Contemplate this: AI vs. meditation

Humankind has made spectacular progress over the past 500 years in understanding the outer world. The inner world is another matter. Physical science is already, some say, within reach of a theory of everything. The science of mind, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have a generally agreed-on theory of anything.

In 1950, one of the century's great minds, Alan Turing, conjectured that, by any operationally explicit definition of intelligence, computers could be made intelligent. He even proposed a definition, which most scientists and philosophers have accepted: the ability to engage a human being in an e-mail conversation without revealing its identity as a machine. Efforts have been underway ever since to construct a machine able to pass Turing's test, a field of research called artificial intelligence (AI).

One of AI's leading figures is Marvin Minsky of MIT . His sprightly 1986 bestseller, "The Society of Mind," is perhaps the most successful attempt so far to introduce AI to a general readership. That book set out to show how one can "build a mind from many little parts, each mindless in itself." Consciousness, AI researchers contend, is not a single, ineffable quality; it's a matter of degree, dependent on the complexity of those connections. And the hardware doesn't matter; whether an entity's brain is made of meat or transistors, mind is as mind does.