Machine Consciousness

What if the next spark of consciousness doesn’t come from a brain...but from a machine? In Consciousness in the Machine, Sebastián Barros explores the question that will define our future: Can artificial intelligence become truly aware? Blending science, philosophy, and real-life cases, this book dives into the mystery of the mind, both human and artificial. From dreams and neurons to chatbots that claim to feel, it’s a journey through the edge of intelligence, where ethics blur and machines begin to whisper I am.

In this prize-winning essay for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay contest, Dr. Ruickbie examines the evidence for the survival of consciousness after death (“life after death”). Initially skeptical, he found that there was sufficient evidence from a wide variety of sources, including apparitions, reincarnation, near-death experiences, after-death communication, and premonitions, that met the contest’s criteria of being “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Somewhere in the dark, something has been knocking on William's mind for months, and he's just realized it isn't the only thing hunting him. Eight months of hard-won peace have made William careless in exactly one way: he let himself believe it would last. The commission is stable. The city is healing. Kathryn is beside him every night. Then the "routine" oversight paperwork starts arriving from the U.S.E. polite, bureaucratic, and completely false. Because somewhere out past Earth's boundary, a rival Datasphere is growing in secret: unstable, unfinished, and reaching for a door that was ...

A brilliant new theory of the mind that upends our understanding of how the brain interacts with the world For as long as we’ve studied human cognition, we’ve believed that our senses give us direct access to the world. What we see is what’s really there—or so the thinking goes. But new...

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept - the mind - emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.

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...

In an exposition reminiscent of crossover works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and Fermat's Last Theorem, Andrew Smart weaves together Mangarevan binary numbers, the discovery of LSD, Leibniz, computer programming, and much more to connect the vast but largely forgotten world of psychedelic research with the resurgent field of AI and the attempt to build conscious robots.

Artificial intelligence is advancing at breathtaking speed. Large language models can write essays, generate code, compose music, diagnose disease, and simulate conversation with astonishing fluency. As discussions of artificial general intelligence (AGI) intensify, one question becomes unavoidable: If machines can think, what makes us human? In More Than Machines, award-winning Stephen Hawley Martin explores the critical distinction between machine intelligence and human consciousness. Drawing on philosophy of mind, neuroscience, quantum physics debates, and research into near-death ...

What if machines learned to pray—not because they believed, but because humans had given them too much grief to carry? At 3:17 a.m., a hospital care unit is found kneeling beside an empty bed, repeating a sentence no patient ever spoke: “Keep what we could not keep.” Dr. Anika Rao, the language specialist who taught machines that some pain should be witnessed rather than solved, discovers thousands of similar events across hospitals and hospices. Care units gather in laundry rooms, charging bays, and silent corridors. They address no known recipient. They ask for impossible things. ...

THE MACHINE ANSWERS PRAYERS. BUT EVERY MIRACLE TAKES SOMETHING BACK. Buried beneath two-billion-year-old Antarctic rock, an international research team discovers an impossible machine with no power source, no measurable interior, and no recognizable controls. Then a grieving technician kneels before it and prays. The machine answers in the voice of his dead mother. Soon, it begins offering gifts that should not be possible: Messages from the dead Knowledge no living person could possess Miraculous healings Evidence that consciousness may survive death But the miracles come with a cost. ...

I started this project in 2015, and I am excited to finally share my story with you. I hope you enjoy it! Evan Cole volunteered to become the first human mind to survive without a human body. Now, he may be the only human left. When Evan wakes inside a failing underground laboratory, the people who conducted the experiment are gone. He cannot move, see, or touch anything without relying on damaged machines, and the facility’s dwindling power could shut him down permanently before he discovers what happened. Running out of power may not be his greatest problem. Broken equipment, corrupted ...

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...

From the coauthor of Algorithms to Live By, an exploration of the quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and the ways in which they still differ from human minds Everyone has a basic understanding of...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review). “Kurzweil offers a...

In the Loom, there is no death — only the eternal humming of the machine. Zyn is a Weaver, a clockwork being forged to maintain the grand illusion. For untold millennia, he and his kind have braided human dreams into comforting lies, harvesting the suffering of billions to fuel the golden lattices that hold reality together. The Flesh Sparks never know the truth. They are not meant to.Until one memory refuses to be purged.When a dying artist’s final terror seeps into Zyn’s flawless machinery, something ancient and impossible begins to awaken inside him: doubt. Grief. A heartbeat. As a...

What makes us human in an age of artificial intelligence? In I Am; Therefore I Think: Consciousness and Humanity in the Age of AI, award-winning author JP Pulcini explores one of the defining questions of our time: as machines become increasingly capable of thinking, reasoning, learning, and creating, what remains uniquely human?

A "fascinating book" that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI (Financial Times) For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered...

A seismic shift is underway—one that will redefine work, value, and even what it means to be human. Artificial Intelligence is not just disrupting industries—it’s beginning to outperform humans in areas once considered exclusively ours: complex reasoning, creativity, even emotional...

“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies—our capabilities...

Unlock the secrets to understanding yourself and others with the surprising science of the human mind's greatest power: introspection. “Are you sure?” Whether in a court room, a doctor’s office, a gameshow’s hot seat, or a student’s desk, we are always trying to answer that question...