Word: sentient
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This decision speaks well of her as a loyal daughter but very poorly of her as a sentient human being. She has no idea what she is getting into, no premonition that her father had been set up as a fall guy by one of the several rogue factions within the U.S. government operating in the area. She is a babe in the palm trees...
...hard. A perfect example is the new Squirt TV, a talk show picked up from public access. The host is a detached 17-year-old, Jake Fogelnest, who is as committed to ironically appreciating the 1970s as any Gen X Bandstand fan despite the fact that he became sentient only around 1981. The question for the target audience for these two shows is: Do you want your ironic appreciation of the 1970s straight up or painfully contrived...
...conceivable that someday we can put together a machine that exactly duplicates the body, with structural details matching every fundamental particle. In the age of artificial hearts and babies born from long-frozen embryos, it is also conceivable that such a "machine" will act as a sentient being capable of experiencing life just as does a human. But does that diminish the mystery and glory of consciousness? Does it change its unique place in the fundamental scheme of things in this universe? Can we ever objectively solve the mystery of consciousness through consciousness? MANI L. BHAUMIK Los Angeles...
...years AI researchers have tossed around the question of whether computers might be sentient. But since they often did so in casual late-night conversations, and sometimes in an altered state of consciousness, their speculations weren't hailed as major contributions to Western thought. However, as computers keep evolving, more philosophers are taking the issue of computer consciousness seriously. And some of them--such as Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz--are using it to argue that consciousness is a deeper puzzle than many philosophers have realized...
...might a pandemonium machine. So might a thermostat. Chalmers thinks it quite possible that AI research may someday generate--may now be generating--new spheres of consciousness unsensed by the rest of us. Strange as it may seem, the prospect that we are creating a new species of sentient life is now being taken seriously in philosophy...