A new essay explores which conditions must be met for consciousness to exist. At least one of them can't be found in a computer. Would it be desirable for artificial intelligence to develop ...

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I was invited by the American Humanist Association to present the arguments of my paper “Natural Evil and the Simulation Hypothesis” at the national conference this past weekend. It was fun: I met a ...

Is this real life? Is this just fantasy? A growing number of scientists are suggesting that the idea that we are all living in a simulation may not be completely far-fetched. Simulation theory is the ...

Elon Musk and others find it plausible that our experiences result from events in a computer simulation, just like the characters in the Matrix movies. An alternative view, supported by both common ...

If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation. This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that ...

We have long taken it for granted that gravity is one of the basic forces of nature – one of the invisible threads that keeps the universe stitched together. But suppose that this is not true. Suppose ...