“Mental states both emerge from (bottom-up) and constrain (top-down) neural activity. With this formulation, one of the traditional ideas in neuroscience––that brain activity precedes conscious thought and that brain-generated beliefs do not constrain brain activity––is also challenged. The concept of ‘bidirectional causation’ underscores the fact that in order to understand the nature of brain-enabled conscious […]
“‘Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,’ said May Kasahara. ‘Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of […]
The idea of artificial superintelligence (ASI) has long tantalized and taunted the human imagination, but only in recent years have we begun to analyze in depth the technical, strategic, and ethical problems of creating as well as managing advanced AI. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is a short, dense introduction to our most cutting-edge […]
“‘Why do you like jellyfish so much?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know. I guess I think they’re cute,’ she said. ‘But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This […]
“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have […]
“It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it become, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the […]
“The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless.” ––The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 79 “Starting from rudimentary replicators, evolution produced increasingly ‘advanced’ organisms, including creatures with minds, consciousness, language, and reason. More recently, cultural and technological processes, which bear some loose similarities to […]
“Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history––his home––the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, […]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an exceptional novel by a very smart author who doesn’t know when to shut up. Michael Chabon’s prose is densely literary, rife with cultural references, and brimming with insight and passion. Kavalier & Clay’s 600+ pages read like the internal monologue of the hyperactive lovechild of a […]
“When he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum’s dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained […]