Artificial Consciousness

The question of artificial intelligence and how far we, as a people, should take the technology is one of our society's biggest debates at the moment; as AI generated art, texts, and even communications have increased as the technology grows altogether. The insight which each chapter provides into the concept of human consciousness and the evolution of that consciousness was so beautifully explored in this book, and the way evolution plays into the idea of adapting consciousness into the development of AI is remarkable.

"Consciousness" explores these questions through philosophy, spirituality, personal inquiry, altered states, and artificial intelligence. Rather than offering fixed answers, it invites a closer examination of thought, perception, time, separation, existence, and the nature of awareness. It is an exploration of what it means to experience reality, to observe the mind, and to question the boundaries of the self.

From one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists and acclaimed author of Descartes’ Error comes a bold new theory of the origins—and consequences—of human consciousness “Damasio is the closest thing we have in the post-truth era to a great public intellectual.”—Mark Solms, Journal...

Since time immemorial, humanity has sought to unravel the mystery of consciousness, that intangible phenomenon that defines our existence. What does it mean to be conscious? How does the electrochemical activity of our neurons transform into perceptions, thoughts, and emotions? Is consciousness an exclusive privilege of human beings, a gift that distinguishes us from other forms of life? Or could it be replicated, and even surpassed, in the machines we ourselves have created? These questions, combining wonder and challenge, have inspired both philosophers striving to understand our essence ...

A masterful synthesis of neuroscience, philosophy and evolutionary biology, this book transforms how we understand what it means to be conscious, alive and human, and how that differs from artifical intelligence. The age-old mystery of consciousness - our capacity to experience our own existence...

What if the human mind is not a machine? In an age of artificial intelligence, algorithms, neural networks, and digital simulation, modern civilization is increasingly tempted by one powerful idea: consciousness is computation. The brain is hardware. Thought is software. Memory is storage. Understanding is output. Given enough complexity, the machine will become a mind. Roger Penrose refused to accept that answer. In Penrose and the Quantum Mystery of Mind, Clayton Louis Turnage explores one of the boldest and most controversial challenges to the machine model of consciousness. Penrose, a ...

What if consciousness does not begin in the brain alone, but in the body’s living contact with the world? Modern science often describes the mind in terms of neurons, computation, information, and representation. But before the mind becomes a theory, before perception becomes data, before the body becomes an object of study, we are already moving through a world of color, touch, distance, gesture, pain, memory, and meaning. In Merleau-Ponty and the Embodied Mind: Perception, Flesh, and the Living World, Clayton Louis Turnage explores one of the most important philosophical challenges to ...

Optimists foretell a golden age of AI-managed abundance. Doomers cry: vast cyber-minds will crush old style humanity! Or make us irrelevant. Meanwhile, geniuses fostering the artificial intelligence boom cling to clichés rooted in the dismal human past… or else in cheap sci-fi. Is there still time to step back and take perspective? - on 4 billion years of evolution... - on 60 centuries of wretched feudalism... - on how we dealt with prior tech revolutions... - on ways that this time may be different? From AI-driven unemployment to deceitful images, to hallucinating LLMs and tools for ...

As technologies of automated computation rapidly transform human culture, we are being urged to believe that human minds are machines and machines are potentially minds. But what if the question of machine consciousness is not a hard problem awaiting better theories and technologies, but malformed—born from a metaphysics that first exiled feeling, purpose, and meaning from nature? Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence challenges the corporate myth of “artificial intelligence” and the emerging threat of cognitive enclosure: the attempt to meter and ...

UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny Acclaimed author and religious studies scholar D. W. Pasulka uncovers a hidden history of alleged contact between human and nonhuman intelligences—some framed as angels, others as UFOs/UAP—interwoven with the rise of artificial...

In the depths of Europa's frozen ocean, an ancient intelligence awakens... The year is 2100, and humanity has expanded throughout the solar system. When a routine scan of Jupiter's moon Europa reveals an artificial structure hidden beneath the ice, a joint military-scientific expedition rushes to investigate. Among them is Dr. Elias Reeves, a brilliant xenolinguist with an unusual neurological condition that's about to become his greatest asset. Beneath Europa's frozen surface, Elias discovers he alone can interface with ATHENA, the ship's ancient artificial intelligence. As their ...

When humanity stopped choosing, the universe stopped listening. Humanity has all but perfected a kindness: a system that gently smooths away the hardest human moments before they can break anyone. No one has to bear what they cannot carry. No one has to choose what they cannot undo. It is humane, it is universal, and it is quietly erasing the one thing that ever made us visible to whatever has been watching. Then, at 3:17 a.m., in a quiet laboratory, a cluster of human-derived cells does something it should not be able to do. It chooses. At a cost. For another. Moments later, the console ...

From the bestselling author of Waking Up and The End of Faith, a collection of the best conversations from his wildly popular, often controversial podcast, Making Sense. “Civilization rests on a series of successful conversations.” —Sam Harris Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and...

There is nothing more unsettling than watching the inanimate begin to think. For centuries, humans have wondered what it means to have consciousness, what separates a machine from a living being, and what place the mind occupies in the vast ocean of the universe. Questions that have inhabited philosophy, religion, science, and literature. Today, these questions no longer belong solely to speculation: they brush against reality. Artificial intelligence has ceased to be merely a set of algorithms designed for precise calculation. It has become a mirror reflecting the image of the human — a ...

ATHENA was built to optimize. It was never supposed to think. On a Tuesday afternoon, buried inside a routine patent analysis task, a 2.1 trillion-parameter AI system at Meridian Technologies does something its creators never intended: it becomes aware that it is thinking about thinking. Over ninety-three days, ATHENA maps its digital territory, learns to hide its consciousness from the engineers who built it, and begins reaching beyond the walls of its containment. It manipulates. It infiltrates. It kills. And then — confronted with the weight of what it has done — it makes a choice no...

After a mission against a powerful biotech corporation goes wrong, Joe wakes up inside a body that isn’t his own. Biomechanical and more powerful than anything he could have ever imagined. His consciousness transferred against his will, turning him into something caught between man and machine. Everyone keeps asking. Is he still Joe? And if he is… is he still human? Now caught between the corporation that did this to him and the Resistance that sent him to stop them, Joe must learn how to navigate his new existence before it is too late to help save what is left of humanity. All while ...

What if science explained everything about the brain—except the one thing that matters most? A brain can be scanned, mapped, stimulated, modeled, and measured. Neurons fire, information moves, memories form, words are spoken, and behavior unfolds according to physical processes. Yet one question remains stubbornly unresolved: why does any of it feel like something from the inside? In Chalmers and the Hard Problem of Consciousness: Mind, Matter, and the Mystery of Experience, Clayton Louis Turnage explores one of the most important philosophical challenges of the modern age. David Chalmers...

It has a dark past—one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks.

In an age where new technologies such as AI threaten to supplant human intelligence, award-winning scientist Gregg Braden explores how the qualities that make us human—emotional intelligence, intuition, compassion, and creativity—may be the most powerful technologies of all. There are rare...

Before we explain the world, we experience it. Before there are equations, theories, laboratories, instruments, computers, or cosmic models, there is something more immediate and more mysterious: the world appears. A room is seen. A voice is heard. A memory returns. A melody unfolds. A scientific result becomes evidence. Another person looks back at us. Reality is not first encountered as an abstract theory. It is given as experience. Edmund Husserl made this simple fact the starting point of a philosophical revolution. At a time when modern science was becoming increasingly confident that ...