Is Artificial Consciousness Impossible?

In AI theory they refer to “the Jetson’s Fallacy.” As with the 1960’s futuristic cartoon show, many people today naively believe that AI is just going to walk beside us into the future. But no. It’s going to increasingly walk inside us. The interface of human and machine intelligence is going to become increasingly blurred. And don’t think that people won’t let it happen. The steps to get there will come one at a time. Many of us alive today might find it abhorrent to have a neural chip drilled into our skulls. But the shift won’t happen all at once. Each generation will likely take one step further towards cybernetic embodiment.

Of Ghosts and Cyborgs: The Tribes that Linger Still

Yet the spirits of the ancestors move within us still; nervous, foraging ghosts with hungry bellies, scanning incessantly for sustenance, water and predators upon the African savannah. Despite our increasingly protected, controlled lives, we humans of the 21st century remain prone to the whims of our biology. And perhaps to mind fields that connect us beyond space and time to the trauma of past lives lived and ultimately lost by our desperate forebears, now long returned to the dust from which their physicality arose.

Reclaiming Your Power from the Machines in the Age of the Sick Click

It is helpful to think of the E-Word of media and social media as the mass monkey mind. In meditative traditions, the “monkey mind” is the term used to describe your chattering, unchecked inner world, which (if I may mix my metaphors) has a tendency to wander about indiscriminately like a blind man stumbling along a crowded street without a walking stick. The blind man keeps bumping into people, either cursing them or apologizing frantically in order to deflect their anger, even as the other pedestrians apologize or curse him back. Because he cannot see, the blind man doesn’t realise that all the other pedestrians are equally as blind, and all without their canes.

Tom Lombardo’s essay “Consciousness, Cosmic Evolution, and the Technological Singularity”

Tom Lombardo is a futurist who is very interested in many of the realms of inquiry that I am, and he has come to similar conclusions many times. (he wrote the introduction to my book Extraordinary Mind). Lombardo’s essay “Consciousness, Cosmic Evolution, and the Technological Singularity” has just been published in the Journal of Futures…

Entangled Minds: The idea that will change everything?

ACADEMIC ARTICLES: Title: Entangled Minds: The idea that will change everything? Author: Marcus T Anthony, Director MindFutures Publication details: MindFutures, Australia, 21012 This fully-cited and easy to read 8000 word article identifies the illogical and inconsistent thinking in some ‘cutting edge’ thinking about the future, especially in relation to discussions about intuitive insight, consciousness beyond…

Integrated Intelligence: The Future of Intelligence?

ACADEMIC ARTICLES: Many classical depictions of intelligence suggest that individual human intelligence is part of a greater transpersonal consciousness. The concept of this integrated intelligence has resurfaced in contemporary times in a number of fields. This paper presents the ideas of four thinkers whose works incorporate integrated intelligence – Broomfield, Dossey, Wilber and Zohar. Inayatullah’s…