William Y. Adams

Few anthropologists have made any attempts to explore their own discipline's prehistory or to have realized its importance. William Adams attempts to rectify this myopic self-awareness by applying anthropology's own tools to itself while uncovering the discipline's debt to earlier thinkers. Adams recognizes that many ideas which were anticipated in antiquity have had a lasting influence on anthropological models in particular. Adams has chosen five philosophical currents whose influences have been, and continue to be, very widespread, particularly in North American anthropology: progressivism, primitivism, natural law, German idealism, and 'Indianology'. This work serves as the basis for the explanation of the true historical and philosophical underpinnings of anthropology and its goals.

I found the JCS issue on Machine Consciousness, Volume 10, No. 4-5 , frustrating and alienating. There seems to be a consensus building that consciousness is accessible to scientific scrutiny, so much so that it is already understood well enough to be modeled and even synthesized. I'm not so sure. It could be instead that the vocabulary of consciousness is being subtly redefined to be amenable to scientific investigation and explicit modeling. Such semantic revisionism is confusing and often misleading. Whatever else consciousness is, it is at least a certain quality of life apparent from personal reflection. Introspection is, after all, the only way we know that consciousness even exists. Scientific and technical redefinitions that fail to account for its phenomenal quality are at best incomplete. In my view, all but one of the ten articles in the JCS volume on Machine Consciousness commit various degrees of Protean distortion