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Will we be able to upload our minds?
I’m pretty much a subscriber to the computational theory of mind (broadly speaking), which holds that the mind is information in the brain. If this theory of mind is accurate, then there should be no...
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Consciousness is in the eye of the beholder
Alan Turing was a pioneer in the field of computer science. One of the things he is famous for is the Turing test. At its core, this is a test about whether or not a machine, a computer, can convince...
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The dualism of mind uploading
brain (Photo credit: TZA) A few days ago, when I told him I thought his skepticism of mind uploading was a bit overly pessimistic, Massimo Pigliucci pointed out that mind uploading implies dualism and...
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Saying that mind uploading will never be possible is unwarranted
There is currently no consensus on how closely the brain should be simulated. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) This question came up on Quora: 3 What percent chance is there that whole brain emulation or mind...
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A machine in the likeness of a human mind
In the fictional far future of the classic science fiction novel, ‘Dune‘, computers are taboo across all human cultures, the result of an ancient jihad which resulted in the religious commandment:...
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Gödel’s incompleteness theorems don’t rule out artificial intelligence
I’ve posted a number of times about artificial intelligence, mind uploading, and various related topics. There are a number of things that can come up in the resulting discussions, one of them being...
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Are rocks conscious?
Image credit: EvanS via Wikipedia Consider a rock outside somewhere. It sits there, starting off in the morning in a certain state. The sun comes out and proceeds to warm it up. Its temperature...
View ArticleWhy embodiment does not make mind copying impossible
A while back, I highlighted a TEDX talk by Anil Seth where he discussed that cognition is largely a prediction machine. Apparently Seth more recently gave another talk at the full TED conference,...
View ArticleBrain inspired hardware
The Scientist has an interesting article up reporting on the progress that’s being made in neuromorphic hardware. But the fact that computers “think” very differently than our brains do actually gives...
View ArticleThe problems with the Chinese room argument
In 1950, Alan Turing published a seminal paper on machine intelligence (which is available online). Turing ponders whether machines can think. However, he pretty much immediately abandons this...
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