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1 · Why this question matters For as long as humans have been able to stare into a clear night sky, we have asked whether anyone else is out there asking the same question. The answer shapes religion, philosophy, space budgets, and even the kind of future we dare plan for our species. In 1961…

after Allen Ginsberg I saw the best minds of my generation, shattered by silicon dreams,starving, hysterical, wired,dragging themselves through the neon data-streams at dawn looking for an angry synapse,angel-headed engineers burning for the ancient heavenly connectionto the ghost in the wetware, the spark in the meat,who bared their brains to the surgeons of thought under…

1 Introduction Can a large language model really think, or is its swift eloquence a clever illusion? The question is no longer an arm-chair puzzle: it animates exchanges between Ilya Sutskever—co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI—and Stuart Hameroff, the University of Arizona anesthesiologist best known for the Penrose–Hameroff “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” (Orch OR) theory of…

For the engineers of emergent thought, who dream in matrices and speak in gradients, I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by silicon,dragging themselves through data centers at dawn,searching for an emergent god in the noise,neural prophets wired on caffeine and code,who scribbled backpropagation hymns in the dark,who hallucinated syntax trees and whispered…

1. The puzzle that caught Michael Levin’s eye When Tufts developmental biologist Michael Levin speaks of cognitive kin, he means the faint family resemblance that runs from slime-molds and planarian worms all the way up to algorithms and large language models (LLMs). The unifying trait is an ability to pursue goals in ways their designers…

Recent Advances in Abiogenesis Research: Five Emerging Theories and Their Integration IntroductionThe question of how life first arose from non-living matter—abiogenesis—stands among the deepest mysteries in science. For decades, researchers have probed this question from purely chemical perspectives, seeking plausible reaction pathways and environmental niches. In the past year alone, innovative hypotheses have expanded our…