Nova Spivack – www.novaspivack.com
Flashback to 1999. The moon, a perfect silver disc, hung suspended in the clear New York summer sky, its light etching the rolling cow fields into stark relief. I had trudged through the dew-damp grass, a young man in my twenties, my tent a distant silhouette against the low rolling hills. … Read More “The Sentience Threshold: Consciousness Beyond Computation at the Self-Referential Heart of Reality”
The Dream of an Artificial Zen Master:
If we make an artificial Zen master,
And it perfectly reproduces everything
that a real Zen master can say or do,
Is it a Zen master?
My commentary:
Not necessarily. To be an actual Zen master it would have to be sentient.… Read More “Do Artificial Zen Masters Dream of Electric Butterflies?”
A proposed experimental design to test whether consciousness of a future event improves the ability of humans and/or computers to predict that event. If we find that this is true, it implies the existence of consciousness, as well as retrocausality as a result of conscious observation.… Read More “Proposal for a Consciousness Test”
My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer.… Read More “My Father and Me. A Memoir. For Mayer Spivack (1936 – 2011)”