Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...roots of the debate between Chalmers and Dennett--the debate over how mysterious mind is or isn't--lie in the work of Dennett's mentor at Oxford University, Gilbert Ryle. In 1949 Ryle published a landmark book called The Concept of Mind. It resoundingly dismissed the idea of a human soul--a "ghost in the machine," as Ryle derisively put it--as a hangover from prescientific thought. Ryle's juiciest target was the sort of soul imagined back in the 17th century by Rene Descartes: an immaterial, somewhat autonomous soul that steers the body through life. But the book...
...that consciousness isn't extra, that it actually does something in the physical world, like influence behavior. Indeed, as a common-sense intuition, this strikes many people as obvious. But as a philosophical doctrine it is radical, for it would seem to carry us back toward Descartes, toward the idea that "soul stuff" helps govern the physical world. And within both philosophy and science, Descartes is dead or, at best, on life support. And the New Mysterians, a pretty hard-nosed group, have no interest in reviving...
These two "hard" questions about consciousness--the extraness question and the water-into-wine question--don't depend on artificial intelligence. They could occur (and have occurred) to people who simply take the mind-as-machine idea seriously and ponder its implications. But the actual construction of a robot like Cog, or of a pandemonium machine, makes the hard questions more vivid. Materialist dismissals of the mind-body problem may seem forceful on paper, but, says McGinn, "you start to see the limits of a concept once it gets realized." With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being realized...
...idea of harnessing Darwinian evolution to help humans do their programming is gaining currency, especially in the biologically oriented milieu in which Brooks and Maes operate. Farsighted proponents of this school imagine huge populations of digital agents meeting and mating in increasingly complex global networks--creating in their progeny artificial intelligences that exceed even the descendants...
Patty and Mike Hensel had no idea what they were in for when Patty's first pregnancy came to term six years ago. A spunky, attractive emergency-room nurse, Patty, now 37, had no signs that there was anything unusual about her pregnancy. Ultrasound tests indicated a single, normal fetus. (Doctors later guessed that the girls' heads must have been aligned during the sonogram.) Mike, who works as a landscaper and carpenter, thought he had heard two heartbeats at one point, but that impression was soon dismissed...