Androids Zombies Brains

The following interview with Dr. Terrence Deacon was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo, California on September 5, 2003.

Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.

Neuroscientist Terence Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic capacities unique to language were a key factor in the evolution of the human brain, and are a key to distinguishing human from animal forms of communication, ways of learning and brain s

Raymond Kurzweil predicts a future with direct brain-to-computer access and conscious machines. From Scientific American, September 1, 1999.

"Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, allowing nonbiological intelligence to combine the subtleties of human intelligence with the speed and knowledge sharing ability of machines. The results will include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, downloading the brain and immortal software-based humans -- the next step in evolution." Also found in Are We Spiritual machines? Ray Kurzweil vs the Critics of Strong AI, Gilder and Richards, eds. 1999.

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Originally "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

"The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance."

"From Silicon Valley via Aspen, Bill Joy wants to call the police. On science. On technology. On the industry that made him rich. The Left is OverJoyed." Originally published in The American Spectator, March 2001. Published on KurzweilAI.net July 25, 2001.

"We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature's very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind."

Within two to three decades, our brains will have been "reverse-engineered": nanobots will give us full-immersion virtual reality and direct brain connection with the Internet. Soon after, we will vastly expand our intellect as we merge our biological brains with non-biological intelligence.

By 2050 robot "brains" based on computers that execute 100 trillion instructions per second will start rivaling human intelligence." Scientific American, December 1999 pp.124-135

"Everyone wants wisdom and wealth. Nevertheless, our health often gives out before we achieve them. To lengthen our lives, and improve our minds, in the future we will need to change our our bodies and brains. To that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains -- using nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will be able to decide the length of our lives--with the option of immortality-- and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well." Scientific American, Oct, 1994

Available reprints by Daniel Dennett

"In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as 'a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.' Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn't human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? "

Searchable encyclopedia of topic in the philosophy of mind.

"Philosophy of mind and the philosophical issues arising in the allied domain of cognitive sciences constitute a fast developing territory, which is very well introduced by a number of excellent web resources...."

"The zombist fails to prove that materialism is untenable."

"We have big, innovative ideas and brilliant mad scientists who make them work in a variety of applications."

"Well, there was six million years in which our brains expanded and got rewired in ways that allow us to do completely different things. We can exchange information by making noise as we exhale -- the gift that we call language. We figure out how the world works, we make many different kinds of tools, we coordinate our behavior and exchange information. And all of these changes in cognitive evolution, in the evolution of the powers of the brain, account for why humans are making a film in which they can talk about chimpanzees rather than vice versa."

An excellent and comprehensive list of articles on consciousness that are available online. Compiled bt David Chalmers