Category: Mind
Neurosurgeon outlines why machines can’t think
| July 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Michael Egnor at Mind Matters Today: The hallmark of human thought is meaning, and the hallmark of computation is indifference to meaning. That is, in fact, what makes thought so remarkable and also what makes computation so useful. You can think about anything, and you can use the same computer to express your entire […]
Bill Dembski: Descartes (1596—1650) could tell you why “smart machines” are stalled
| July 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From design theorist William Dembski at Mind Matters Today: The computational literature on No Free Lunch theorems and Conservation of Information (see the work of David Wolpert and Bill Macready on the former as well as that of Robert J. Marks and myself on the latter) imply that all problem-solving algorithms, including such a master […]
J. P. Moreland on why minds could not simply evolve somehow
| July 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
Via Chad at Truth Bomb, quoting Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, …you can’t get something from nothing…It’s as simple as that. If there were no God, then the history of the entire universe, up until the appearance of living creatures, would be a history of dead matter with no consciousness. You would not have any […]
Announcement: Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence launches Wednesday, July 11
| July 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Physicist Stephen Hawking warned humanity that “the development of artificial intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race… Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” To meet the challenge of AI, Hawking urged the creation of “some form of world government.” But will AI really spell […]
Can we choose not to believe in free will?
| July 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Peter Gooding at The Conversation: A recent study showed that it is possible to diminish people’s belief in free will by simply making them read a science article suggesting that everything is predetermined. This made the participants’ less willing to donate to charitable causes (compared to a control group). This was only observed in […]
Sabine Hossenfelder: Free will is compatible with physics
| July 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy, Physics |
From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog Back(re)action: It occurred to me some years ago, however, that there is a much simpler example for how reductionism can fail. It can fail simply because the extrapolation from the theory at short distances to the one at long distances […]
Random evolution somehow creates responsibility?
| July 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus: Certain features of human behavior recur regardless of culture. Does that mean that we are in some sense fine-tuned by natural selection to be a particular kind of creature? Nope, says Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist and the former chairman of the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural […]
Modern brain imaging techniques offer examples of a human mind with very little brain
| July 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Plough Quarterly: I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was […]
Neuroscientist: Free will is an illusion but we should believe we have it
| July 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Steven Novella at The Ness: For example, as I said above, even though I am highly aware of what neuroscience has to say about the illusion of free will and decision making, I also recognize that we have to live our life as if we have free will. We do make decisions, and those […]
Study: Religiously affiliated people lived “9.45 and 5.64 years longer…”
| July 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Medicine, Mind, Religion |
From Chuck Dinerstein at American Council for Science and Health: There is increasing evidence that a correlation exists between a person’s social support and engagement and their longevity. At a bare minimum, it makes sense because it is challenging to manage chronic disease or recovery from hospitalization on your own. A new study looks at […]
Michael Shermer: We can never solve mysteries like consciousness, free will, or God
| June 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Michael Shermer at Scientific American: Are these “hard” problems, as philosopher David Chalmers characterized consciousness, or are they truly insoluble “mysterian” problems, as philosopher Owen Flanagan designated them (inspired by the 1960s rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians)? The “old mysterians” were dualists who believed in nonmaterial properties, such as the soul, that […]
Linguists skeptical of Darwinian theory that toolmaking “paved the way” for human language
| June 23, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, language, Mind, Neuroscience |
Should young ID theorists study language origins, as retired linguist suggests below? From Ben James at The Atlantic: Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence […]
At New Scientist: The neuroscientists’ bet that a signature of human consciousness will be found in the brain has only five years to go…
| June 22, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
If it is still on. From Per Snaprud at New Scientist: TWENTY years ago this week, two young men sat in a smoky bar in Bremen, northern Germany. Neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers had spent the day lecturing at a conference about consciousness, and they still had more to say. After a few […]
From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.”
| June 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience |
From Bernardo Kastrup, Adam Crabtree, and Edward F. Kelly at Scientific American: In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what has traditionally been called “multiple personality disorder” and today is known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (“alters”), some of […]
Astonishing news: Dogs use gestures to communicate with people
| June 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Phoebe Southworth at the Daily Mail: Scientists have found ‘strong evidence’ that dogs use gestures to communicate with people in one of the first systematic attempts to decode their language. … Sometimes dogs use a variety of signals in order to get their message across if it is not understood the first time, the […]
Jay Richards: Is artificial intelligence budding consciousness or just statistical processing?
| June 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Jay Richards at ENST: On a new episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards talks with host Mike Keas about a recent Atlantic article from former National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger on “How the Enlightenment Ends” with the rise of artificial intelligence. Richards … explains that AI is about statistical processing, not budding […]
At Nautilus: Psychology needs evolutionary psychology
| June 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
As if psychology were not troubled enough. Psychologist Cristine Legare argues at Nautilus: My high school biology teacher, Mr. Whittington, put a framed picture of a primate ancestor in the front of his classroom—a place of reverence. In a deeply religious and conservative community in rural America, this was a radical act. Evolution, among the […]
Researcher who hopes machines will think like humans draws flak for critiquing the field
| June 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From a new paper by AI researcher Gary Marcus at ArXiv: Although deep learning has historical roots going back decades, neither the term “deep learning” nor the approach was popular just over five years ago, when the field was reignited by papers such as Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton’s now classic (2012) deep network model of […]
Bill Dembski on artificial intelligence’s homunculus problem
| June 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Bill Dembski at Freedom, Technology, Education: Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence So how can we see that AI is not, and will likely never be, a match for human intelligence? The argument is simple and straightforward. AI, and that includes everything from classical expert systems to […]
Animals take turns when communicating? Who would have imagined that?
| June 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From ScienceDaily: An international team of academics undertook a large-scale review of research into turn-taking behaviour in animal communication, analysing hundreds of animal studies. Turn-taking, the orderly exchange of communicative signals, is a hallmark of human conversation and has been shown to be largely universal across human cultures. The review, a collaboration between the Universities […]
