Watson, Blackmore & Hosking, Court Advocate's Handbook

Susan Blackmore Consciousness in Meme

Setting aside the problems of recognising consciousness in a machine, this article considers what would be needed for a machine to have human-like consciousness. Human-like consciousness is an illusion; that is, it exists but is not what it appears to be. The illusion that we are a conscious self having a stream of experiences is constructed when memes compete for replication by human hosts. So...

Marin Advocates for Transit

Marin Advocates for Transit is very supportive of MTC's mission of regional coordination, and well recognizes the importance of this task. In furtherance of that mission, we offer the following comments on the draft Regional Transportation Plan EIR. We hope that these comments will help focus the RTP and its EIR on a full range of policy options to optimize the environmental and social conditio...

Confusion worse confounded By Susan Blackmore Commentary on Sheldrake

In Part 1. Sheldrake consistently mixes up the sense of being stared at that derives from the normal senses of vision or hearing, with a putative sense that he claims can operate without normal sensory cues. He might have avoided confusion by giving a name to this proposed paranormal sense, and then made clear, throughout the paper, which he was referring to at different times, but he did not. ...

Federal budget disappoints seniors' advocates.

Explaining Watson

Our paper is actually two contributions in one. First, we argue that IBM’s Jeopardy! playing machine needs a formal semantics. We present several arguments as we discuss the system. We also situate the work in the broader context of contemporary AI. Our second point is that the work in this area might well be done as a broad collaborative project. Hence our “Blue Sky” contribution is a proposal...