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"When inexperienced chess players sit down to play against experts, they probably wonder what it is that makes the experts so good that it seems they are almost playing a different game. New research suggests that one difference is that the experts use more of their brains. In a study in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, a team of scientists in Germany showed experts and novices simple geometric objects and simple chess positions and asked the subjects to identify them. Reaction times were measured and brain activity was monitored using functional M.R.I. scans. On the identification of the geometric objects, the subjects performed the same, showing that the chess experts had no special visualization skills. When the subjects were shown the chess positions, the experts identified them faster. "

"Maybe such a crisis is in order. It isn't just that as these machines get more powerful they do more jobs once done only by people, from financial analysis to secretarial work to world-class chess playing. It's that, in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting drift of scientific inquiry. First Copernicus said we're not the center of the universe. Then Darwin said we're just protozoans with a long list of add-ons--mere "survival machines," as modern Darwinians put it. And machines don't have souls, right? Certainly Deep Blue hasn't mentioned having one. The better these seemingly soulless machines get at doing things people do, the more plausible it seems that we could be soulless machines too. But 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, of consciousness, more seriously, not less. And one result is to leave the theologically inclined more room for spiritual speculation."