Fresh Air

Kazuo Ishiguro on ‘Klara and the Sun’

characters in books are artificial. I mean, we're making that kind of leap anyway. When we read books and get weepy over the fate of some character, we're not weeping over a real person. We've put ourselves into some kind of space where we're relating to kind of created beings.

Book of the Day

Two collections of horror stories modernize the genre | NPR's Book of the Day

I feel sure that by manufacturing disembodied worlds, worlds of our own, and that's what we mean by a metaverse, it's a location, let's not call it a place, a location where we exist only in avatar form and where our minds enter a reality not dependent on the material world. Then as we do that, we have unexpectedly created an opportunity for the dead.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have these experiences feel that they've encountered a reality that's even more real than the things we see and touch in everyday life. And what's especially interesting is that these experiences also appear to change people. They feel a greater sense of connection with others. They feel less fear about death.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences — that sense of oneness, of feeling connected to something larger than themselves — tend to have a thicker cortex in certain brain regions. And this is true even after you control for whether someone goes to church or synagogue or mosque, or whether they believe in God.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have these experiences — near-death experiences, or experiences of awe, or spiritual experiences generally — often come away feeling that they have encountered something that is more real than ordinary reality. And this sense of 'hyper-reality' is one of the most commonly reported features of these experiences.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have what researchers call 'spiritual experiences' — states of overwhelming connection, awe, or transcendence — consistently show changes in a specific region of the brain called the parietal cortex. What's surprising is that damage to this region, whether from a stroke or a tumor, can actually cause people to become more spiritual, not less.

Book of the Day

R.F. Kuang says there’s 'quite a lot' of herself in 'Katabasis' protagonist Alice

Alice feels betrayed by her own mind for a lot of the book. Um when I started the novel, I did it, too. And the reason why the prose is kind of jarred and chaotic and it's crammed with references that feel like they're about to spill over and just explode, that's because that's what living in her mind is like and what living in my mind was like.

TED

Why AI Is Unlikely to Become Conscious | Anil Seth | TED

We project consciousness into them in the same way we might project faces into clouds, or even the image of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.

TED Radio Hour

How does your brain perceive the world?

Our minds are black boxes to each other. I think if we actually switched consciousnesses, if we had like a Freaky Friday situation, initially we'd be totally lost in the wilderness.

TED Radio Hour

How does your brain perceive the world?

Our minds are black boxes to each other. I think if we actually switched consciousnesses, if we had, like, a Freaky Friday situation, initially we'd be totally lost in the wilderness.

Book of the Day

To understand consciousness, Michael Pollan looked at plants, AI and himself

Consciousness is kind of how we do sentience. For animals like us, we need a much more elaborate sentience. We need the ability, say, to imagine what's going on so that we can have counterfactuals.

Book of the Day

To understand consciousness, Michael Pollan looked at plants, AI and himself

Sensience is kind of the base default case of having a certain awareness of your environment and a sense of the changes taking place in your environment and whether they're good for you or bad for you and then the ability to move toward the positive and away from the negative. Consciousness is kind of how we do sensience.

TED

A Songwriting Battle with My AI Clone | Jason "Poo Bear" Boyd | TED

AI has never had its heart broken, you know, AI's never been in love. So it's like those things. Of course, there will be a math equation that equals up to heartbreak or love or something like that. But I don't think, like, actually going through it.