A Popular Fairy Tale Comparing human brains to computers has become something of an industry lately. Like nuclear fusion, an emergent silicon mind seems to be always just around he next corner. The poster boy for this idea is Ray Kurzweil . If you want to watch a movie imagining precisely this vision, take a look at Transcendence . Transcendence is a tolerably good movie but brain capture fails in the movie for truly stupid reasons (plot spoiler) because it apparently fails to capture the "soul" and not due to any fundamental difficulty involved in creating a mind in a machine. The monstrously expensive and spectacular failure of the Blue Brain project was conceived by Henry Markham. You can view his  version of this fairy tale on TED.  [1] So How Big a Computer Do We Need? The 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represent about 10 trillion characters - 10,000,000,000,000 characters. To make the analogy even approximately apt, we need to imagine each character i...

What, if anything, is "consciousness"? This is a central question of Zen . I have recently taken a look at the more "Scientific" view on the question. I just read Daniel Dennett 's discussion of consciousness. There are lots of Dennett lectures online. He's articulate and entertaining.  Dennett is a philosopher so tends to dig himself into obscure debates about language, terminology and disputes with other philosophers. He borrows a lot of experimental results, but he's not really part of the Scientific culture. Sorry, philosophers, philosophy is not Science. As Robert Laughlin reminds us, scholars of the humanities talk about words; physicists talk about facts. Dennett is still well worth reading though. Let me sketch out what I think he's talking about. He seems to be arguing against the intuitive view of consciousness, best represented by what's called the Cartesian Theater . This pictures the mind as something sitting in a theater watching t...