The synthesis of salvinorin A by Salvia divinorum is of considerable interest for developing pain relief, anti-opioid addiction and antidepressant medications, but progress has been compromised by limited access to plant material and the complexity of the biosynthetic pathway. Initially using S. splendens, a closely related species, the first steps in the biosynthetic pathway have been...
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have reignited questions about whether artificial systems possess consciousness. Yet, despite remarkable progress in reasoning and language understanding, current AI systems exist only within isolated episodes of computation. This paper argues that a missing ingredient in such systems is temporal continuity, i.e., the persistence of internal...