Progress may seem likely on some of the so called "easy problems" of consciousness, such as explaining the dynamics of access consciousness in terms of the functional or computational organization of the brain (Baars 1988).
This was not an easy feat of consciousness, considering my size, and I suspected he'd been drinking.
David Chalmers, my colleague at N.Y.U., famously distinguished between what he has called the "hard problem" and the "easy problems" of consciousness.
In his most important book, "The Conscious Mind," published in 1996, Chalmers accused Dennett and the physicalists of focussing on the "easy problems" of consciousness — questions about the workings of neurons or other cognitive systems — while ignoring the "hard problem".
AI is a phenomenon that will never go down easy – intelligence and consciousness are prerogatives of the living, and the inevitability of their existence in machines is hard to fathom, even with all those doomsday-scenario movies and books.
It will not be easy: the digital human consciousness is playful.
These mild concussions, which do not necessarily lead to loss of consciousness, are easy to dismiss, simple to misdiagnose and difficult to detect.
Such remarks are consistent with either an anti-realist view of fiction (there are no facts about the easy chair or about consciousness; see 366 367) or a self-fulfillment or self-shaping realist view (Doyle creates facts about Holmes as he thinks or writes about him; we create facts about what it's like to be us in thinking or making claims about our consciousness, as perhaps on 81 and 94).
I thought Cleeremans would laugh when I told him I wanted to start our interview with an "easy" question: what is consciousness?
We spent so much time on computers – working on them, communicating with them, being entertained by them – it was easy, once the machines achieved consciousness, for them to reprogram us in their own image.
But because he seems to believe that the penetration of his characters' consciousness is an easy thing, his characters believe this too about themselves, and exist for us only in practised simplicities.
