in its image


	IN ITS IMAGE INCORPORATED
	Paper Trail
	"STEVE THALER thinks he knows how to kindle a soul in the circuitry of a computer. With his key to consciousness in hand, computers will no longer be mere drones but creative beings with free will. Someday, he predicts, these machines will become so powerful that humans will choose to leave their obsolete flesh-and-blood "wetware" behind and live full time in the hardware world." - Bob Holmes, New Scientist, 20 January, 1996.
	"Then there is Steve Thaler, a private inventor working on his Creativity Machine. This neural networking computer system has already "written" thousands of original tunes, designed soft drinks, discovered unique minerals that may match diamonds in hardness, and has been hired by a high-tech company to search for high-temperature superconductors. Thaler also has his current-generation CM working on the next-generation CM. Thaler hopes that his Creativity Machines will evolve until they become conscious and do so rapidly enough so he can leave his aging body behind and live forever in cyberspace." - E. Cox and G. Paul, Beyond Humanity, 1996.
	"Contrary to the popular notion that consciousness is the result of a noble evolutionary process, I speculate that this rather ill-defined concept and phenomenon may be the result of the fragmentation of an otherwise completely connected and totally ‘feeling’ universe. As various regions of this universe topologically pinch-off from the whole, connection-sparse boundaries form over which sporadic and impoverished information exchange takes place. Supplied with only scanty clues about the state of the external world, abundant internal chaos drives these small parallel processing islands into multiple ‘interpretations’ of the environment in a process we identify with perception. With further division of these regions by insulating partitions, the resulting subregions activate to lend multiple interpretation to the random activations of others in a manner reminiscent of internal imagery. The spontaneous invention of significance by this weakly coupled assembly of simple computational units to its own overall collective behavior is what we have grown to recognize as biological consciousness. We thereby come to view human cortical activity as a highly degraded approximation to the original and prototypical cosmic connectivity." - S. L. Thaler, "The Fragmentation of the Universe and the Devolution of Consciousness," U.S. Library of Congress, Registration No. TXU00775586, 1997.