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In any case, I’d go so far as to argue that the dopamine framing actually subsidizes the social imaginary that reduces the human being to the status of a machine, readily programmable by the manipulation of stimuli, which may itself be the deeper and more malignant problem.

L. M. Sacasas • Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes: " ... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neoc... See more

Christopher Allen • The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Under scientism, humans are just robots running programs—either the ones dictated by our genes, or destructive pathogens like spirituality. However, by refusing to understand how meaning-making is a subtle community project related to the ways we live together, this orthodox scientism denies any scheme of things where human agency—hand in hand with

Douglas Rushkoff • Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

Where is the freedom in being perfectly satisfied with your thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions when they are the product of prior events that you had absolutely no hand in creating?

Sam Harris • Free Will

What are some of those fundamental assumptions that would need to be reimagined or extended to accommodate artificial intelligence?

Here are three. First, death: Humans tend to be either dead or alive. Borderline cases exist but are relatively rare. But digital minds could easily be paused, and later restarted.

Second, individuality. While even ide

Lauren Jackson • What if A.I. Sentience Is a Question of Degree?

Much of our seeming intelligence actually comes not from raw brainpower or a plethora of instincts, but rather from the accumulated repertoire of mental tools (e.g., integers), skills (differentiating right from left), concepts (fly wheels), and categories (basic color terms) that we inherit culturally from earlier generations.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

we humans can see that the Gödel statement is in fact true, but because of Gödel’s result, we also know that the system’s rules can’t prove it—the system is in effect blind to something not covered by its rules.4 Truth and provability pull apart. Perhaps mind and machine do, as well. The purely formal system has limits, at any rate. It cannot prove

Erik J. Larson • The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do

There is no such thing, at least among finite minds, as intelligence at large:

Sublime

L. M. Sacasas • Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

Christopher Allen • The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Douglas Rushkoff • Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

Sam Harris • Free Will

Lauren Jackson • What if A.I. Sentience Is a Question of Degree?

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

Erik J. Larson • The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do

David Bentley Hart • The Experience of God