advanced degrees built mathematical models to assess the risks, but their models were deeply flawed.
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It’s good to see a growing response to the materialist superstition about the mind and the brain from the neuroscience and philosophy community.
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