2018

From M. Anthony Mills: In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities. This stubborn fact has led some philosophers, such as W.V.O. Quine, Read More ›

From Maverick Philosopher: From an interview with Daniel Dennett in the pages of The Guardian (2017) … My understanding of postmodernism – and you’re a very prominent atheist – is that in the absence of a single meta-narrative, which is God, you had competing narratives… [Dennett:] Yes and one’s true and the others are false. One of those narratives is the truth and the others aren’t; it’s as simple as that. Maverick Philosopher observes, Is it really so simple? Dennett is suggesting that his naturalist narrative is not a mere narrative, but the true narrative. If so, then there is truth; there is a way things are in themselves apart from our stories and beliefs and hopes and desires. I Read More ›

At his blog: Here is the PR / spin definition of theistic evolution: Evolutionary creation is “the view that all life on earth came about by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent. Evolution is a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes in creation.” This view, also called theistic evolution, has been around since the late nineteenth century, and BioLogos promotes it today in a variety of religious and educational settings. And here is the no-spin definition of theistic evolution: As Dr. Stephen Meyer explains it, the central issue dividing Bio-Logos writers from intelligent design theorists is BioLogos’s commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), which is not a scientific theory or empirical finding, but an arbitrary rule excluding Read More ›

From Jeff Lewis and Belinda Lewis, “The myth of declining violence: Liberal evolutionism and violent complexity” at : The publication of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature popularized an emerging orthodoxy in political and social science – that is, that violence and warfare have been declining over the past century, particularly since the end of the Second World War. Invoking the scientific and political neutrality of their data and evidence, Pinker and other ‘declinists’ insist that powerful, liberal democratic states have subdued humans’ evolutionary disposition to violence. This article analyses the heuristic validity and political framework of these claims. The article examines, in particular, the declinists’ interpretation and use of demographic, archaeological, anthropological and historical evidence. The article argues Read More ›

A friend writes to draw our attention to this lecture, assuming you are in England now that April’s there:   — Durham Castle Lecture – Professor Markus Gabriel 25th April 2018, 20:00 to 21:30, Senate Room, Durham Castle, University College ‘Are We Real? Consciousness and Fiction’ It is a widespread believe in our contemporary natural scientific culture that central features of our mind are fictions or illusions of sorts. The prominent philosopher Daniel Dennett even claims that illusionism about phenomenal consciousness (our qualitative experience of reality as rich with colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc.) should be “the obvious default theory of consciousness.” Remarkably, illusionists about consciousness typically do not offer actual error theories that tell us in what precise sense Read More ›

From Anil Ananthaswamy and Kate Douglas at New Scientist: Chimpanzees are not a proxy for our ancestors – they have been evolving since our two family trees split between 7 and 10 million years ago – but their social structures can tell us something about the conditions that male dominance thrives in. Common chimpanzee groups are manifestly patriarchal. Males are vicious towards females, they take their food, forcibly copulate with females that are ovulating and even kill them merely for spending time away from the group. More. (paywall) As part of a denunciation of patriarchy in human society, this does not sound like it holds much promise but one must pay to find out more… From James Kushiner at Salvo, Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to say, “This week we will be joined by philosopher of biology Dr. Paul Nelson, who will discuss the concept of ontogenetic depth and why it matters to evolutionary theory.” 9pm British time (4pm Eastern / 3pm Central / 1pm Pacific (Time zones.) In this session, Discovery Institute senior fellow Dr. Paul Nelson will explain why “ontogenetic depth” matters to evolutionary theory (and intelligent design), and why reports of the concept’s uselessness, or death, are wrong. Despite being currently impossible to measure — and Paul will show why — ontogenetic depth is nonetheless real and important. More information. Webinar. See also: Webinar: Paul Nelson on evolution as theory of transformation

Long time readers know we have occasionally indulged in Sam Harris fricassée in these pages.  See here, here and here for examples.  Harris is one of the leading proponents of the “consciousness is an illusion” school, which means he denies the Primordial Datum – the one thing that everyone (including Sam Harris) knows for a certain fact to be true — that they are aware of their own existence.  That said, we will be the first to admit there is an integrity – of a sort – to Harris’ silliness.  He understands that his materialism precludes, in principle, the existence of immaterial consciousness, and so he denies consciousness exists.  Yes, I know, it is gobsmackingly stupid.  But at least it Read More ›

When someone asks you “Do you believe in evolution?” they probably won’t take the time to listen to your 15 minute exposition on the different meanings of “evolution” and why you reject one or more of them, and they probably won’t read “Darwin’s Black Box” if you gave them a copy, so what do you say? Here’s my short answer: “I believe in the evolution of life and in the evolution of automobiles, but I don’t believe either could have come about without design.” When someone tells you “The theory of evolution is well-established science, only ignorant people still doubt it,” again, they probably won’t give you 30 minutes to respond, and won’t have time to read anything you refer Read More ›

From electrical Engineering prof Michael I. Jordan at Medium: Of course, classical human-imitative AI problems remain of great interest as well. However, the current focus on doing AI research via the gathering of data, the deployment of “deep learning” infrastructure, and the demonstration of systems that mimic certain narrowly-defined human skills — with little in the way of emerging explanatory principles — tends to deflect attention from major open problems in classical AI. These problems include the need to bring meaning and reasoning into systems that perform natural language processing, the need to infer and represent causality, the need to develop computationally-tractable representations of uncertainty and the need to develop systems that formulate and pursue long-term goals. These are classical Read More ›

😉 From Emily Conover at Science News: The source of a mysterious glitch in data from a gravitational wave detector has been unmasked: rap-tap-tapping ravens with a thirst for shaved ice. At the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the desert of Hanford, Wash., scientists noticed a signal that didn’t look like gravitational waves, physicist Beverly Berger said on April 16 at a meeting of the American Physical Society.More. Does this have to do with ravens being remarkably intelligent birds? Her’s a thought:  Let’s see what they do now that the scientists have corrected their system for frost buildup. 😉 See also: Rob Sheldon on Physics Nobel for gravitational waves: Another PC moment in science? and Furry, feathery, Read More ›

Darwinian Ken Miller is promoting his new book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will. In a guest column at Scientific American, he claims that the use of the term “Darwinism” is a slur against science: A number of purposes are served by reducing an entire scientific field to an “ism” based on the name of its founder. The first is obvious. Evolution then becomes an ideology, not a field of science. This view is on full display at the lavishly appointed Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where visitors are assured that scientific data can be interpreted in two ways—from a Darwinist perspective, or from a creationist point of view. Because both depend only Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study by scientists at the University of Liverpool documents, for the first time, how the ability of bacteria to swap genetic material with each other can directly affect the emergence and spread of globally important infectious diseases. Known as ‘horizontal gene transfer’, this phenomenon is understood to have played a role in developing the global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis. However, the dynamics of AMR transfer through bacterial populations and its direct impact on human disease is poorly understood. It’s poorly understood, in part, because Darwinism is enjoined on the public instead of a proper appreciation of the many dimensions of evolution. Plasmids are small circular DNA molecules that can be transferred horizontally between bacteria. They contain Read More ›

Recently, we noted a piece by astrophysicist Adam Becker at Aeon, asking whether “fetish for falsification and observation” holds back science. Essentially, multiverse cosmologists have been trying for some time to undermine basic principles of science such as the requirement for evidence and the capacity for falsification, in order to get their evidence-free theories accepted as science. Once they are accepted as official science on the basis that they somehow feel right, evidence against them won’t really matter much. Laszlo Bencze, who has studied Karl Popper’s work in some detail, writes to offer some thoughts: — I finally read the article referenced. It is filled with the same confusion about Popper’s philosophy of science as I have seen many times Read More ›

From Andrew Jaffe at Nature, reviewing Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time: According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification. … Rovelli is one of the creators and champions of loop quantum gravity theory, one of several ongoing attempts to marry quantum mechanics with general relativity. In contrast to the better-known string theory, Read More ›