Sublime

Marvin Minsky went so far as to argue that we should view human cognition as a “society of mind,”

This form of explanationless science is just bad philosophy disguised as science.

Contemporary neuroscience identifies a particular part of the brain, sometimes called “the interpreter,” as the source of the familiar internal narrative that gives us our sense of self. Two prominent neuroscientists have recently characterized the quirky, undependable quality of the tale told by the interpreter. Antonio Damasio describes it this w

Since the 1950s, discussions about AI have largely revolved around a big, tantalizing question: What can machines do, and where might they hit a wall? Will they ever truly think, understand, or maybe even become conscious? Could they reach the so-called “heights of human intelligence”? And then there’s that shadowy question looming in the backgroun

After von Neumann, Shannon was the most important figure in the establishment of the system of the world that Google now embodies. I would like to say that he showed the way out. But Shannon himself ended up enmeshed in the same materialist superstition that afflicts the Google Age. “I think man is a machine of a very complex sort,”

As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”

And, although it seems obvious that an AI will have qualia and consciousness, we cannot explain those things. So long as we cannot explain them, how can we expect to simulate them in a computer program? Or why should they emerge effortlessly from projects designed to achieve something else? But my guess is that when we do understand them, artificia

Human consciousness is unlike all other varieties of animal consciousness in that it is a product in large part of cultural evolution, which installs a bounty of words and many other thinking tools in our brains, creating thereby a cognitive architecture unlike the “bottom-up” minds of animals. By supplying our minds with systems of representations

Kurzweil seems to believe that consciousness can be put to the side. His book How to Create a Mind is the most systematic exposition of AI and, like his masterpiece, The Singularity Is Near, full of original insights. But on the issue of consciousness both books plunge into circularity, merely asserting that when a machine is fully intelligent it w