It might help us all to acknowledge it We animals who call ourselves “humans” are not a lot more intelligent than many other living beings. We are just better able to communicate with each other and coordinate our activities more effectively, at our human time scale, than most other animals…

Would you want an experienced self-driving car or the latest general version? The recent development of many artificial cognitive agents, such as robotic devices and large-language models for text generation, raises an interesting general question about the value of individualization. We humans, taking ourselves as a pinnacle of an “intelligent”…

Or are there inevitable limits to growth of complex decision-making structures, including and beyond biological ones? Stephen Arthur has written a very interesting article, “How I Know There Are No Aliens” (https://medium.com/@sxarthur_80712/how-i-know-there-are-no-aliens-d85e826c41f1), in which he begins “The Great Silence contradicts what should be. Intelligent alien species should be millions or…

How desirable is that in this age of incipient artificial intelligence? There’s a well-known song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “The King and I” with the lyric “Getting to know you, Getting to know all about you. Getting to like you, Getting to hope you like me …” which expresses…

And what that tells us about ourselves and other thinking beings We humans have an unusual ability to ask ourselves and others the causes and reasons for things and events that we experience. “Why is the sky blue?” is a familiar example of a question that a child may ask…

In cases of dementia, the decision about timing is crucial In many places now, Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) is available to people with terminal illnesses who have the mental ability to choose to die and who wish to have medical assistance in doing so. I think this is a…

If so, what are its intentions? Fundamental to our human use of language, like all of our actions, are our intentions: Why we say and write what we do to our listeners and readers. We attempt to modify their own cognition and behavior in some ways — by informing, questioning…

It’s the ability to manage our own “to do” lists Like most animals, we humans have to serialize our behavior. We may have many plans for action, but we can do at most a few things at a time. As the joke goes, some of us can’t even walk and…