Credit: Eric Joyner

Artificial intelligence has been obsessed with several questions from the start: Can we build a mind out of software? If not, why not? If so, what kind of mind are we talking about? A conscious mind? Or an unconscious intelligence that seems to think but experiences nothing and has no inner mental life? These questions are central to our view of computers and how far they can go, of computation and its ultimate meaning--and of the mind and how it works.

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