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Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?
Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.
By Derek AskeyDecember 2024For six years we’ve taken no precautions / and my body has made no / third baby, nor have we plotted / to create another life, content / to let nature do what it would
By Nadia ColburnAugust 2024Wanting to go beyond where I’ve already been: / Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing to do? / Then why would I rather go all the way back to the day / before I was born?
By Jim MooreAugust 2024So early the mist remains hammocked / between hills. My hand / palms a calf’s muzzle. // We are two beings / drawn together by instinct. By this definition, / I have found the one.
By Megan J. ArlettJuly 2024Mushrooms in the desert, pot on a family vacation, black hash on a nuclear submarine
By Our ReadersMarch 2023Cohen: This summer, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine caused controversy by disclosing a conversation with an AI called LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” The conversation seemed to suggest this AI system had some awareness of itself, but the idea was dismissed by a number of people who work with such systems.
Güzeldere: It’s interesting that Google fired the guy who published that conversation. . . . People are saying, “Oh, it’s just a hack,” but it’s a very impressive hack. I think it will become a product that will be accepted by consumers.
By Finn CohenDecember 2022The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. . . . It takes many forms: our finding similarities among seemingly unrelated things, wadding up worries into tangled balls of obsession difficult to pierce even with the spike of logic, painting elaborate status or romance fantasies in which we star, picturing ourselves elsewhere and elsewhen.
By Diane AckermanDecember 2022December 2022How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe-inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. . . . These atoms now form a conglomerate — your brain — that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder.
V.S. Ramachandran
February 2022A memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
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