Patterns
14 articles-
Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious
Zombies are supposed to be capable of asking any question about the nature of experience. It’s worth wondering, though, how a person or machine devoid of experience could reflect on experience it doesn’t have.Photograph by Ars Electronica / Flickr The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you […]
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The Math That Takes Newton Into the Quantum World
How a math professor learned to stop worrying and love algebraic geometry.
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How Our Universe Could Emerge as a Hologram
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they’ve had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical “universe in a bottle,” as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it. Nautilus Members […]
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How the Universe Remembers Information
A “memory matrix” might solve Stephen Hawking’s black-hole paradox.
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The Case for Being Skeptical of Moral Outrage
If, as the research shows, our moral outrage is highly sensitive to actions but not consequences, we might want to treat feelings of moral outrage—whether others’ or our own—skeptically. Photograph by Vjacheslav_Kozyrev / Flickr The episode last month at the Lincoln Memorial, involving the boys from Covington Catholic High School, and a Native American man, […]
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What Dark Matter Needs Are New Kinds of Experiments
After 30 years and no results, it’s time to support more entrepreneurial physicists.