As artificially intelligent systems become more anthropomorphic and pervasive, and their potential impact on humanity more urgent, discussions about the possibility of machine consciousness have significantly intensified, and it is sometimes seen as 'the holy grail'. Many concerns have been voiced about the ramifications of creating an artificial conscious entity. This is compounded by a marked lack of consensus around what constitutes consciousness and by an absence of a universal set of criteria for determining consciousness. By going into depth on the foundations and characteristics of consciousness, we propose five criteria for determining whether a machine is conscious, which can also be applied more generally to any entity. This paper aims to serve as a primer and stepping stone for researchers of consciousness, be they in philosophy, computer science, medicine, or any other field, to further pursue this holy grail of philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Within the field of Humanities, there is a recognized need for educational innovation, as there are currently no reported tools available that enable individuals to interact with their environment to create an enhanced learning experience in the humanities (e.g., immersive spaces). This project proposes a solution to address this gap by integrating technology and promoting the development of teaching methodologies in the humanities, specifically by incorporating emotional monitoring during the learning process of humanistic context inside an immersive space. In order to achieve this goal, a real-time emotion detection EEG-based system was developed to interpret and classify specific emotions. These emotions aligned with the early proposal by Descartes (Passions), including admiration, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness. This system aims to integrate emotional data into the Neurohumanities Lab interactive platform, creating a comprehensive and immersive learning environment. This work developed a ML, real-time emotion detection model that provided Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD) estimations every 5 seconds. Using PCA, PSD, RF, and Extra-Trees, the best 8 channels and their respective best band powers were extracted; furthermore, multiple models were evaluated using shift-based data division and cross-validations. After assessing their performance, Extra-Trees achieved a general accuracy of 96%, higher than the reported in the literature (88% accuracy). The proposed model provided real-time predictions of VAD variables and was adapted to classify Descartes' six main passions. However, with the VAD values obtained, more than 15 emotions can be classified (reported in the VAD emotion mapping) and extend the range of this application.

The "brain in a jar" is a thought experiment of a disembodied human brain living in a jar of sustenance. The thought experiment explores human conceptions of reality, mind, and consciousness. This article will explore a metaphysical argument against artificial intelligence on the grounds that a disembodied artificial intelligence, or a "brain" without a body, is incompatible with the nature of intelligence.[1] The brain in a jar is a different inquiry than traditional questions about artificial intelligence. The brain in a jar asks whether thinking requires a thinker.

Ai-Da will open her solo exhibition LEAPING INTO THE METAVERSE at the Venice Biennale this year curated by Aidan Meller. Philosophers amongst you will be familiar with the work of Rene Descartes – a mathematician, epistemologist, and rationalist – much of his work laid the ground for modern philosophy and in particular the strand that has grown out of Hobbes and Locke that informs a lot of the 17th century and the formation of states and societies thereafter. There is one eerie and unsettling aspect of his life that is gaining greater attention. Descartes had a relationship with a servant (Helen van der Strom), and their relationship produced a young daughter Francine, to whom Descartes was very attached. Tragically, Francine died of scarlet fever, aged five, and so distraught was Descartes that he had a robot or automata (clockwork, lifelike doll) built in her likeness.

Wikipedia is one of the richest knowledge sources on the Web today. In order to facilitate navigating, searching, and maintaining its content, Wikipedia's guidelines state that all articles should be annotated with a so-called short description indicating the article's topic (e.g., the short description of beer is "Alcoholic drink made from fermented cereal grains"). Nonetheless, a large fraction of articles (ranging from 10.2% in Dutch to 99.7% in Kazakh) have no short description yet, with detrimental effects for millions of Wikipedia users. Motivated by this problem, we introduce the novel task of automatically generating short descriptions for Wikipedia articles and propose Descartes, a multilingual model for tackling it. Descartes integrates three sources of information to generate an article description in a target language: the text of the article in all its language versions, the already-existing descriptions (if any) of the article in other languages, and semantic type information obtained from a knowledge graph. We evaluate a Descartes model trained for handling 25 languages simultaneously, showing that it beats baselines (including a strong translation-based baseline) and performs on par with monolingual models tailored for specific languages. A human evaluation on three languages further shows that the quality of Descartes's descriptions is largely indistinguishable from that of human-written descriptions; e.g., 91.3% of our English descriptions (vs. 92.1% of human-written descriptions) pass the bar for inclusion in Wikipedia, suggesting that Descartes is ready for production, with the potential to support human editors in filling a major gap in today's Wikipedia across languages.

Elon Musk thinks you don't exist. But it's nothing personal: he thinks he doesn't exist either. Instead we are just immaterial software constructs running on a gigantic alien computer simulation. Musk has stated that the odds are billions to one that we are actually living in "base reality", ie the physical universe. At the end of last year, he responded to a tweet about the anniversary of the crude tennis video game Pong (1972) by writing: "49 years later, games are photo-realistic 3D worlds. What does that trend continuing imply about our reality?"

The "brain in a jar" is a thought experiment of a disembodied human brain living in a jar of sustenance. The thought experiment explores human conceptions of reality, mind, and consciousness. This article will explore a metaphysical argument against artificial intelligence on the grounds that a disembodied artificial intelligence, or a "brain" without a body, is incompatible with the nature of intelligence.[1] The brain in a jar is a different inquiry than traditional questions about artificial intelligence. The brain in a jar asks whether thinking requires a thinker.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. The "brain in a jar" is a thought experiment of a disembodied human brain living in a jar of sustenance. The thought experiment explores human conceptions of reality, mind, and consciousness. This article will explore a metaphysical argument against artificial intelligence on the grounds that a disembodied artificial intelligence, or a "brain" without a body, is incompatible with the nature of intelligence. The brain in a jar is a different inquiry than traditional questions about artificial intelligence.

The "brain in a jar" is a thought experiment of a disembodied human brain living in a jar of sustenance. The thought experiment explores human conceptions of reality, mind, and consciousness. This article will explore a metaphysical argument against artificial intelligence on the grounds that a disembodied artificial intelligence, or a "brain" without a body, is incompatible with the nature of intelligence.[1] The brain in a jar is a different inquiry than traditional questions about artificial intelligence. The brain in a jar asks whether thinking requires a thinker. The possibility of artificial intelligence primarily revolves around what is necessary to make a computer (or a computer program) intelligent.

Descartes Underwriting, the Paris-based parametric insurtech, has formed a partnership with Reask, the tropical-cyclone modeling firm. The partnership aims to expand the availability and advancement of parametric cyclone insurance products by combining Descartes' ability to incorporate new technology into parametric insurance product design with wind data provided by Sydney-headquartered insurtech Reask. This partnership also seeks to address the insurance protection gap by expanding global cyclone parametric coverage, Descartes said, explaining that the consistent global coverage of Reask's tropical cyclone product, Metryc, enables the expansion of parametric insurance policies into regions and geographies where data limitations impeded previous coverage. Furthermore, Reask's ability to augment scarcely available ground-level observations and deliver high-resolution wind hazard intensity metrics within days following an event greatly supports the deployment of Descartes' parametric products. As natural catastrophe and extreme weather risks evolve due to climate change, the inherent difficulties in obtaining accurate data due to the destructive nature of cyclone activity are also likely to be accentuated.