Vocabulary to the text:

skydiving	тривалі стрибки з парашутом
breaking and entering	злам і проникнення (із подоланням фізичної перешкоди до чужого житла з умислом грабунку)
misdemeanor	провина, незначний (дрібний) злочин
in and of itself	сам по собі
to live by one's wits	жити, постійно вигадуючи як заробити собі на життя (часто нечесним шляхом)
stamina	запас життєвих сил, витривалість; витримка
gear	спорядження

1. Questions to the text:

1. What activities may be considered adventurous?

2. What is the psychology of adventure? What turns people into adrenaline-junkies?

3. What variables may influence an adventure traveler?

2. Additional word list

shelter	притулок, захисток
survival	виживання
to start a fire	розпалювати вогонь
avalanche	сніговий обвал, лавина
blizzard	завірюха, хуртовина, віхола
sandstorm	самум, піщана буря
snowstorm	завірюха, хуртовина, буран
crevasse [krɪ'væs]	розколина, глибока й вузька щілина в льодовику
glacier ['glæsɪə]	льодовик, глетчер
creepy-crawlies	повзучі гади (павуки, хробаки, скорпіони і т.п.)
to endure	терпіти, зносити (біль, умови і т.д.)
tourist gear
tent	намет
sleeping bag	спальний мішок
backpack, rucksack	рюкзак
axe	сокира
creepers	шипи на взутті альпініста
fishing rod	вудка
rope	канат, линва; мотузка; трос
pole	жердина
first-aid kit	медична аптечка
injury	тілесне пошкодження
wound	поранення
fracture	перелом

3. Additional questions and discussion:

1. Have you ever had a real adventure?

2. What problems might an adventurer encounter?

3. Are you familiar with basic survival techniques?

4. What great adventure stories do you remember?

5. Which great adventurers of the past and present do you know? What are they famous for?

4. Compose and write a plan of the text.

5. Write short notes about the key issues raised in the text.

6. Retell the text using new vocabulary.

7. Prepare a report on a famous adventure (adventurer) (20 sentences).

8. Watch one episode of “Man vs Wild”, “Survivorman”, “Dual survival” (TV-shows) or other survival TV show and write a letter to your friend about it.

Module 4. The mind.

Topic 10. Human intellect and artificial intelligence.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

--Samuel Johnson

Man, using his intellect, solved thousands of his problems and found the answer to thousands of questions that emerged during his existence on Earth. It is man's intellect that has made it possible for him to fashion our present civilization.

In fact the intellect or, in brief, the mind is the originating and determining influence of all we do and all we are. It gives real value to human life and makes it so vastly different from that of animals.

Mind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will, and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness.

Theories of mind and its function are numerous. Earliest recorded speculations date back to Zoroaster, the Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, Adi Shankara and other ancient Greek, Indian and, later, Islamic philosophers. Pre-scientific theories grounded in theology concentrated on the supposed relationship between the mind and the soul, human's supernatural, divine or god-given essence.

Which attributes make up the mind is much debated. Some psychologists argue that only the higher intellectual functions constitute mind, particularly reason and memory. In this view the emotions - love, hate, fear, joy - are more primitive or subjective in nature and should be seen as different from the mind as such. Others argue that various rational and emotional states cannot be so separated, that they are of the same nature and origin, and should therefore be considered all part of what we call the mind.

Thought is a mental process which allows individuals to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans and desires. Words referring to similar concepts and processes include cognition, idea, and imagination. Thinking involves the cerebral manipulation of information, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reasoning and making decisions. Thinking is a higher cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is part of cognitive psychology.

Memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. Although traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Imagination is accepted as the innate ability and process to invent partial or complete personal realms the mind derives from sense perceptions of the shared world. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary language, some psychologists have preferred to describe this process as "imaging" or "imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination. Imagined images are seen with the "mind's eye". One hypothesis for the evolution of human imagination is that it allowed conscious beings to solve problems (and hence increase an individual's fitness) by use of mental simulation.

Consciousness is an aspect of the mind generally thought to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain. Phenomenal consciousness has many different experienced qualities, often referred to as qualia. Phenomenal consciousness is usually consciousness of something or about something, a property known as intentionality in philosophy of mind.

In 1950 Alan M. Turing published "Computing machinery and intelligence" in Mind, in which he proposed that machines could be tested for intelligence using questions and answers. This process is now named the Turing Test. The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first used by John McCarthy who considers it to mean "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". It can also refer to intelligence as exhibited by an artificial (man-made, non-natural, manufactured) entity. AI is studied in overlapping fields of computer science, psychology, neuroscience and engineering, dealing with intelligent behavior, learning and adaptation and usually developed using customized machines or computers.

Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include control, planning and scheduling, the ability to answer diagnostic and consumer questions, handwriting, natural language, speech and facial recognition. As such, the study of AI has also become an engineering discipline, focused on providing solutions to real life problems, knowledge mining, software applications, strategy games like computer chess and other video games. One of the biggest difficulties with AI is that of comprehension. Many devices have been created that can do amazing things, but critics of AI claim that no actual comprehension by the AI machine has taken place.

The debate about the nature of the mind is relevant to the development of artificial intelligence. If the mind is indeed a thing separate from or higher than the functioning of the brain, then hypothetically it would be much more difficult to recreate within a machine, if it were possible at all. If, on the other hand, the mind is no more than the aggregated functions of the brain, then it will be possible to create a machine with a recognizable mind (though possibly only with computers much different from today's), by simple virtue of the fact that such a machine already exists in the form of the human brain.

Vocabulary to the text:

consciousness ['kɒnʃəsnɪs]	свідомість
perception [pə'sepʃ(ə)n]	1) сприйняття, відчуття 2) розуміння, усвідомлення
stream of consciousness	a person's thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow.
cerebral ['serɪbrəl]	мозковий
innate [ɪ'neɪt]	природжений, природний; властивий, притаманний
mind's eye	погляд у думці, у власній уяві
sentience ['senʃəns]	чутливість
qualia	the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena
artificial intelligence	штучний інтелект
knowledge mining	the process of extracting patterns from knowledge. Knowledge mining is seen as an increasingly important tool by modern business to transform data into business intelligence giving an informational advantage. It is currently used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery.
aggregated	консолідований

1. Questions to the text:

1. How does intellect make us different from the animals?

2. What functions are usually attributed to the mind?

3. Are emotions manifesting the functions of the mind?

4. Describe thought.

5. Describe memory.

6. Describe imagination.

7. What is consciousness?

8. Who and when started the AI problem?

9. Which sciences study the AI?

10. May AI be recreated in the machine?

2. Additional questions and discussion:

1. Imagine what could happen in best - and worst-case scenarios should scientists develop AI.

2. What applications may AI possibly have?

3. Do you think intellect may be obtained through the academic process or is it a gift bestowed by God?

3. Write short notes about the key issues raised in the text.

4. Compose and write a plan of the text.

5. Retell the text using new vocabulary.

6. Prepare a report about the attempts to create AI.

7. Write a letter to your friend about the extraordinary feats of human intellect.

Topic 11. Living in a knowledge-intensive society.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

--Benjamin Franklin

As Albert Einstein aptly remarked, “Information is not knowledge”. By this the prominent physicist of course meant the fact that information may be misguided, irrelevant and not corresponding to the true nature of things. While knowledge is information, confirmed by the reality, by the physical facts. However, for the purposes of this topic we will refer to knowledge in terms of information.

Undoubtedly, the present-day world represents a stream of information, a powerful and unpredictable current which may either take us to a paradise island or drag underwater and suffocate. Information comes to your mind as soon as you have brushed your teeth in the morning and turned on the tube. It continues to come in public transportation; it covers us at the workplace, at a college, at any crowded place. By the time we get home we are swollen with information of all kinds.

Now, present generations become slowly adapted to the rapid stream of information, consuming it, digesting it, and successfully using it for their purposes. Such people may be called infomaniacs or wikiholics. They spend a lot of time browsing the web in the search of new knowledge. On the other hand, some people cannot really cope with huge amount of information and suffer from information anxiety, which may be manifested in headaches, weakness and of course stress. Stress is a very common result to an information poisoning.

Of course, cutting-edge technology has changed the humanity forever. The sight of a person reading an e-book in the subway or a guy in a cafeteria with a laptop using Wi-Fi to check out latest news from his Facebook account or a granny logging into her e-mail do not surprise us anymore. Welcome to the new, information-intensive reality.

The huge role in these processes of course belongs to the Internet, which has definitely become a breadbasket for informaholics. Besides providing us with the most useful, up-to-date information on any happening in the world or an encyclopedic phenomena, Internet becomes a new home for the modern generation of computer whiz-kids. Physical living is gradually turned into virtual existence where people may spend days forgetting about the real world “out there”. A good example is a feverish adoration of social networks, like MySpace or Facebook or its Eastern European counterpart – Vkontakte. When the connection between a man and the Internet is severed, this may be compared to an oxygen starvation. So, without exaggeration, information has all the signs of a powerful drug, which may cause addiction.

However, eventually we should treat the new world with its new information-intensive reality as something we cannot change. And what we cannot change we may use to our benefit. He who has information rules the world – a new challenge to Bonaparte’s famous quote “Imagination rules the world”. Among other means of getting useful information, besides the Internet, is of course profound classical academic education. University is the place where a person may get sufficient expertise to successfully perform at a future job or at least become an intelligent person.

It is a good question what kind of world we are moving to with all that incredibly fast and unstoppable process of total computerization and humanity becoming a one big information-consuming organism. In the world where new knowledge has spurred scientists to create the most comfortable conditions of living we might find ourselves in a situation where our physical abilities might no longer be needed at that scale and there is a chance of physiological changes in our bodies. Why need a spade or scythe when a button or a lawn mower may help you do all the dirty work in the garden, after all?

Also, one needs to keep in mind that the path of knowledge may be the path of danger. Bright examples include the worst-case scenarios of the Large Hadron Collider crashing and bringing to life a black hole which will consume the planet or a computer genius creating an AI which might enslave humanity. These might be urban legends however such scenarios may well become true and a new, imminent danger may emerge. We need to give ourselves full account of what a beneficial and simultaneously dangerous thing knowledge is. Scientists need to tread the path of knowledge with great caution because the price of an error may be the very existence of human civilization.