And, of course, it’s a great big party.

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The targeted controllers were attached to the centrifuges at the heart of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Thousands of these centrifuges are needed to process uranium ore into the highly enriched uranium needed to create a nuclear weapon. Under normal operating conditions, the centrifuges spin so fast that their outer edges travel just below the speed of sound. Stuxnet bumped this speed up to nearly 1,000 miles per hour, past the point where the rotor would likely fly apart, according to a December report by the Institute for Science and International Security. At the same time, Stuxnet sent false signals to control systems indicating that everything was normal. Although the total extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear program remains unclear, the report notes that Iran had to replace about 1,000 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility in late 2009 or early 2010.

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How would we know if a machine had taken on this seemingly ineffable quality of conscious awareness? Our strategy relies on the knowledge that only a conscious machine can demonstrate a subjective understanding of whether a scene depicted in some ordinary photograph is “right” or “wrong.” This ability to assemble a set of facts into a picture of reality that makes eminent sense–or know, say, that an elephant should not be perched on top of the Eiffel Tower–defines an essential property of the conscious mind. A roomful of IBM supercomputers, in contrast, still cannot fathom what makes sense in a scene.

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A computation, whether it is performed by electronic machinery, on an abacus or in a biological system such as the brain, is a physical process. It is subject to the same questions that apply to other physical processes: How much energy must be expended to perform a particular computation? How long must it take? How large must the computing device be? In other words, what are the physical limits of the process of computation?

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Science, Eddington held, undercut common sense. By contrast, a half century earlier, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s defender and general polymath, wrote that science was "nothing but trained and organized common sense " [2]. What should we think about this? At least one Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga [3], has argued that this means that if evolution is true we should not think evolution is true, because our evolved cognitive capacities did not evolve to deliver us truth, but only fitness.

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Cardiovascular system [More]

Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being "firmly agnostic" on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.

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