Thousands of years before anyone understood the brain and the mechanics of perception, the Greek philosopher Plato came up with his famous Allegory of the Cave to represent how humans think about and perceive reality and truth. In the allegory, prisoners spend their whole life chained up in a cave, facing a wall with a fire at their back. Many objects, animals, and people pass in front of the fire behind them and cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners see these shadows and give each form different names. Eventually, a prisoner is released from the cave,…
Comments closedMonth: April 2021
In 1985, English musician Clive Wearing suffered a brain infection—herpes encephalitis—that left him with both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He was unable to remember anything prior to waking up from the coma caused by the encephalitis, and he was unable to form new memories since the coma. “It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment,” his wife Deborah wrote in the memoir Forever Today. “Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before.” Despite suffering from one of…
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Now that we understand a little bit about the complicated architecture of the brain, we can finally start to appreciate the beautiful complexity of the world it creates. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is filtered through the lens of the brain, refracted through our thoughts and past experiences, and reconfigured to create our unique perception of reality. Because of this complicated system of translating sensation to perception, we never really interface directly with reality. Most of the time, the image that perception creates is fairly accurate—or at least we mostly agree on it. But like any complicated…
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In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing devised a rather simple test for evaluating the intelligence of a computer. In the “Turing Test,” a human evaluator holds a conversation with two or more “people” in which one individual is secretly a computer. The computer tries to imitate a real person, and if the evaluator is fooled, then the computer has reached human intelligence. At the time, Turing estimated that computers capable of passing this test would be developed by the turn of the century. But as anyone who has talked to Cleverbot knows, we are still far from achieving this goal.…
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