Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Intelligent Design

Einstein shows modern science is working. But post-modern science does not need to work.

From a letter published in Nature: Two teams of physicists have subjected Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity to some of the strictest tests so far, and found no deviation from the theory’s predictions. … The team reports agreement between relativity’s predictions and the lunar data that is up to three orders of magnitude better than previously reported. In a separate paper, … authors found that data and theory matched with a precision of up to an order of magnitude better than recorded in previous tests. More. So modern science, say what you want about it – (sexist, racist, imperialist, (apply to your national government’s grievance-monger to have your alternative personal grievance entered on the growing indictment against science…) – accords Read More ›

Psychologists: Consciousness is an illusion, like a rainbow

From David Oakley and Peter Halligan at The Conversation: If the experience of consciousness does not confer any particular advantage, it’s not clear what its purpose is. But as a passive accompaniment to non-conscious processes, we don’t think that the phenomenon of personal awareness has a purpose, in much the same way that rainbows do not. Rainbows simply result from the reflection, refraction and dispersion of sunlight through water droplets – none of which serves any particular purpose. Our conclusions also raise questions about the notions of free will and personal responsibility. If our personal awareness does not control the contents of the personal narrative which reflects our thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions and decisions, then perhaps we should not be Read More ›

Neuroscience’s failing attempts to measure free will

Which, in the context, can only mean naturalist efforts to identify free will as an illusion, like consciousness, that evolved to help spread our selfish genes. From Ari N. Schulman at Big Questions Online: For example, let’s say I decide not to commit murder. My decision is rational not only because I have deliberated about the reasons not to do it, but also because my decision flows from a character that has been formed in a rational way. When faced with the choice to murder, my dispositions have already been shaped, e.g., by membership in a society that professes to value human life, by individual reflection, or by both. And if this is the case, then when confronted with the Read More ›

Philip Cunningham on determinism vs free will

 Notes for the vid are here: George Ellis stated much the same thing when he noted, in Einstein’s denial of free will, that if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. … More. See also: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice? and Nature, as defined today, cannot be all there is. Science demonstrates that.

How are those AI spiritual machines coming?

Reader Edward Sisson writes to say, Denyse says in her 2006 article that “Then there was artificial intelligence (AI). Remember, this is supposed to be the “age of spiritual machines,” when computers are becoming indistinguishable from humans. In reality, the human mind works quite differently from a computer, and simply increasing computing power does not produce characteristic human qualities. AI enthusiast Kenneth Silber complains, “This is a disappointing state of affairs.” It sure is, if you are HAL or Deeper Blue.” [No computer has become inherently smarter than its programmers, for the same reasons as characters in a novel do not have more insight than the author. ]” He adds, The current issue of MIT’s Technology Review (Nov/Dec 2017) is Read More ›

Is “macroevolution” a term used only by creationists?

Recently, we noted an upcoming Royal Society meeting: Sexual selection in extinct animals. An alert reader writes to say, On linking to the Royal Society website referenced in the Uncommon Descent post, we find this: “Sexual Selection: patterns in the history of life. Theo Murphy International scientific meeting organised by Dr Rob Knell, Dr Dave Hone and Professor Doug Emlen. Sexual selection is potentially an important driver of macroevolutionary processes like speciation and extinction, but this has rarely been tested using the fossil record. This meeting will bring biologists and palaeontologists together to discuss sexual selection’s role in macroevolution, how to detect it in extinct animals and how to measure its influence on the history of life across geological time.” Read More ›

Romantic love “evolved” to prevent infanticide? Can someone please pull the chain on evolutionary psychology?

From Phoebe Weston at the Daily Mail: Falling in love is one of life’s great mysteries, but now scientists believe this strange feeling could be key to our evolutionary success. For the first time researchers have found evidence ‘selection promoted love in human evolution’ as it increased the chances of us having families. Scientists studied the Hadza people of Tanzania, who don’t use modern contraception, and found passionate partnerships were associated with having more children. It follows previous research that found love may have evolved to stop male primates from killing their infants. More. From the human history for which we actually have a good deal of evidence (not just from a small, outlier group), “passionate partnerships” were not the main Read More ›

Google’s Truthbot gets upended by reality

From Eric Worrall at Watts Up With That?: Google’s efforts to filter out positions which they think are fake news, like climate skeptic posts, have hit an unexpected snag: Google have just noticed large groups of people across the world hold views which differ from the views championed by the Silicon Valley monoculture. Like we said, the snag is people. As a climate skeptic and IT expert I’m finding this Google difficulty highly entertaining. What people like Google’s Schmidt desperately want to discover is a generalised way of detecting fake news. They believe in their hearts that climate skepticism for example is as nutty as thinking the moon landings were faked, but they have so far failed to find a Read More ›

Could traversable wormholes that allow information to escape black holes really exist?

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The flurry of findings started last year with a paper that reported the first traversable wormhole that doesn’t require the insertion of exotic material to stay open. Instead, according to Ping Gao and Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Aron Wall of Stanford University, the repulsive negative energy in the wormhole’s throat can be generated from the outside by a special quantum connection between the pair of black holes that form the wormhole’s two mouths. When the black holes are connected in the right way, something tossed into one will shimmy along the wormhole and, following certain events in the outside universe, exit the second. Remarkably, Gao, Jafferis and Wall noticed that their scenario is Read More ›

Would this proposal for peer review reform work?

From Jennifer Franklin at Elsevier Connect: A new sort of peer review: RMR articles are sent for review without the results, discussion or conclusion (although data has already been collected) and reviewers are asked to evaluate the article on the research question and the methodology only. The review process is split into two stages. In stage 1, only the research question and methodology are sent for review, and reviewers are asked to provide a recommendation. If the paper is given an in-principle “accept” decision, the paper moves into stage 2 where the author submits the full paper for review. More detail on this process can be found here. Get this: If you asked a compelling question, used rigorous methods and Read More ›

Common Atlantic jellyfish is actually two species?

At this point, is “species” just homage to Darwin’s Origin of Species? From ScienceDaily: The Atlantic sea nettle is one of the most common and well known jellyfish along the U.S. East Coast, especially in the Chesapeake Bay and Rehoboth Bay where they commonly sting swimmers in large numbers. Since it was described nearly 175 years ago, the jellyfish has been assumed to be a single species. The discovery that is was actually two distinct species, Gaffney said, was made possible by DNA sequencing techniques. “Before DNA came along, people in museums looked at organisms and counted spines and bristles, measured things, and sorted organisms by their physical characteristics in order to identify species,” Gaffney said. “In the case of Read More ›

Upcoming Royal Society meeting: Sexual selection in extinct animals Huh?

Extinct animals? Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to Theo Murphy International scientific meeting organised by Dr Rob Knell, Dr Dave Hone and Professor Doug Emlen [May 9-10 2018] Sexual selection is potentially an important driver of macroevolutionary processes like speciation and extinction, but this has rarely been tested using the fossil record. This meeting will bring biologists and palaeontologists together to discuss sexual selection’s role in macroevolution, how to detect it in extinct animals and how to measure its influence on the history of life across geological time. One thing about studying sexual selection in extinct animals, we may never be able to find out if we are wrong. Sexual selection was Darwin’s other Really Big Theory of how evolution happens, Read More ›

When Noam Chomsky flirted with not being a Darwinist

Linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages) writes, Recently listened to “Noam Chomsky speaks about Universal Linguistics: Origins of Language” on YouTube. The talk was at Winona State University in Minnesota on March 20, 1998. This is about 20 years back, and the man could more comfortably sound like an ID person than he could now. He is a Cartesian, meaning that for all practical purposes he accepts the mind-body distinction, that is, that human language is creative yet operates within the parameters of grammar that is innate. Yet he says there is no physical-mental distinction because there is no physical. Newton’s law of gravitation–an attractive force at a distance–is as mystical and unexplainable as the telekinesis of a psychic (if Read More ›

In 2008 book, philosopher of consciousness John Searle warns against the post-modern will to power in science

Wintery Knight reminds us that philosopher of consciousness John Searle wrote about the basic instincts behind post-modernism in Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy In The Real World in 2008: I have to confess, however, that I think there is a much deeper reason for the persistent appeal of all forms of antirealism, and this has become obvious in the twentieth century: it satisfies a basic urge to power. It just seems too disgusting, somehow, that we should have to be at the mercy of the “real world.” It seems too awful that our representations should have to be answerable to anything but us. This is why people who hold contemporary versions of antirealism and reject the correspondence theory of truth Read More ›

Here are some astronauts who are not named Julie Payette who doubt that life has a random origin

Readers may recall the recent flap about Canada’s governor-general ridiculing anyone who thinks that life did not originate randomly, to which Canadian biophysicist Kirk Durston responded, among other things: The third problem with the Governor General’s example of unquestioning faith in science is the corruption that has reached crises proportions in certain areas of science itself, with a special nod to the biological sciences. In 2012 the journal Nature published an exposé which found that 89% of “landmark” papers in the field of cancer research, could not be reproduced. More. This is not a good time to be gung-ho for scientism but anyway, Durston notes: that other astronauts do not agree with Payette: On two different occasions, I spent time Read More ›