Author: Barry Arrington

When they say they “know” that an AI machine is conscious.  How can I be so sure?  Easy.  As I have discussed before, we cannot in principle “know” that even other humans are conscious; far less can we know that an AI is conscious.  By its very nature, consciousness, as evidenced by subjective self-awareness, can […]

Two recent posts have highlighted the moral and intellectual rot that threatens Western Civilization.  In the first, materialist Seversky expressed a moral nihilism that is breathtaking in its scope.  I asked him if the ancient practice of killing unwanted girl babies was an affirmatively good thing.  His answer:  “It was an affirmatively good thing for […]

It is amusing to watch WJM hoist a materialist with his own petard. All that follows is WJM: Brother Brian, So, if you could, you’d force others to live by your preference – let’s call it the non-oppression of women. Your position is that it is your subjective preference as to how people should behave, […]

Those of us who believe in truth, virtue and “justice” (unadorned with the modifier “social”) are inimical to the “social justice” movement. So says this UN report: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.” Social Justice in an Open […]

You’ve gotta love Sev’s refreshing honesty. In this post I noted that killing little babies was not uncommon in ancient cultures. And then I asked: [Materialists] say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it […]

I have a question for our materialist interlocutors. As Georgi Boorman summarizes in this article, in many ancient cultures killing certain babies was an acceptable, even lauded, practice. Here’s my question: You say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. […]

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 […]

Yesterday two stories out of Virginia went viral.  In the first the Democrat sponsor of an “abortion” bill confirmed that she intends to allow the babies to be killed up to the moment of birth.  See here. You can read the text of the bill in this article.  Under the proposal a baby could be […]

Writing at his blog: With few exceptions, most scientists and philosophers think that morality is at bottom based on human preferences. And though we may agree on many of those preferences (e.g., we should do what maximizes “well being”), you can’t show using data that one set of preferences is objectively better than another. (You […]

Over at EN he writes: If determinism is also true, that does not mean that free will is false. It could be simply that there is a problem with the philosophical abstraction called “libertarian free will” (which seems to assert indeterminism as a fundamentalist tenet). “If determinism is also true, that does not mean that […]

. . . and the reality behind that illusion is, well, the initial illusion. Richard Dawkins famously declared that the appearance of design in living things is overwhelming. Theistic evolutionists do not disagree.  But, like arch-atheist Dawkins, they assert that the appearance of design is an illusion and Darwinian evolution is the reality behind the […]

As long-time readers know, we at UD often disparage Wikipedia for its left-wing bias. Still, you have to give it its due. For a quick lookup of non-controversial facts, it has its uses. Uses to which, apparently, Bill Nye has not put it. If he had looked up Wiki’s entry on Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in […]

I fear my ears are going to bleed the next time I hear some materialist bleating about how design is a science stopper. On second thought, maybe the conversation will go something like this: Materialist: But design is a science stopper. Barry: Dang. Isaac Newton said this: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets […]

In a comment to a prior post frequent guest Seversky writes: If I tell you that I tried to drop a stone but it flew up in the air and disappeared out of sight, would you believe me? Probably not. Why not? Because every time you have dropped a stone it has fallen to the […]