(Christof Koch is one of the most eminent researchers in consciousness studies and a collaborator of the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick. This is an edited transcript of an interview of Christof Koch, taken by George Zarkadakis on April 2004, in Tucson, AZ) GZ: How would you define the problem...
Year: 2013
Sex with robots: loving the mecha
This is a summary of a more extended article published on Aeon magazine on March 26th 2013. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, delivers us Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor who carves the ivory statue of a perfect woman. He names her Galatea, the "one as white as milk". The statue is so life-like that...
Greece and Europe: a troubled relationship
http://www.slideshare.net/zarkadakis/greece-and-europe On March 25th 2013 I was invited at the Catholic University of Lille to give a lecture on Greece and Europe (see my slides above). My lecture explored some of the ideas in my Washington Post article. March 25th is Greece's National Holiday commemorating the Uprising against the Ottoman...
The ocean in the sky
We dived at approximately moondown. The navigator explained how up was down - and vice versa - and that in the new medium of exploration common perceptions would be challenged. Forget what you know, he said. Forget we did. The familiar ripples on the fabric of the ocean floor was...
Literary narratives and global warming
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/25679327 w=400&h=300] My talk (in Greek) at the Onassis Foundation in Athens,where I discussed my novel "The Passage" and the relationship between literary narratives and the contemporary understanding of global warming.
Can robots reproduce?
It is rumored that when Descartes left France to work as the tutor of young Queen Christina of Sweden he was asked by his royal student what could be said of the human body. Descartes answered that one could regard as a machine; whereby the Queen pointed to a clock and ordered...
Darwin and the robots
Darwin’s theory of evolution, reinterpreted after the discovery of genes, states that successful genes survive and propagate across generations of living beings. Success is measured by the frequency of genes per generation which is a reflection of how well these genes adapt to – or are selected by - the...
Super Turing machines and oracles: the making of a artificial mind
A major theoretical - as well as philosophical - problem in Artificial Intelligence is incomputability. Although there are many formal definitions of the concept of incomputability, it really boils down to this: there are many things that the human mind does which cannot be expressed in an algorithmic fashion. The most...
The woman who remembered everything
Human memory is different from computer memory in many important ways. Computers store information in specific locations. While there are ways of storing meta-data with each piece of information, computer memory is very limited when it comes to context. For example, the stored image of your boyfriend may be given...