Anyone who reads Murakami expects a hefty dose of weirdness, but I think The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle set a new bar for me. This novel’s psychological density and elusive tone make it difficult to say anything definitive about it, except perhaps that it subverts the idea that human experience is definable in any consistent way. I […]
“The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian always seemed to feel. People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to […]
“It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell […]
“Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as that. And […]
“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 […]