Category: Mind Mysteries
-
As artificial intelligence grows more capable, the greatest danger may not be a machine that refuses to obey us, but one that obeys us too well. From Grey Goo to rogue AI agents, the human problem in the machine may…
-
In 1974, humanity sent a message toward the stars. But transmitting a signal is the easy part. How do you communicate with another intelligence when you may share no language, culture, senses, or even way of understanding the world?
-
If every part of something is replaced, is it still the same thing? The Ship of Theseus has puzzled philosophers for centuries, but the question becomes considerably stranger when we stop talking about ships and start talking about ourselves. What,…
-
What if wanting doesn’t require a mind? A bacterium cannot think about survival, yet its behaviour is organized around staying alive. If that’s enough to call it a kind of wanting, then where do we draw the line between wanting,…
-
Can the human soul be weighed? For more than a century, experiments have claimed to measure what leaves us at the moment of death. But follow the evidence far enough, and the story becomes stranger than the question itself.
-
Exciting news from the field of brain scanning technology is poised to make big waves across multiple scientific disciplines. Researchers have devised a portable PET scanner! That might not seem as exciting to you as it does to me, but…
-
For years, a photograph supposedly showing the human soul leaving the body has circulated online. Attributed to Russian scientist Konstantin Korotkov, the image has been linked to Kirlian photography—but the famous “soul photograph” doesn’t actually exist. So where did the…
-
If you could push a button, flip a switch, or utter a simple command and have all of the vast knowledge of the human race suddenly embedded in your memory. Would you? Imagine it. A sudden flash and you can…
-
OK, here it comes. A rant some of you may have been expecting. Any of my regular readers are well aware of my interest in the mind-body question. And in that regard, some big news has hit the airwaves in…
-
The average human will spend one-third of their lifetime asleep. In most cases that equates to approximately 20 years of your life that you will spend in an altered state of consciousness, experiencing some kind of dreamscape, scarcely aware of…
