Consciousness is an immaterial creation given only to human beings to enable us to have a relationship with a higher power and to understand our universe better.
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Egnor notes that intellect is the capacity to contemplate universals. In this respect, a human being is more different from an ape than an ape is from a virus.
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The people trying to manufacture human language from ape laughter simply don’t have a better hypothesis. But much seems to depend on pretending otherwise.
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TV is a dying industry. The internet is not so timebound as TV and it is much more interactive.
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The people who do not trust science today would probably like to be able to. And the people who do trust it may simply be unaware of the problems.
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It’s supposed to be a given that machines or brain organoids might be conscious despite not knowing what that is or how it works — but preborn children can’t be…
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Many people, for example, do not realize that age-verification laws, which sound virtuous, require monitoring everyone’s usage of AI at home, not just that of minors.
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Most of us are hypocrites for social peace. But we tend to abandon hypocrisy when things start to really get out of hand.
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What these speculations point to is the way new findings have destroyed classical materialism. Materialism isn’t so much dying out as breaking up.
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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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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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Lê’s essay offers a much more sober assessment of transhumanism, the war on human exceptionalism, and the idea that machines think like people.
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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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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Where exactly is a popular song located? It lives in memory, human and recorded, in many forms. But it occupies no spatial location.
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The main concern with glacier rights is the inevitable erosion of what human rights mean. Ungrounded in reality, they come to mean everything, anything, and ultimately, nothing.
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Neuroplasticity is a very interesting and important area of research. But the careless and casual attribution of unexpected mental states to it is junk science.
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Technology has a history but the human mind does not. We see it where we see it.
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Unfortunately, some of them spend a lot of time trying to discredit people who are willing to look at these questions.
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