MachineMachine /stream

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Is our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the first cyborg species? Gizmodo/New Scientist has a fascinating article up about how humans evolved as a result of technology. Timothy Taylor, an anthropologist…

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Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient…

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Now available for free online: The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel…

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You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right…

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In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at…

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For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday…

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How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with…

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Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception,…

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Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my…

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ow does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this…

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The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated,…

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As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It…

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My mild-mannered English husband Adam lives quite a colorful existence in his dreams. Having benefited from hours of delight at his dead of night musings, I thought it was only…

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Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page…

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A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel…

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Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape?…

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Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to…

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You've been singing the theme to The Love Boat for hours now, and you're becoming unmoored. If a song is on an unfinished loop, "sing it through all the way,…

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Boston University neuroscientist Patrick McNamara has an interesting evolutionary theory of dreaming. McNamara’s theory draws from the well-known “handicapping principle” in evolutionary biology, where some organisms have been observed to…

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Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world,…