Word: ponder
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Ruckman believes his year on the river will be "a good break from academics for me. Everyone encourages you to take a year or two years off. This gives me time to ponder...
...however logical this downbeat argument may sound, it doesn't appear to be prevailing among scholars who ponder such issues for a living. That isn't to say philosophers are suddenly resurrecting the idea of a distinct, immaterial soul that governs the body for a lifetime and then drifts off to its reward. They're philosophers, not theologians. When talking about some conceivably nonphysical property of human beings, they talk not about "souls" but about "consciousness" and "mind." The point is simply that as the information age advances and computers get brainier, philosophers are taking the ethereal existence of mind...
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...
...also interesting to ponder why the United States has become so vocal about violations of international law. Just a decade ago, anyone who spoke about the thousands of peasants, students, nuns and priests who were being massacred in E1 Salvador was branded a communist. The United States never called an emergency session of the United Nations when martyrs in E1 Salvador were tortured and killed...
What followed was what one might call Diller's John the Baptist phase. He announced that he was going to take a year off and ponder the future of the entertainment industry, then emerged after a mere six months in the wilderness, if that's a fair description of schmoozing it up with the likes of Bill Gates and John Malone. Diller was now preaching the new religion of interactivity--though, to give credit where credit is due, so was virtually every other sentient being in telecommunications in 1992. Owning a traditional broadcast network, Diller told the New Yorker with...