Holloway: This test for intelligence, the Turing Test, was invented by and named after the mid-twentieth century computer pioneer Alan Turing. It is a subjective test in that it depends on whether an artificial intelligence is capable of convincing human testers that it is a human. But fooling humans, while impressive, is not really the same thing as actually possessing human-level intelligence.
Intelligent Design
Why frogs have such weird skulls
Food for thought: “Weirdly, it’s easier for us to generate beautiful images of skulls than it is to know what these frogs eat,” Blackburn said. “Natural history remains quite hard. Just because we know things exist doesn’t mean we know anything about them.”
Have you ever wondered why the world is three-dimensional?
Why not two or four spatial dimensions? One researcher, James Scargill, argues that we could possibly have made do with two dimensions.
Why COVID-19 rates are difficult to compute
Among other things: “Things appear deceptively dire if we calculate death rate solely by reference to reported COVID-19 cases; but the picture is deceptively benign if we measure deaths against an inflated conjecture about the non-reporting population. ” – McCarthy
A symmetry the universe “must never violate”?
Sounds like a designed system all right. Too bad that’s a problem for many physicists.
Some timely thoughts on “gullibility”
Our betters need to believe that we are gullible. Not so, says Hugo Mercier, whose recent book, Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe (2020), takes a different position from that of the campus fatheads.
Michael Egnor: Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist, doesn’t know how computers work
Egnor: It’s remarkable that Dr. Shallit—a professor of computer science—doesn’t understand computation. Materialism is a kind of intellectual disability that afflicts even the well-educated. To put it simply, machines don’t and can’t think. Dr. Shallit’s wristwatch doesn’t know what time it is.
Eric Holloway: Math shows why the mind can’t be reduced to a formula
Holloway: The fundamental implication is that nothing within math, science, and technology can create information. Yet information is all around us. This problem arises in many areas: evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, and physics.
Pass me a Corona! II
The comments to the original Pass me a Corona! post are closed. Additional comments on that topic should be posted below. I will start this post with PaV’s last comments to the prior post [i.e., everything that follows is PaV, not Barry]. Today the paywall for a Spectator USA article has been lifted. The article Read More…
The Media Squandered Trust; The Nation Suffered
In bygone days the news media enjoyed a great deal of prestige and was trusted by nearly everyone. Walter Cronkite was called “the most trusted man in America.” Those days are gone.* A poll last week indicated that the news media are viewed least favorably of 16 major institutions. It is no wonder. Vicious partisanship Read More…
John West on Darwin’s corrosive idea
Intro: In the case of Darwin’s idea of unguided evolution and of a planet of life formed from blind material processes alone, John West, Associate Director of the Center for Science & Culture, notes a range of consequences and impacts, on how we see the sanctity of human life, how we understand morality and spirituality, and much more.
Michael Egnor: If you care about suffering, you implicitly acknowledge God’s existence
Egnor: Heck, if I were a mere vehicle for selfish genes evolved wholly by natural selection, I would love mass death, as long as my own genes weren’t deleted. Coronavirus is efficient — natural selection on an industrial scale. Those of us who are alive are the winners.
The eugenicists were mostly the Woke people of their day
Terry Scambray: Opponents were mostly the unWoke—Catholics, anti-Darwinists, and such. (A review of The Guarded Gate.)
David Berlinski’s thought experiment: Darwinism vs. the obvious
A thought experiment by philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski echoes something Michael Egnor noted recently: Not only are human beings unique but we are unique despite being animals in nature. Here’s the thought experiment:
Tracking the Covid-19 pandemic — Our World in Data
Here is a log-lin on cases, relative to 100 as marking breakout: Likewise, for deaths, starting at the fifth: Here, we see onward unfolding of the pandemic. The 2 – 3 day doubling band is still there [and the USA is growing fastest now], but now we see where the plague is beginning to slow Read More…