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Abstract

The increasing use of computers and robots at the work place and in peoples' personal lives, paralleled with their portrayal, interpretation and representation in the media and popular culture, has in recent years raised general awareness of some issues previously of interest mainly to philosophers of mind and consciousness. Various issues of artificial intelligence and its computational metaphors are also of more specialised relevance for information scien tists, due to their bases in such things as: languages and vocabularies; categorisation and classification, and the logic of information acquisition, storage and retrieval. It may be the case that the more general acceptance of some of these ideas about human consciousness may be part of a shift in world view comparable to long-term historical precedents such as heliocentrism and natural evolution, both in the way they were initially seen to lessen humanity, and in the ways they were initially opposed and resisted.

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Stone Age babies in cyberspace

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