Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The “dumb Neanderthal” myth dies hard

Prediction: Neanderthals will suddenly become just like us if a different set of putative “less than human” bones turns up. So long as there is no other “not quite human” in easy view, it really doesn’t matter what Neanderthals actually did. They’ll still have to be cast that way to appear in the approved drama of human evolution. Read More ›

Why neither weak nor strong scientism can ground ethics

Paul Copan: Science has built-in limitations, but some moderns have placed a burden on science that it cannot—and was never meant to—bear. Theology, philosophy, and other sources of knowledge not only help supplement what science can show, but they can also enrich our study of science. Read More ›

Scientific quest for morality ends in moral nihilism

One outcome of morality becoming an uninspiring talkshop is that massive breaches of ethics are more difficult to address except in terms of the commotion they create, as opposed to the truths they violate or the individuals they harm. Read More ›

Philosopher of science Mike Keas: Artificial intelligence (AI) as an emergent religion

Many Singulatarians hold that their soon-to-be-realized technology will be indistinguishable by the rest of us from magic.   Are they serious? Well, in 2005, Kurzweil said that the magical Harry Potter stories “are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now.” when, due to AI, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.”  Keas warns that this type of thing encourages people “to expect the experiential equivalent of occult phenomena.” More. Mike Keas’s new book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion discusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magic: See also: Historian: Darwinists Kept The “Flat Earth” Myth Going, To Attack Read More ›

Simple demonstrations of how structure and quantity are embedded in the world

As there seems to be resistance to the point that the world embeds structure and quantity (thus, mathematical features) I think it is useful to provide some simple reminders. The Egyptian rope trick and the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triplet, thus a right angle forced through a numerical relationship (and note the power of the number twelve again): Lego bricks demonstrating the Pythagorean relationship — notice, number theory connexions and the natural interpretation of “squaring”: Also, notice a Mobius strip cutting exercise: In none of these cases is the result dependent on our creating a mathematical model or an axiomatisation. The results are objective, factual, embedded in the world and in fact helped to constrain how Mathematical systems were axiomatised. END In Read More ›

Brendan Dixon: The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves

Because Machine Learning is opaque—even experts cannot clearly explain how a system arrived at a conclusion—we treat it as magic. Therefore, we should mistrust the systems until proven innocent (and correct) Data analyst Kalev Leetaru—who has written several good pieces on AI at Forbes—also points out that machine learning is “about correlations, not causation.” The fact that two pieces of data may be linked does not mean that one causes the other but nonetheless, “Developers and data scientists increasingly treat their creations as silicon lifeforms ‘learning’ concrete facts about the world, rather than what they truly are: piles of numbers detached from what they represent, mere statistical patterns encoded into software. We must recognize that those patterns are merely correlations Read More ›

Brendan Dixon: Artificial Intelligence Is Actually Superficial Intelligence

The confusing ways the word “intelligence” belie the differences between human intelligence and machine sophistication We’ve known, for as long as we’ve had chess-playing programs, that computers do not play chess like we play chess. We’ve lost sight of that difference because recent artificial intelligence (AI) program advances have overcome higher hurdles than previous programs. Computers now win at dynamic strategy games, translate languages, analyze MRIs, and even recognize cats. These advances seem, on the surface, to convey the idea that more is going on than mere programming, that computers are living up to their designation as “intelligent” in the same sense as a human being. But we should know better. And recent research into how the latest advances differ Read More ›

Adult human brains apparently do generate new nerve cells

Not a lot of them but it adds up over time: Just last year, two opposing papers appeared in leading journals, one claiming firm evidence of ongoing neurogenesis in the adult human dentate gyrus, while the other study came to the opposite conclusion. The fact that adult neurogenesis is reliably seen in rodents only adds to the confusion. Neuroskeptic, “A New Look at Neurogenesis in Humans” at Discover Magazine Neuroskeptic also quotes an authority (Snyder): “Spalding et al. estimated that only 0.004% of neurons are added each day in adult humans [10]. While this would appear negligible under the microscope (1 cell in 25,000), it translates to ∼15% over a decade; a sizable fraction…” It will be interesting to see Read More ›

“If’n I Drop, I’m Gonna Be in Motion”

In a recent post I took umbrage with a writer who said : “If determinism is also true, that does not mean that free will is false.” Well, yes, it kinda does, because those two things — determined and free — are mutually exclusive. The whole thing put he in mind of a scene from one of my favorite movies, Raising Arizona. Enjoy.