consciousness

One problem is that consciousness means different things to different people. For example, some researchers focus on the subjective experience — what it is like to be you or me. Others study its function — cognitive processes and behaviours enabled by being conscious. These differences muddy attempts to compare ideas.

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more

people turn to AI with existential questions and complex, unresolved scientific problems because they think that the mystical processes in AI systems generate knowledge or insights that far exceed human cognitive abilities.