We’ve been hearing a lot about that. From Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT , in “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions” at Technology Review, featuring the fourth sin: When people hear that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to use as a mental model the way in which a person would learn that new domain. However, machine learning is very brittle, and it requires lots of preparation by human researchers or engineers, special-purpose coding, special-purpose sets of training data, and a custom learning structure for each new problem domain. Today’s machine learning is not at all the sponge-like learning that humans engage in, making Read More ›

From lit prof Tim Parks and AI philosopher Riccardo Manzotti at New York Review of Books: Manzotti: One of the comedies of modern thinking is that we treat objects that exist relative to the tools of scientists as more real, more correct, somehow, than other objects. In the case you mention, there are four objects: the air, and three others in relation to it—your body, the thermometer, and my body. The thermometer meets the air and says seventy-two degrees. A digit. Your body meets the air and registers cold. My body meets the air and registers warm. All three “measurements” are valid and real. Seventy-two degrees, cold, and warm. You can’t choose to be warm because someone tells you a Read More ›

Recently, we reported on the question of whether the missing dark matter of the universe has finally been found, and we cautioned, Keep the file open but remember: We did find the Higgs boson (and Peter Higgs got the Nobel). But gravitational waves and dark energy are questionable despite the Nobels awarded. More. Our physics commentator Rob Sheldon offers some perspective: The New Scientist was kind enough to link to the arXiv server, so I could read the actual paper. Because the journalese is not making the slightest bit of sense. The two main conundrums of dark matter are: a) It allows galaxies to spin faster than they otherwise would, yet not enough gas is found in the galaxies to Read More ›

From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: The number of known species of geckos has just jumped upwards, with 15 new species being formally described this week. … The 19 species all live in a small area of Myanmar just 90 by 50 kilometres in size. “That’s the really amazing thing about it,” says Grismer. “They all come from such a small area.” It’s common to find lots of closely-related species of invertebrates like snails or insects in such a small area, but it is unprecedented for a backboned animal, say Grismer. “For lizards, it is remarkable.”More. A friend asks why no criteria are offered in the article as to how the scientists determined that the groups of lizards are Read More ›

From J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, Traditionally, therapeutic bloodletting was justified by the need to release from the patient an excess of one vital humor that was out of balance with another. Release the excess humor, and the balance of humors would be restored, as would be the patient to a state of health. The practice, indeed so much of medical practice in those times, probably killed more patients than it helped, but never mind, it was justified by sound and venerable teaching—the science was settled, we might say today. (K751-755) – Citing: R. G. DePalma, V. W. Hayes, and L. R. Zacharski, “Bloodletting: Past and Present,” Read More ›

Progressive hero Ta-Nehisi Coates (an atheist) is conflicted about whether to bring on the guillotines.  From a recent interview with Vox: When he tries to describe the events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully.’ Materialist ideas have entailments, including (1) God does not exist; (2) good and evil Read More ›

In the view of physicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes, the doomed ideas are proton decay, modified gravity, supersymmetry, Technicolor, and WIMP-based dark matter. Supersymmetry is, of course, Cool, so it is immortal, irrespective of evidence. But Siegel cautions, While there are many elegant reasons to favor supersymmetry, the fact is that these particles should exist at approximately the same masses as the highest-mass Standard Model particles. With the advent of the LHC, we have determined that if these particles exist, they are many times heavier than the Standard Model particles, so much so that they would no longer solve the mass-difference problem. As a theory to explain this hierarchy problem, supersymmetry is completely dead. More. Of course, it might be Read More ›

A lot of people are now reading Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, and one of them is retired linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages). Turner’s challenge to Darwinism is the fact that life shows internal purpose, which cannot be accounted for by the mere declaration that it evolved in order to do so. Rude reflects, Someone ought to write a book titled, let me suggest, “Materialism and its Dissidents.”  Having recently read J. Scott Turner’s “Purpose and Desire,” I’m reminded of what a fellow linguist used to call “Aristotle’s anima.”  An ardent Darwinist, he nevertheless would tell me that Darwinism couldn’t work without the desire to live–something no completely Read More ›

J. Scott Turner’s recent Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It makes the case that life is not comprehensible without the concept of purpose and that Darwinism’s failure to explain is an “impending crisis.” Michael Ruse, author of many books on the triumph of Darwinism, tells us at Big Questions Online: The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these Read More ›

… without taking purpose into account, which he addresses through Biology’s Second Law, homeostasis. From J. Scott Turner in Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It: away. And the uncomfortable question is this: what if phenomena like intentionality, purpose, and design are not illusions, but are quite real—are in fact the central attributes of life? How can we have a coherent theory of life that tries to shunt these phenomena to the side? And if we don’t have a coherent theory of life, how can we have a coherent theory of evolution? This is the hard nut that has to be cracked, and this leads me to the other theme I Read More ›

According to a report from Leah Crane at New Scientist: The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. … Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: Carlo Rovelli: Theories of everything ill-conceived but we can learn to understand quantum mechanics

From Sarah Jones at New Republic: The bots, our children, do not behave. They have taken over the internet—bots account for more than half of internet traffic—and interfered with our elections. But instead of being unnerved by the bot’s growing power, Anthony Levandowski would like to make one God. The Silicon Valley engineer, who has been accused by Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, of trying to steal trade secrets and give them to Uber, in 2015 “founded a religious organization called Way of the Future,” Wired reported last week. “Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to ‘develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.’” Nobody but Levandowski knows if he Read More ›

Foreword by sociologist Steve Fuller: Interesting in light of the recent “Adam and Eve and Mustn’t Believe” fracas at BioLogos: Here’s the outline: Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique Edited by J. P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, Wayne Grudem Expected: Nov 30, 2017 Retail Price: $60.00 About Theistic Evolution The debate about biological origins continues to be hotly contested within the Christian church. Prominent organizations such as Biologos (USA) and Faraday Institute (UK) insist that Christians must yield to an unassailable scientific consensus in favor of contemporary evolutionary theory and modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life accordingly. They promote a view known as “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creation.” They argue Read More ›

From Oxford’s William E. Carroll at Big Questions Online: The use of cosmology either to deny or to affirm creation is often the result of confusions about what creation is and about the explanatory power of the natural sciences. Creation, as a metaphysical and theological notion, affirms that all that exists — in whatever way it does — depends upon God as a cause. The natural sciences have as their subject the world of changing things, from subatomic particles to acorns to galaxies. Whenever there is a change there must be something that changes. Whether these changes are biological or cosmological, without beginning or end, or temporally finite, they are still processes. Creation, on the other hand, is the radical Read More ›