“Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.”― Alfred North Whitehead The more one researches what is meant by the term consciousness, the less it seems that there is any consensus of meaning. Most discussions I have come across seem to rather assume its meaning. Language, as …
Tag: Meaning
AI & Consciousness
If AI "aims" to do anything, as the writer of this article from Scientific American suggests, therefore displaying self-arising intentions beyond its programming, is it not displaying some form of sentience or consciousness? The death of the mind of the fictional HAL 9000 AI computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey provides another illustrative example. The …
All and Nothing
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to start with the big bang."Carl Sagan Objectivity We may or may not begin with time, the big bang, matter from nothing, or from within countless other stories shared among us. We may take the root sense of being for granted because the …
Polyphony
"Songbirds sing. That is fact, not metaphor. They sing, and in the forest every morning, when a dozen or a hundred or a thousand individuals of six or ten or twenty different species sing at once, that is polyphonic music." When I first read these words in Robert Bringhurst's book, Everywhere Being is Dancing, it reminded me …
Dreaming With Lemurs
Dreams mean different things to people according to culture, time and place. For tribal cultures, dreams were often revered by being incorporated into the life of its members through rites of passage, or taken as prophetic messages. These practices have mostly faded away in cultures where individuality is highly esteemed. As technology enables individuals to sustain …
Theoria 