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The Simulation Theory of Consciousness   (or Your Autonomous Car is Sentient)  by Donald Firesmith  Genre: Speculative Non-Fiction  Have you ever wondered what our robots might be thinking? What do our cars experience as they use their sensors to observe the world around them and increasingly take over our driving duties? When we play computer games, are we the only ones who experience the simulated virtual worlds they create? More generally, are our computer-driven creations sentient with their own internal, subjective streams of conscious? Named a distinguished engineer by the Association of Computing Machinery, Donald Firesmith uses his 40 years of experience developing complex, software-intensive systems to argue that the answer is yes. The many functional analogies between humans and cyber-physical systems produce a strong argument that every software-reliant physical system that creates a real-time simulation of itself and its environme...

The Secrets of Hawthorne House   by Donald Firesmith  Genre: YA/MG Urban Fantasy  Matt's life changes forever when a family of druids moves into the dilapidated Victorian mansion next door. The story of an unlikely friendship, the clash of two completely different cultures, secret magic, and a search for the lost Hawthorne treasure.  Fifteen-year-old Matt Mitchell was having the worst summer imaginable. Matt’s misery started when a drunk driver killed his mother. Then his father moved him and his twin sister to the small town of Hawthorne in rural Indiana, as far as his grieving father could take from the ocean that Matt's mother had loved. At the new high school, three bullies are determined to make Matt miserable. And to top it off, Matt learns that the recluse who lives in the 'haunted house" next door is none other than Old Lady Hawthorne, the town’s infamous witch and murderer. Matt’s terrible summer is turning into an awful autumn when so...