Lennox: Our undoubted progress in technology in terms of speed and competence can easily mask the huge barrier that stands in the way of superior intelligent machines — consciousness.
Mind
At Mind Matters News: George Montañez on what’s wrong with the Turing Test
Marks: It’s very easy to determine if who you’re talking to is a computer. You just ask them to compute the square root of 30 or something, because a human would take a while to get the square root of 30.
Humans vs monkeys Science claims we should question more sharply
ScienceDaily: “In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures and species, researchers found that indigenous Tsimane’ people in Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for “recursion,” But aren’t these claims a bit ridiculous? When was the last time a monkey conveyed a complex idea?
Theoretical physicist: Physics has made huge strides, but has not upset free will
George Ellis: If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing Read More…
Why we can’t cheat death by uploading our brains to the internet
It sounded like such a great idea, right? Robert J. Marks: Well, actually, that’s very interesting because I think there’s a presupposition on Musk’s part that we are indeed algorithmic. That we can actually be represented by an algorithm, by a computer code… There’s good foundations and algorithmic information theory and computer science, which suggest Read More…
The modern human mind evolved so far back it met itself in the parking lot?
Vince: The great flowering of culture we enjoy from our Cro-Magnon ancestors was not evidence of a cleverer, ‘more evolved’ people but because the demographic, social, environmental and cultural changes that occurred at this time in Europe drove cultural complexity.
A new video on the irreducible mind
From Inspiring Philosophy: Does neuroscience show consciousness emerges from a brain? We show a wealth of data suggests the opposite. The mind does not appear to be reducible to matter.
A philosopher explains how you can know for sure that you are not a sim
As philosopher Richard Johns explains, sims do not understand simhood: How can Alice determine whether the strange little man in her apartment who claims to be her Programmer is telling the truth? Recently, philosopher Richard Johns (left), whose work was profiled here at Mind Matters News in “A philosopher explains why thinking matter is impossible,” Read More…
Two reasons why humans have souls are proposed
Maybe wondering about whether we have a soul is a bit like wondering whether we should act more mature in difficult situations.
At Mind Matters News: Brain activity can’t reveal our minds, it turns out
Our minds read things but it doesn’t follow that we can read our minds. We can’t even read brains. Which is not the same thing.
Michael Egnor: Atheist neuroscientist gets the brain wrong
Atheist neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran claims in a video at You Tube (Beyond Belief Conference, 2006) that brain hemispheres can have different opinions on the existence of God. Perhaps it is relevant, in assessing such a bizarre claim, that Dr. Ramachandran also makes a statement about brain surgery that is false.
Michael Egnor: Neuroscientists can’t dismiss near death experiences
Egnor: It’s sobering to note that neuroscience has utterly failed to explain how the brain and mind relate. It is as if cosmology had failed to tell us anything meaningful about the universe; or medical science failed to tell us anything about health and disease; or geology failed to tell us anything about rocks.
Michael Egnor: Materialism is easily falsifiable by science
Egnor: Cosmological singularities, such as black holes and the singularity from which our universe arose, are wholly supernatural. That is, they are undefined in any materialist/naturalist framework.
AI replacing humans is consistent with Dawkins’s naturalist philosophy
Which is where the wheels come off.
Jonathan Bartlett on Elon Musk’s myths of the mind
Bartlett: What I found most interesting about the conversation, however, is not the technology itself but the (secular) mythology embedded in Musk’s lengthy descriptions of what he thinks his device can do…