Category: Mind
A long ramble about free will denies its existence, but nicely
| October 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
The piece is notable for apparent incoherence on the subject: From philosopher Joseph Laporte at Big Questions Online: As we learn from Augustine’s Confessions, he felt the crushing burden of his vices and of his own helplessness to lift himself without God’s grace. That fits with many people’s experience. Besides, it’s Christian orthodoxy: without grace, […]
Researchers: Your brain knows when you have died
| October 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Mind, Neuroscience |
According to those who have been resuscitated from clinical death. From Fox News: The evidence reportedly suggests a surge of brain activity immediately after a near-death experience. “What tends to happen is that people who’ve had these very profound experiences may come back positively transformed — they become more altruistic, more engaged with helping others. […]
Claim: Whales and dolphins have rich ‘human-like’ cultures and societies
| October 19, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From ScienceDaily: Whales and dolphins (Cetaceans) live in tightly-knit social groups, have complex relationships, talk to each other and even have regional dialects — much like human societies. A major new study, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Monday 16th October), has linked the complexity of Cetacean culture and behaviour to the size of […]
Nature cannot be all there is. Science demonstrates that.
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Multiverse, Naturalism, Neuroscience, Philosophy |
From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Naturalists (who say nature is all there is) have recently sought to jimmy the rules around evidence to accommodate their strong belief that a multiverse really exists. Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers a glimpse of the future they propose, in a piece at Forbes titled “The multiverse […]
Neuroscience: Walking back “Perception a controlled hallucination”
| October 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience, Philosophy |
From Ari N. Shulman at Big Questions Online: Is human perception a controlled hallucination? That was the claim advanced in a pair of talks at the Human Mind Conference in Cambridge, England in June, one by Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, the other by Andy Clark, a philosopher at the University […]
Poor robot can’t pass Turing test
| October 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Becky Feirrera at Motherboard: All stories about robots are, on some level, reflections of human behavior, and Thom’s efforts to flirt like a human—borrowing overheard phrases from others to compensate for his lack of self—is familiar enough in the human dating scene. But by the end of “The Flirtbot’s Condition,” a friendly chat with […]
Atheist immortality: Uploading one’s mind to a computer
| October 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Human evolution, Mind |
From Shivali Best at Daily Mail: Professor Cox said that he found ‘no reason at all’ why human intelligence couldn’t be simulated by computers – although he did not express a timeline for this to happen. Classic. Last we heard, the mind doesn’t really exist and our perceptions are hallucinations. funny, all that stuff disappears when […]
Dan Brown: AI Collective consciousness will replace God
| October 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Religion |
Yes, that Dan Brown, of da Vinci code fame, on the book tour circuit. From Reuters via Daily Mail: Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. ‘We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,’ he said, forecasting the emergence […]
Postmodernism in science 101: You think outside your brain and the world thinks for you
| October 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience |
From Sam Kriss at Atlantic: Among philosophers, biologists, and cognitive scientists, this nightmare is an exciting new field of study, known as embodied or extended cognition: broadly, the theory that what we think of as brain processes can take place outside of the brain. In some cases, this isn’t a particularly radical idea. The octopus, […]
Can AI become just like us?
| October 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Mind, Naturalism |
We’ve been hearing a lot about that. From Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT , in “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions” at Technology Review, featuring the fourth sin: When people hear that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to […]
Consciousness researcher: Objectivity is “cultural discrimination”
| October 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From lit prof Tim Parks and AI philosopher Riccardo Manzotti at New York Review of Books: Manzotti: One of the comedies of modern thinking is that we treat objects that exist relative to the tools of scientists as more real, more correct, somehow, than other objects. In the case you mention, there are four objects: […]
From LiveScience: Consciousness after death
| October 5, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Medicine, Mind, Naturalism |
From Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience: Driven by ambition and curiosity to learn what lies on the other side of death, five medical students deliberately stop their hearts in order to experience “the afterlife” in the new thriller “Flatliners” (Sony Pictures), which opened in U.S. theaters on Sept. 29. They quickly discover that there are unexpected […]
Are split-brain people really two half-persons? No, and that deepens the “mystery of consciousness”
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Mind, Naturalism |
From cognitive psychologist and physicist Yaïr Pinto at Aeon: We’ve got to admit that split-brain patients feel and behave normally. If a split-brain patient walks into the room, you would not notice anything unusual. And they themselves claim to be completely unchanged, other than being rid of terrible epileptic seizures. If the person was really […]
Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: We know almost nothing about the human consciousness but naturalism must treat it as evolved from unconscious elements. Much confusion is avoided by recognizing that that is a core assumption, not a discovery. Naturalist theories of consciousness currently proliferate with abandon because there is no basis for […]
If evolution were repeated, would jellyfish be intelligent?
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Douglas Fox at Aeon: The ctenophore was already known for having a relatively advanced nervous system; but these first experiments by Moroz showed that its nerves were constructed from a different set of molecular building blocks – different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’, says Moroz: these animals are ‘aliens […]
New findings overturn the widely held model of human visual attention
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Our visual attention is drawn to parts of a scene that have meaning, rather than to those that are salient or “stick out,” according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. The findings, published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, overturn the […]
Human self-awareness without cerebral cortex
| September 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Ferris Jabr at Scientific American: Consciousness, most scientists argue, is not a universal property of all matter in the universe. Rather, consciousness is restricted to a subset of animals with relatively complex brains. The more scientists study animal behavior and brain anatomy, however, the more universal consciousness seems to be. A brain as complex […]
Paul Nelson on poetic naturalism as a religion
| September 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Religion |
From Paul Nelson at Evolution News & Views: Seriously: Carroll himself announces this “poetic naturalism as religion” Facebook option on his webpage, without a trace of irony. If we think of religion as the sphere of one’s deepest values – i.e., those bedrock truths and commitments for which we would willingly offer ourselves, and by […]
Claim: It makes sense to pretend to believe in free will
| September 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From What Is Thought? by AI expert Eric B. Baum (2004, pp 226-27): Consciousness has many aspects. We are aware of our world and our sensations. We have a sense of self. We have goals and aspirations. We seem to have free will and moral responsibility. Yet, as I’ve said, the mind is equivalent to […]
Are newborn babies really not conscious?
| September 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From philosopher Bernardo Kastrup at Scientific American: An article on the neuroscience of infant consciousness, which attracted some interest a few years ago, asked: “When does your baby become conscious?” The premise, of course, was that babies aren’t born conscious but, instead, develop consciousness at some point. (According to the article, it is about five […]
