Purpose and design in nature were required to produce a universe, star system, and planet amenable to the production of technology.
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Part of the reason we don’t know exactly how anesthesia works is surely that we do not know what consciousness is (there are at least 325 theories out there).
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God would be the God of them too, but of course, this statement begs the question of what could be considered human-like, and that is a conversation unto itself.
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Neurologist Brian Edlow hopes that brain–computer interface technology like Neuralink will help researchers communicate with covertly conscious people.
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Bioethicist Brandon Ambrosino reacts to the physicians’ protest and promotes the very de-professionalization that the original article decried.
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Good dialogue is like great poetry where the real meaning can sometimes be hidden or disguised beneath the words.
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Instead of being expected to believe that human consciousness is an illusion, we may believe it exists — along with the cabbage mind and the electron mind.
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If strategy is more important than ideology for accelerationists, that is probably because their aims are incoherent and their groups fragment easily.
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Shermer’s coverage of issues like the design inference and irreducible complexity is embarrassingly shallow.
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LLMs’ impressive outputs demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms; they do not demonstrate that the AI has invented new computational methods.
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The inventions that changed our lives for the better were usually accompanied by speculation bubbles and busts. LLM firms will likely attract the same fate.
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We continue to explore the way simple roles followed by unintelligent agents — even dumb bugs — can yield complex behavior.
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Lê’s essay offers a much more sober assessment of transhumanism, the war on human exceptionalism, and the idea that machines think like people.
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YouTubers are quickly replacing the A-list celebrities, and while I’m surprised to see the studios going along with this trend, I’m not at all disappointed, and, for the first time in a long time, I’m hopeful for the future of entertainment.
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It’s at the point now, nearly twenty years later, that many colleges and universities are seeing significant drops in enrollment simply because there aren’t enough college-aged students in the application pool.
Read More ›Michael Egnor comments that academics often hold such beliefs because they make them sound clever, not because they make sense.
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The moral stigma against suicide prevents many deaths — which is why assisted suicide activists don’t call it suicide.
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We don’t have a reason to expect the eliminative materialism Carlo Rovelli recommends, which has not helped in the past, to be more help in the future.
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A few of us suggest individual users should know the risks and make the choices, leaving both government agencies and multi-national computer servers out of the picture.
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To solve last week’s puzzle, keep in mind that every termite is doing the same thing.
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