Glossary

Artificial Intelligence
The branch of computer science which aims to create intelligent machines; the study and design of intelligent agents, where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success.

Artificial General Intelligence
Machines engineered with the autonomy and self-understanding to come to grips with novel problem domains and solve a wide variety of problem types; machine intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence; a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can.

Atheism
Either the rejection of theism, or the assertion that deities do not exist. In the broadest sense, it is the absence of belief in the existence of deities.

Bright
A social movement that aims to promote public understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic world view, co-founded by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell in 2003. The noun "bright" was coined by Geisert as a positive-sounding umbrella term, and Futrell defined it as "an individual whose worldview is naturalistic (free from supernatural and mystical elements)."

Cognition
The process of thought. Its usage varies in different ways in accord with different disciplines: For example, in psychology and cognitive science it refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Other interpretations of the meaning of cognition link it to the development of concepts; individual minds, groups, organizations, and even larger coalitions of entities, can be modelled as "societies" (Society of Mind), which cooperate to form concepts.

Compatibilism
Championed by the ancient Greek Stoics, Hobbes, Hume and many contemporary philosophers, is a theory that argues that free will and determinism exist and are in fact compatible.

Determinism
The philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.

Epistimology
The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.

Evolution
The change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though the changes produced in any one generation are small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the organisms. This process can culminate in the emergence of new species. Indeed, the similarities between organisms suggest that all known species are descended from a common ancestor (or ancestral gene pool) through this process of gradual divergence.

Faith
Belief regardless or despite the evidence.

Gene
The basic unit of heredity in a living organism; a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions.