Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought

If language were sufficient to express human thought, why would we need visual arts, music, dance?

When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great

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What led early researchers to think that language might be localized is that disruption to particular regions of the brain reliably caused loss of language functions. Think of the circuits in your home again. If your contractor accidentally cuts an electrical wire, you can lose electricity in an entire section of your home, but it doesn’t mean that

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“Who cares if chatbots are sentient or not—more important is whether they are so fluent, so seductive, and so inspiring of empathy that we can’t help but start to care for them.”

even if we were not dabbling in virtual seances, the prospect of a reasonably capable conversational agent raises other questions worth considering. For example, might it p... See more