Category: Free will
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AI. Games. Intelligence. Humans.
Artificial Intelligence is constantly beating humans in more and more board games. Some years ago, the same team that created that Go-playing bot celebrated something more formidable: an artificial intelligence system that is capable of teaching itself—and winning at—three different games. The AI is one network, but works for multiple games; that generalizability makes it…
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Placebo.
Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients – especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence – will improve. Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his…
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Trained to be altruistic?
The decisions of individuals such as their willingness to cooperate and altruistic acts are just as important as international agreements or national regulations. This is what scientists call “prosocial behavior”. Psychologists from the University of Würzburg and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have now published the results of…
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Ethics, Robots, Free will…
Can there be ethics without free will? The sister-site Harmonia Philosophica @ Blogger provides some insight… Check out “Philosophy Wire: Ethics without free will… No ethics at all…“. Somehow making our new robots obey orders doesn’t sound like a good idea. Obeying orders was the foundation of the deepest evil even known to mankind…
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Counting till the end… Numbers… Infinite… Water and fire…
Gisin, of the University of Geneva, debates the physical reality of real numbers. His main problem lies with real numbers that consist of a never-ending string of digits with no discernable pattern and that can’t be calculated by a computer. Such numbers (like π for example) contain an infinite amount of information: You could imagine…
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