Why Machines Could Be – But Aren’t – Conscious

I recently had a brief back-and-forth with Bobby Azarian about his new article on Raw Story. Azarian, a neuroscientist at George Mason University, argued that artificial intelligence (AI) could never be conscious. I highly recommend reading Azarian’s article: it’s a great distillation of some key concepts in the philosophy of mind, and he makes an […]

Science versus Pseudoscience: The Demarcation Problem

Below is the text of my newest article for the Berkeley Science Review: In October, 2004, the Dover Area School District in York County, Pennsylvania decided that intelligent design would be taught in their classrooms as an alternative to evolutionary theory. In response, a group of Dover parents sued the school district, claiming that […]

Love In A World Of Atoms

The threads that weave the cloth of our mentality are soulless. Our experience of the most beautiful sunset, our most fervent desires, our loftiest thoughts, and our most expansive feelings of love are storms of neural activity, nothing more. Science – and neuroscience in particular – has stripped our mental lives of a soul. But […]

On the Golden Age of Islamic Science

During what we sometimes call the “Middle Ages,” science in the Abbasid Caliphate was flourishing: scholars from diverse backgrounds gathered in centers like Baghdad, where they made fantastic advances in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and physics. When these scientific achievements eventually reached Europe, they helped spark Europe’s Scientific Revolution. As beneficiaries of their discoveries, we are […]

Why Humans Go To War

Humans, chimpanzees, and wolves are the only mammals that form coalitions with other members of their species to inflict deadly violence on yet other members of their species. Why do we do it? We may have evolved an instinct for war. Support for this idea comes from what anthropologist Richard Wrangham calls the Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis. The […]

Information and the Emergence of Life

Scientists don’t yet know how life emerged on Earth. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explains how life evolved once it emerged, but it does not explain how life emerged in the first place. But science presses on. One of the main challenges in figuring out how life emerged from chemistry is defining what life is. […]

Is Neuroscience a Mature Science?

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Mark Baxter, Ph.D. about the status of neuroscience as a field. Mark is a neuroscientist who studies the molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. This is my second conversation with Mark. Several months ago, we discussed a controversial paper on the effects of marijuana consumption on the […]

The Ethics of Cognitive Enhancement: Part 3

Go back to Part 1. Go back to Part 2. From the discussion in the last two parts of this series on the ethics of cognitive enhancement, we can draw three conclusions. The first is that we should allow all forms of cognitive alterations that aren’t lethal and don’t lead you to harm others. As […]

The Ethics of Cognitive Enhancement: Part 2

Go back to Part 1. In Part 1 of this series on the ethics of cognitive enhancement, I pointed out that it is not logical to deny people access to new methods of cognitive enhancement as they become available, because such methods would not be categorically different from methods of cognitive enhancement that are currently legal and […]

The Ethics of Cognitive Enhancement: Part 1

“Smart drugs” like Adderall and Modafinil are just the beginning of the cognitive enhancement revolution. Though they were initially developed to alleviate the symptoms of cognitive disorders, these and similar drugs are increasingly being used by the cognitively healthy to boost memory, focus, and wakefulness over long periods of work. With the commercial use of […]