The Digital Mind: How Science is Redefining Humanity (MIT - download pdf or read online

What do pcs, cells, and brains have in universal? pcs are digital units designed by means of people; cells are organic entities crafted by way of evolution; brains are the boxes and creators of our minds. yet all are, in a single means or one other, information-processing units. the facility of the human mind is, up to now, unequaled through any latest desktop or identified dwelling being. Over eons of evolution, the mind has enabled us to enhance instruments and know-how to make our lives more straightforward. Our brains have even allowed us to improve desktops which are virtually as strong because the human mind itself. during this booklet, Arlindo Oliveira describes how advances in technological know-how and expertise may well permit us to create electronic minds. Exponential progress is a trend equipped deep into the scheme of lifestyles, yet technological swap now supplies to outstrip even evolutionary switch. Oliveira describes technological and clinical advances that diversity from the invention of legislation that regulate the habit of the electromagnetic fields to the advance of pcs. He calls traditional choice the last word set of rules, discusses genetics and the evolution of the relevant apprehensive approach, and describes the function that computing device imaging has performed in knowing and modeling the mind. Having thought of the habit of the original method that creates a brain, he turns to an unavoidable query: Is the human mind the one process that could host a brain? If electronic minds come into life -- and, Oliveira says, it really is tough to argue that they're going to no longer -- what are the social, felony, and moral implications? Will electronic minds be our companions, or our rivals?