Essentially, our brains — which would otherwise be overwhelmed — take shortcuts with the information they feed to our minds. Clever illusions reveal the shortcuts.
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Researchers: Steve Gould’s Punk Eek is right; evolution can pause a long time, then happen rapidly
Punctuated equilibrium is what we observe but it isn’t popular. Punk eek makes it even less likely that life develops due to unintelligent random processes. It just does not allow anywhere near enough time.
At Mind Matters News: The hive mind: Leafcutter ants behave like farmhands but…
Ants’ complex behavior patterns are part of following a colony algorithm rather than making individual decisions. They make immediate individual decisions but the hive mind of the colony makes the big ones. We humans struggle to understand the hive mind because our world is one of uniquely individual minds that can, with effort, be got to work together — for a while.
At Mind Matters News: Researchers: Humans process information differently from monkeys
The researchers found that, from an information theory perspective, human brains engage in less redundant and more synergistic processing than macaques. So information theory supports human exceptionalism where Darwinism doesn’t?
Fun: A giant undersea meadow turned out to be a single organism – the world’s largest
At Futurism: “According to The Guardian, this single Posidonia australis plant, more commonly known as ribbon weed, spans an astonishing 77 square miles of undersea land off the coast of western Australia’s Shark Bay. For perspective, that’s three times the size of Manhattan. Move over, trees! There’s a new — well, ~4,500 year old — giant in town.”
At Mind Matters News: A little-known structure tells our brains what matters now
Takehome: The cuneate nucleus (CN) in the brain stem turns out to communicate regularly with your prefrontal cortex and spine as to what you had better notice. The more we learn about the brain, the less likely it seems to be purely a product of material, natural causes.
At Mind Matters News: Asked at The Scientist: Do invertebrates have feelings?
What we are learning is that invertebrate status is not, by itself, evidence of an inability to think or feel — as we used to suppose. In a world full of information and intelligence, it’s not nearly as tidy as our biology teachers thought.
Fun! Are these the most realistic CGI dinosaurs ever?
Gizmodo says they are: … Now, I suggest you compare all that you’ve seen about dinosaurs before to Apple TV+’s newest five-part series, Prehistoric Planet, which shows the true lives of dinosaurs as they were 66 million years ago, to our best current understanding. There are reptiles that need back scratches, hadrosaurs harried by mosquitos, Read More…
At Mind Matters News: Do ants think? Yes, they do — but they think like computers
Navigation expert Eric Cassell points out that algorithms have made the ant one of the most successful insects ever, both in numbers and complexity. Computer programmers use some of the same basic structures.
At Mind Matters News: Information theory: Evolution as the transfer of information
The authors of the open-access paper, marine researcher Rasmus Skern-Mauritzen and forester Thomas Nygaard Mikkelsen make clear that they understand information to be immaterial.
At Intelligent Design Academy: Chemical evolution of amino acids and proteins ? Impossible !!
A fact sheet is offered as well as a video.
At Mind Matters News: Why scientists think there might be life on Europa
An intelligent design approach to the universe is a better bet for finding life elsewhere than Darwinian randomness is.
Sabine Hossenfelder: The big problem with quantum theory is chaos
Hossenfelder: “… the chaotic motion of Hyperion tells us that we need the measurement collapse to actually be a physical process. Without it, quantum mechanics just doesn’t correctly describe our observations. But then what is this process? No one knows. And that’s the problem with quantum mechanics.”
From the Intelligent Design Academy: Quantum mechanic communication in cells – A paradigm shift in biology
The worldview in which Darwinism made sense will not survive quantum mechanics.
At Mind Matters News: The remarkable medicines wild animals find in nature
While intelligent animals like dolphins may sense cause and effect, we don’t know how butterflies and fruit flies pick out the plants that can help.