Your inner monologue may be less constant than you think--more like a fridge light that turns on when you look. Thinking doesn't always involve words. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When I first started researching this story, I assumed I was writing about other people: those fascinating outliers who reportedly lack an internal monologue--the experience of actively speaking words in your mind as a sort of private narration of your life. Then I got on a Zoom call with Dr. Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has spent 50 years studying inner experience, and somewhere in the first ten minutes, I started to wonder: What if I'm talking about myself?

There is something reassuring about Mary Oliver's words. Especially in an era of rapid change, there is comfort to be had in those things that move slowly. But oceans rise and mountains fall; nothing stays the same. Not even the way poetry is made. The disappearance of the author in 20th-century literary criticism can perhaps be traced back to the surrealist movement and its game of "exquisite corpse." The surrealists believed that a poem can emerge not only from the unconscious mind of an individual, but from the collective mind of many individuals working in consort -- even, or perhaps especially, if each individual has minimal knowledge of what the others are doing. Soon the idea of making art from recycled objects emerged.

Intelligence comes in many forms. Octopuses are highly intelligent--and completely unlike humans. In case you haven't noticed, artificial intelligence systems have been behaving in increasingly astonishing ways lately. OpenAI's new model DALL-E 2, for instance, can produce captivating original images based on simple text prompts. Models like DALL-E are making it harder to dismiss the notion that AI is capable of creativity. Consider, for instance, DALL-E's imaginative rendition of "a hip-hop cow in a denim jacket recording a hit single in the studio."

Many forms of intelligence exist. Octopuses are highly intelligent--and completely unlike humans. In case you haven't noticed, artificial intelligence systems have been behaving in increasingly astonishing ways lately. OpenAI's new model DALL-E 2, for instance, can produce captivating original images based on simple text prompts. Models like DALL-E are making it harder to dismiss the notion that AI is capable of creativity. Consider, for instance, DALL-E's imaginative rendition of "a hip-hop cow in a denim jacket recording a hit single in the studio."

The future of west virginia politics is uncertain. The state has been trending Democratic for the last decade, but it's still a swing state. Democrats are hoping to keep that trend going with Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Republicans have their own hopes and dreams too. They're hoping to win back some seats in the House of Delegates, which they lost in 2012 when they didn't run enough candidates against Democratic incumbents.

David Chalmers, who coined the phrase "Hard Problem of consciousness," is arguably the leading modern advocate for the possibility that physical reality needs to be augmented by some kind of additional ingredient in order to explain consciousness--in particular, to account for the kinds of inner mental experience pinpointed by the Hard Problem. One of his favorite tools has been yet another thought experiment: the philosophical zombie. Unlike undead zombies, which seek out brains and generate movie franchises, philosophical zombies look and behave exactly like ordinary human beings. Indeed, they are perfectly physically identical to non‐zombie people. The difference is that they are lacking in any inner mental experience. We can ask, and be puzzled about, what it is like to be a bat, or another person.

David Chalmers, who coined the phrase "Hard Problem of consciousness," is arguably the leading modern advocate for the possibility that physical reality needs to be augmented by some kind of additional ingredient in order to explain consciousness--in particular, to account for the kinds of inner mental experience pinpointed by the Hard Problem. One of his favorite tools has been yet another thought experiment: the philosophical zombie. Unlike undead zombies, which seek out brains and generate movie franchises, philosophical zombies look and behave exactly like ordinary human beings. Indeed, they are perfectly physically identical to non?zombie people. The difference is that they are lacking in any inner mental experience. We can ask, and be puzzled about, what it is like to be a bat, or another person.