Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 41 of 171
Mind, consciousness and hallucination are linked
One of the goals of current AI research is to create “machines with minds in the full and literal sense,” according to Google’s Peter Norvig. Authors like Kurzweil, Rothblatt, and Bostrom think that machines with minds are inevitable, even if the problem of consciousness might still be too ill-defined, uninteresting, or even too daunting to tackle for academic AI researchers. Labs like Google’s attract the brightest scientists to work on Ray Kurzweil’s vision.21 The Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti,22 known for his radical “spread mind” theory that consciousness is not only in the brain, argues that full-fledged artificial minds invariably raise the issue of consciousness. And I would add that the issue of consciousness invariably raises the issue of LSD and hallucinations. There is some foundational relationship between the mind, consciousness, and hallucination.