Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Overview of the Chapters -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Half a Brain -- Remember to Breathe -- Massaging the Message -- Sneaky Gut Bacteria -- Worker Watches -- Mutating Watches -- Bad Boats -- Living Digital Beings -- Clearer Questions -- Doomsday Averted -- Pathetic -- 2. The Meaning of "Life" -- The Technium -- Viruses and Worms -- Artificial Life -- Helpless Procreation -- The Durable and the Digital -- Autopoiesis -- Sprouting from Teenagers and Sparks -- Really Living -- From Orgies to Eating Natural Gas -- Homeostasis -- Metabolism -- Growing

Brains, Minds, and the Sky -- Connections -- Learning, Pain, and Pleasure -- 3. Are Computers Useless? -- Flynn's IQ -- IQ Rising, Brains Shrinking -- Massaging the Message -- Islands of Disjoint Truths -- Cognitive Cockroaches -- Cautious Optimism -- 4. Say What You Mean -- Did I Say That? -- My Brain's Mouthpiece -- Freudian Slip -- Monkey Mind Control -- From GOFAI to Machine Learning -- Smiling Cats -- Learning and Feedback -- Perceptrons -- From Jellyfish to Dogs -- Feedback in Biology -- 5. Negative Feedback -- Talking to Myself -- Speaking Loudly All at the Same Time

Feedback from Bell Labs -- Positive Feedback -- Cognitive Feedback -- Self and Non-Self -- Guns and Femurs -- Delayed Feedback -- Predictive Feedback -- Circular Reasoning -- 6. Explaining the Inexplicable -- Flesh and Blood -- Gorillas -- Death by Pneumonia -- Nonsensical Explanations -- 7. The Wrong Stuff -- Rats in Pain -- Am I a Computer? -- Body Matters -- Contemplation -- Making the Virtual Real -- I Forget -- Intelligence Augmentation -- Is My Hammer Out of My Mind? -- Embodied Robots -- Cognitive Feedback -- 8. Am I Digital? -- Are We Alone? -- Teleportation -- Information

A Thread of Life -- Dataism -- A Universal Machine? -- Borel's Amazing Know-It-All Number -- Too Much Information -- Noiseless Measurements -- Is Time Discrete? -- Imperfect Communication -- Ah, to Be Digital! -- 9. Intelligences -- The Wrong Stuff (Again) -- Humanoid Robots and Creeps -- Tone-Deaf AIs -- Transhumanism and the Singularity -- Goals, Adaptability, and a Miswired Thermostat -- What Do You Know? -- The Hard Problem -- Can You Learn If You Can't Know? -- 10. Accountability -- Who Is the Artist? -- Crashes and Viruses -- A Tale of Tangled Accountability -- Volition

Imagining Alternatives -- When, Whether, Why, and How -- Vulgarity and Racism -- Machine Creativity -- The Origin of Self -- Hunekers and Mosquitos -- Annoying Balls -- A Worm's Sense of Self -- Is Incompetence Necessary? -- Social Contract -- 11. Causes -- Autonomy -- A Harmless Fiction? -- Subjective Machines -- Does Ugliness Cause Talent? -- Subjective Causality -- Confounders and Colliders -- Hypothetical Intervention: Counterfactuals -- Actual Intervention -- Randomized Controlled Trials -- Uncaused Action -- Metastable States -- Determinism -- Force -- Choice -- Determinism and Interaction

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Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us?

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