Category: Mind
Yes, the placebo effect is real, and it may be getting stronger
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
At Mind Matters: The fact that you may start to get better if you believe you are receiving treatment is one of the best-attested facts in medicine. A drug licensed for use must demonstrate greater effectiveness than a placebo (a capsule of sugar or an inert substance, perhaps) in clinical trials. That standard does not […]
Whatta headline! Early man was “total mean girl”
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
William von Hippel, an evolutionary psychologist promoting a book, explains how we got here: Social connection and its middle-school messiness assured our survival — more than harnessing fire or developing opposable thumbs. Von Hippel writes that a series of “social leaps” — or movements forward in the way we connect with our fellow man — […]
You are conscious? But so what? Maybe your coffee mug is too
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
A survey of materialist (naturalist) theories of consciousness would require you to keep an open mind on the topic. At Mind Matters, In an academic article, Kastrup identified the available materialist options, as he sees them. Picture, if you will, you, an amoeba, and a coffee mug. How much does each of you participate in […]
Brendan Dixon: Even the skeptical Deep Learning researcher left out one AI myth
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Readers may remember Dixon from the time MIT tried building a universal moral machine. Here are some of his thoughts on one overlooked aspect of the “superintelligent AI” myth: [Google AI researcher] Francois Chollet is right to recognize that we, like all animals, come pre-wired. Young deer stand, leap, and run within hours of birth. […]
What algorithms can’t figure out and why
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Mind, Naturalism |
Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute, asks, Who needs wisdom? if We’ve got algorithms! ? In our increasingly digital society, the algorithm seems set to replace wisdom in human reasoning. While we are seeing some pushback against the movement to “algorithmicize” everything, few lay out explicitly the limitations as well as […]
BBC: Chimpanzees show empathy and altruism just like humans
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind |
The BBC has also thought that chimpanzees were entering the Stone Age. And now: Eminent anthropologist Frans de Waal explains that politicians have a lot to learn from how chimpanzees show empathy. “How chimpanzees reveal the roots of human behaviour” at BBC Reality: Chimpanzees don’t seek humans out the way dogs do. In many ways, […]
Life forms are not machines and neurons are not neural networks
| November 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Mind |
From Mind Matters: Much popular literature leaves the impression that living organisms are machines or even billions of them linked together. For example, at Medium, we learn, Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for […]
Is the human mind best seen as a halting oracle?
| November 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Mind |
Eric Holloway explains Jonathan Bartlett’s account of the human mind as a halting oracle: In his paper, “Using Turing oracles in cognitive models of problem-solving” Jonathan Bartlett proposes to model the human mind as a halting oracle. A brief explanation: Computer science pioneer Alan Turing (1912–1954) imagined a universal machine that can copy any other […]
Can culture explain why brains have become bigger?
| November 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on […]
Once upon a time, MIT tried building a universal Moral Machine…
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Intelligent Design, Mind |
In an effort to program self-driving cars to make decisions in a crisis, MIT’s Moral Machine offered 2.3 million people worldwide a chance to crowdsource who to kill and who to spare in a road mishap… The project aimed at building righteous self-driving cars revealed stark differences in global values. People from China and Japan […]
Winston Ewert: Do technologies change cultures or were the changes inevitable anyway?
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Ewert, developer of the dependency graph model of relationships between life forms (as an alternative to the tree of life concept) offers some thoughts on whether technology is neutral: A number of examples can be put forward in defense of the thesis that technologies do change cultures. A commonly cited example is the printing press. […]
Michael Egnor: Is your brain a billion little biological machines?
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience |
As pop neuroscientist Anil Seth claims in a TED talk? What the brain “is” depends on how you study it. We live in a mechanical age, so we study it as a machine. But our method of study determines what we learn. Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg noted perceptively that “…what we observe […]
Stone tools found in Saudi Arabia from 300,000 years ago
| October 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
At the time, Saudi Arabia was a grassy plain with many lakes: Archaeologist Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and his colleagues recently discovered a handful of stone tools in a sandy layer of soil beneath the dry traces of a shallow Pleistocene lake at Ti’s al Ghadah, […]
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do […]
Jonathan Bartlett: Self-driving vehicles are just around the corner, all right
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
On the other side of a vast chasm… The code needed to detect and handle the flow between the situations increases polynomially with the number of driving situations we must address. That is, if we have 2 driving situations, there are 2 possible transitions to account for. If we have 3 driving situations, there are […]
Multiverse proponent Max Tegmark on how AI could run the world
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
In his book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, (2017), MIT physics prof Tegmark offers a science fiction scenario for how AI colossus Prometheus, produced by a group of idealistic programmers, the Omegas, could take over the world. And not only take over the world but make it a bureaucrat’s idea of a […]
Crows create compound tools
| October 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind |
But no, they’re still not people. From ScienceDaily: An international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and the University of Oxford have revealed that New Caledonian crows are able to create tools by combining two or more otherwise non-functional elements, an ability so far observed only in humans […]
Researchers: Starchy food may have aided human brain development
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: A perennial topic in human evolution is, what gave humans an advantage? A logical response to the question is: Name just about anything and someone will make a case out of it. A little while ago, it was meat. This time, it’s starch. People with more copies of the AMY1 gene — and corresponding […]
Ayn Rand had misgivings about “evolution”
| October 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy |
That might not be what we’d have expected to hear about the twentieth century novelist and philosopher but reader Eric Holloway sends us this item: I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I […]
Move over Mother Theresa! Wild chimps sometimes share food with others
| October 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From ScienceDaily: Sharing meat after hunting and exchanging other valued food items is considered key in the evolution of cooperation in human societies. One prominent idea is that humans share valuable foods to gain future favors, such that those we chose to share with are more likely to cooperate with us in the future. Despite […]
