Pop fears about the AI apocalypse often feature the machine suddenly and inexplicably "coming to life." The "lights go on," and all of a sudden, the machine supposedly feels like us, has a consciousness like us and (therefore) starts to exhibit all of our worst attributes. In particular, it "wants" to live and suddenly "sees" us as a threat. All of this plays on thousands of years of confusion about what it is to be human in the first place. What is it to "feel alive"? What is consciousness? What is "self"? I think that thousands of years of superstition and religious "theology" shed no light at all on this question. If you are one of those who are looking for a detailed treatment of the "soul" as distinct from the body, I wish you good luck. As for me, I see no reason to invent a separate realm of reality to house my mind - even as I admit that it is difficult to say just exactly how a slab of meat be...

This post is fun to read once processed by Perplexity AI here . Len writes: My thoughts on this matter have to do with the physical substrate of consciousness and its possible dependence on entanglement as a means of messaging. Well .. "The physical substrate of consciousness" ... There are some metaphors and analogies in that idea that need to be made explicit (Hofstader's Surfaces and Essences is always looking over my shoulder). The analogy at work here seems to be that "consciousness" is like a thing of some sort - a kind of physical substance. It would seem to be as easy to think of consciousness as a process - particularly a kind of "calculation". It does seem that calculations need a "substrate" - a physical medium to work. Hofstadter spent a lot of time on this idea in his famous "Goedel, Escher, Bach", which won him a Pulitzer. In fact, the idea underlies most of the Science Fiction ideas about consciousness, incl...

Zen and its Western cousin, "Mindfulness" were a stop on my long journey to self-discovery. They introduced me to a line of investigation through subjective experience. In spite of the strong tradition against a philosophical interpretation in Taoism and Zen, all this came with a certain amount of "theory". To make a long story short, these disciplines challenge our idea of the "self" and, following ancient Buddhist tradition, regard the self (whatever that is) as impermanent**. Some would go as far as to claim that the self is an illusion. The Western "scientific" branch would claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain. Sam Harris is a leading popularizer of this view and he claims extensive subjective experience (hundreds of hours of meditation) as his "evidence". Antonio Damasio takes a different view, based on thousands of case studies (a more trustworthy kind of "evidence"). His view is that our fee...

Back in 1969, I appeared in Grenoble, France, eager to start on my Ph. D. in Computer Science at what was then the leading IBM research center in Europe. It did not go well. At the time, the idea of "Time Sharing" on a computer was in its infancy. Very few people had access to the big mainframes using slow text-only terminals. Yet, I imagined a time when everyone would have access to the same computer system. All of human knowledge would be accessible. People could share their projects and extend that knowledge together, online. The group mind of humanity would be implemented in a vast computer network. In short, I imagined the Internet. World Wide Web 3.0, a bit beyond what we have now. Artificial Intelligence (my field) played a big role in this vision. I called it the "Spirit System". The idea quite literally blew my mind. Weakened by days without sleep and culture shock I had the first of my numerous "nervous breakdowns". My hopes of an academic career...