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Essays on Infinite Lifespans  
William Sims Bainbridge
Artificial  Intelligence,  broadly  defined,  covers  not  only 
computerized vision and language, but a whole host of other 
approaches  such  as  probabilistic  planning,  rule-based  rea-
soning,  case-based  reasoning,  logic  programming,  machine 
learning, neural networks [24;25] and even methods that go 
beyond  what  individual  human  minds  do,  such  as  genetic 
algorithms that mimic biological evolution. [26] Perhaps the 
major application area is finding patterns in vast sets of data. 
One often hears about knowledge extraction, implying that 
the computer can take crude data and refine it to meaning-
fulness. Data fusion and data mining refer to assembling raw 
data from many sources and sifting them for discoveries that 
a human could never make, simply because the data are too 
vast and too fragmented. It is often said that a human being 
can hold only about seven things in mind at once, whereas 
modern information systems deal with billions. [27] 
Thus, AI intending to duplicate human abilities is currently 
in  hiatus,  while  AI  to  enhance  the  information  processing 
abilities of humans is being pursued aggressively. At the same 
time,  some  researchers  are  doing  fundamental  research  at 
the intersection of AI and Cognitive Science. For example, 
Lokendra  Shastri  [2830]  of  the  International  Computer 
Science Institute in Berkeley, California, has been modeling 
how the hippocampal system in the human brain may record 
memories of specific episodes in the persons life. Damage 
to the hippocampus deep within the human skull disrupts 
the ability of the person to learn lifes events, without neces-
sarily blocking other kinds of learning such as language and 
skills. Shastri postulates that the hippocampus and related ele-
ments of the brain hold memories of episodes as connections 
between a small number of concepts that themselves are stored 
elsewhere. John gave Mary a book may be represented by 
neural connections between a link to memories of John, a link 
to memories of Mary, a link to the concept book, plus verb