WORLDVIEW ETHICS — Toward a Metabolic Theory of Consciousness: The Cognitive Science Revolution

Cognitive Science Brings Unprecedented Clarity

The cognitive science revolution could be said to trace its roots back to Kantian philosophy through the experiments of Hermann von Helmholtz, the grandfather of cognitive neuroscience. Helmholtz conducted a variety of incredibly imaginative experiments in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, measuring in one case the speed of transmission of a nerve impulse by simulating physiological conditions in a frog leg and measuring the observable physical effects of its nervous activation. A century and a half later, science has improved dramatically in terms of high resolution imaging techniques and the corresponding inferences about neural circuitry we can now make in live subjects so complex as to include the functioning brains of real people. It is against this increasing base level of empirical understanding of the processes of human cognition that the present artificial intelligence revolution is playing out.

As time has gone by and the amount of information about what brains are and how they work has increased, computers have improved by leaps and bounds with regard to computational efficiency. Decreasing size and electricity needs have made processors more portable and indeed more…