Eric Holloway explains Jonathan Bartlett’s account of the human mind as a halting oracle: In his paper, “Using Turing oracles in cognitive models of problem-solving” Jonathan Bartlett proposes to model the human mind as a halting oracle. A brief explanation: Computer science pioneer Alan Turing (1912–1954) imagined a universal machine that can copy any other machine. However, this machine has a critical limitation: It cannot determine whether any given machine will run forever or not. This is known as the halting problem: “There can be no general procedure to decide if a self-contained computer program will eventually halt.” A halting oracle is a non-mechanical entity that can solve the halting problem for all machines. A common objection to Bartlett’s idea Read More ›

In an excerpt from his recent book, Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn’t, a psychiatrist explains how we can have meaning even though we don’t: People assume that our human sense of purpose is dependent on the universe having a purpose, and without such purpose they assume that life has no meaning. This is a wholly unsubstantiated assumption. Our purposeless universe has become infused with local pockets of purpose, and this has happened through entirely natural, spontaneous processes. Purpose emerged in the universe with life itself. Purpose and meaning (and morality too) can be entirely explained as natural phenomena, emergent from a random, material universe. All living creatures are purposeful. Simple creatures Read More ›

From a review of James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality Can science tell us how we ought to behave? In Science and the Good, a book that crosses the boundaries of history, philosophy, and psychology, sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky examine nearly 400 years of scientific attempts to discover the sources and meaning of morality. That effort, they conclude, has failed. Science can tell us the way things are but not the way things ought to be. In the language of philosophy, it can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.” … Before the dawn of the Enlightenment era, late-medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas had Read More ›

A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific ideas, and doing so in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans and their Islamic successors, deal with this awkward fact is to claim that these poor scholars were cowed by the terrible restrictions of the Church and tightly constrained in what they could explore. Which, right on cue, “Skep” proceeds to do: “The fact is there weren’t a lot of scientists around for the Read More ›

Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of  The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016) addresses the “God of the Gaps” – the claim that the intersections between the material and the immaterial in nature are just “gaps” waiting to be filled in (with special reference to the origin of life): The first thing I would bring to your attention – although not the essential point – is that when we discuss the Origin of Life we are not talking about a “gap” in scientific knowledge. A gap implies some acceptable and tolerable missing piece of the puzzle that we expect to fill in within some reasonable amount of time. What we actually see is more like the ocean between the coast Read More ›

Post World War II, scientists studying origins, sensed a moral mission to tell the story in order to encourage us to be better people. The close-knit hunter-gatherer clans that represented all humanity co-operated for survival and were chock full of moral lessons for us all. But was it true?: Readers and reviewers lumped Morris, Ardrey and Lorenz together as promoting a powerful new vision of humans as animals. (To be fair, each author saw different moral systems and imperatives emerging from their research, but these nuances mattered less to readers than their shared zoomorphic vision.) The view of humans as specialised animals carried implications for who among the scientists could truly judge what it meant to be human. If our Read More ›

It’s now suggested that people likely to live long tend to find each other (assortative mating). How else to explain this?Researchers found that siblings’ and first cousins’ lifespans were well correlated but also: But spouses’ lifespans were correlated, too. That could be easily explained by spouses sharing the same household and lifestyle: eating the same healthy diet or puffing on cigarettes together. But the researchers noticed something odd: the lifespans of other relatives related only by marriage also correlated. That can’t be explained by genes, and it can’t be explained by shared environment. So Ruby and his colleagues started investigating the lifespans of in-laws. They looked at siblings-in-law, and first-cousins-in-law, and then further afield, at relationships like “the sibling of Read More ›

We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He had been dosing his co-worker’s food with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), used to induce cancer in rats, which initially made the victim vomit and gave him diarrhoea. The victim – who survived and testified in court on 2 November – subsequently installed a camera on his desk, and recorded Wang pipetting a substance into his food. Wang is due to be sentenced on 11 Read More ›

Back in the 1960s, space scientists needed to know if it is true that a cat always lands on its feet: NASA contributed funding to the paper “A Dynamical Explanation of the Falling Cat Phenomenon,” published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures, by Stanford’s T.R. Kane and M.P. Scher. What was so significant about the paper was that it demonstrated that cats are physically capable of rotating their body in mid-air to right themselves when falling. A cat employs specific motor functions in order to achieve this self-righting mechanism, and the paper analyzed these functions as equations that could then be applied to humans. While this function isn’t very useful to humans on earth, it’s critically important in Read More ›

This post went viral yesterday at Mind Matters: The 2014 science fiction film Transcendence featured a scientist who uploaded his consciousness into an AI program. Many people talk as though things like that are just around the corner. But industry pros say it isn’t really possible. Why not? François Chollet, author of Keras, a framework for the Python deep learning language, offers a list of reasons, but starts by pointing to an underlying misconception: that a super-AI could be developed that would go on creating more super-AIs until something vastly more intelligent than a human being arises. He points out that such a process has not actually happened in the universe of which we have knowledge: An overwhelming amount of Read More ›

The mechanome is the underresearched “ the set of proteins or molecular entities that sense or respond to forces” within the cell (Allen Liu). Our earlier stab at the subject here at UD garnered 354 comments, so there’s no shortage of interest. The mechanome (and mechanobiology in general) plays a key role in research into artificial cells. Suzan Mazur is the author of The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’. Suzan Mazur talks to mechanical and biomedical engineer Allen Liu, one of the people best placed to offer some insights:   Suzan Mazur: The Liu Lab at the University of Michigan is particularly interested in the mechanobiology of the cell lipid membrane. Would you briefly describe your Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on existing research on learning, Muthukrishna and colleagues analytically and computationally modeled the predictions of the cultural brain hypothesis and found that this theory not only explains these increases in brain size, but a variety of other relationships with group size, learning strategies, knowledge and life history. The theory relies on the idea that brains expand to store and manage more information. Brains expand in response Read More ›

Neutral evolution, intended to cover for the failures of Darwinian evolution (natural selection), is now being challenged by selectionists: Selection isn’t in doubt, but many scientists have argued that most evolutionary changes appear at the level of the genome and are essentially random and neutral. Adaptive changes groomed by natural selection might indeed sculpt a fin into a primitive foot, they said, but those changes make only a small contribution to the evolutionary process, in which the composition of DNA varies most often without any real consequences. But now some scientists are pushing back against this idea, known as neutral theory, saying that genomes show much more evidence of evolved adaptation than the theory would dictate. This debate is important because Read More ›

Barry:  Can we know with absolute certainty that it is evil to torture a baby for pleasure? JDK:  “There is no possible answer to the question: it’s a meaningless question.” UPDATE: JDK has accused me of being intellectually dishonest for quoting him as saying (1)  there is no possible answer to the question; and (2) it is a meaningless question.  He has implied that the “context” of his statement makes it mean something other than what it appears to mean on its face. OK JDK.  I’ll bite.   Do you believe the question has meaning and it is possible to answer?  If so, answer it.  If not, apologize for saying the quotation was dishonest. SECOND UPDATE: JDK continues to post in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Captive Goffins are capable of inventing and manipulating tools, even though they aren’t known to use tools habitually. The authors of the present study investigated two questions: do Goffins adjust tool properties to save effort, and if so, how accurately can they adjust tool dimensions for the task? The authors supplied six adult cockatoos with large cardboard sheets to tear into strips as tools for the testing apparatus: a food platform with a food reward set at varying distances (4-16cm) behind a small opening which also varied in width (1-2cm). They found that the Goffins were capable of adjusting the length of their cardboard strip tools to account for variations in food distance, making shorter tools when the Read More ›