I have an essay in Aeon magazine on the possibility that machines might become conscious without our realizing it and possible ways to test for that. A huge variety of physiological and behavioral tests of consciousness might be adapted to machines, and Spanish AI researcher Raúl Arrabales Moreno and his colleagues have systematized them as […]
My favorite optical illusions are motion illusions: static images that appear to spin, shimmer, and shimmy, like Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie–Woogie or the psychedelic pinwheels of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. So I was pretty pleased to come across a new class of them, known as fuyuu, or floating, illusions. I visited their co-creator, mathematician Hitoshi Arai, […]
COPENHAGEN—I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was […]
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