Epstein Secrets

f Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT; and co-author (with Ed Regis) of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is th

ing a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts

cience seem to go hand in hand; each field can propel the other. 132 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016935 Many evolutionary scientists, and such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, have pointed out that the human brain is the result of billions of years of evolution.*°> Human intelligence is not the special characteristic we th

agic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the M

f Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT; and co-author (with Ed Regis) of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is th

ing a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts

cience seem to go hand in hand; each field can propel the other. 132 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016352 Many evolutionary scientists, and such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, have pointed out that the human brain is the result of billions of years of evolution.*°> Human intelligence is not the special characteristic we th

agic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the M