All my books and articles are listed in Publications.
People often ask me what to read on a particular subject. Here are some suggestions.
Watch
The Perfect Human Being (De Volmaakte Mens) on Dutch Television. This episode –Human Versus Machine – revolves around the conversations between myself and Nick Bostrom with our host Bas Heijne, 2015. The clip involving us starts around 16.40
Listen
“The Viral Mind of Susan Blackmore” interviewed on Litopia After Dark, 27 March 2015
Read
Blackmore, S. 2023 The New Evolution, New Scientist, 23 September, p19 (download PDF of my original text, pre-publication)
Winfield AFT, Blackmore S. 2021 Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B 377: 20200323. https://doi.org/10.
Minds Without Brains? The promise and peril of artificial intelligence. “What really interests me is the artificial intelligence that is already evolving of its own accord, for its own sake.” (Commonweal Magazine) 5 April 2021
Blackmore, S. (2009) Artificial, self-replicating meme machines. In J. Brockman (Ed) This will change everything, New York, Harper Perennial. Reprint of my response to the Edge Question 2009
Consciousness in meme machines, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 4-5, 19-30, 2003. Setting aside the problems of recognising consciousness in a machine, this article considers what would be needed for a machine to have human-like consciousness.
There is no stream of consciousness. This paper is based on a conference presentation at ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness 2001, in Skövde, Sweden, 7-11 August 2001. The oral style of the original has largely been retained. “Advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence have changed the focus of the problem to what Chalmers (1995) calls the ‘hard problem’ – that is, to explain how subjective experience arises from the objective activity of brain cells.”
Extract from The Meme Machine 1999, Chapter One – Strange Creatures. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has provided some nice surprises for those who thought they knew what makes human intelligence so special.