A sustained argument about intelligence, knowledge, self-reference, consciousness, embodiment, feeling, and the ethical consequences of building minds organised differently from our own.
A thermostat holds a target temperature, measures the room against it, and switches the heating on or off to close the gap. Ordinary language barely resists describing this as the thermostat "wanting" the room warmer…
Turing's 1950 paper proposes a replacement for the question "can machines think?" — a question he considered too vague to be worth answering directly. In its place: an interrogator, conversing by teleprinter with a…
A program trained on a large corpus of poetry generates a stanza no human wrote, scanning correctly, using an unexpected but apt metaphor, submitted anonymously to a competition and shortlisted before anyone involved…
A weather vane turns to face the wind. A thermostat's bimetallic strip bends with temperature. A sentence, "it's windy today," is also reliably produced when it's windy. All three co-vary with some state of the world in…
This series opened with a thermostat that seems to want the room warmer and believe it's currently too cold, and the feeling that this description is too generous without an easy account of why. Dennett's answer doesn't…
A theatre has a stage, lit by a spotlight, surrounded by a much larger backstage and wings kept dark — actors rehearsing lines, stagehands shifting scenery, a prompter reading ahead in the script, none of it visible to…
This series opened with a chess engine that outperforms every human player while seeming, on most readings, experientially nothing like a mind at all. That description assumes an answer to a question this page finally…
This page closes the series deliberately without a verdict. Its job is narrower and more useful than settling whether any current system suffers: to separate the rungs of a ladder that discussions of machine suffering…