Let’s consider the issue of just who I am, and who the new Ray is a little more carefully. Like the water in a stream, my particles are constantly changing, but the pattern that people recognize as Ray has a reasonable level of continuity. After each procedure, I claim to be the same guy. If we talk about consciousness as just a certain type of int... See more

The economy “wants” to grow more than the 3.5% per year, which constitutes the current “speed limit” that the Federal Reserve bank and other policy makers have established as “safe,” meaning noninflationary. The underlying long-term growth rate will continue at a double exponential rate. Restricting the growth rate of the economy to an arbitrary li... See more

So far, I’ve been talking about the hardware of computing. The requisite hardware capacity is a necessary but not sufficient condition. A key advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that machines can easily share their knowledge. We exposed it to thousands of hours of recorded speech, corrected its errors, and patiently improved its performance.... See more

Is the human brain different from a computer?The answer depends on what we mean by the word “computer.” Certainly the brain uses very different methods from conventional contemporary computers. Most computers today are all digital and perform one (or perhaps a few) computations at a time at extremely high speed. With regard to digital versus analog... See more

How to Use Your Brain Scan

Over the past several years, Roger Penrose, a noted physicist and philosopher, has suggested that fine structures in the neurons called tubules perform an exotic form of computation called “quantum computing.” Quantum computing is computing using what are called “qu bits” which take on all possible combinations of solutions simultaneously. Just bec... See more

How will we apply the thousands of trillions of bytes of information derived from each brain scan? With this approach, we don’t have to copy every single connection. Although the information contained in a human brain would require thousands of trillions of bytes of information (on the order of 100 billion neurons times an average of 1,000 connecti... See more

DNA Sequencing, Memory, Communications, the Internet, and Miniaturization

Objective and Subjective