Material processes cannot, for example, account for the power to grasp infinity or perfection — which are not material ideas.
Mind
Five Reasons Why AI Programs Are Not “Human”
Wesley J. Smith gives us “five reasons to reject granting personhood, or membership in the moral community, to any AI program.”
At Mind Matters News: The battle over the human mind split two great thinkers
Philosopher Neil Thomas points out how neuroscience today has undermined a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role but that’s what happened.
At Mind Matters News: Computer prof: You are not computable and here’s why not
Dr. Robert J. Marks’s new book, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022), comes out just as Google has placed an engineer on leave for claiming an AI chatbot he tends is a real person…
Saturday night fun: Optical illusions: What causes them? Try some out!
Essentially, our brains — which would otherwise be overwhelmed — take shortcuts with the information they feed to our minds. Clever illusions reveal the shortcuts.
At Mind Matters News: The hive mind: Leafcutter ants behave like farmhands but…
Ants’ complex behavior patterns are part of following a colony algorithm rather than making individual decisions. They make immediate individual decisions but the hive mind of the colony makes the big ones. We humans struggle to understand the hive mind because our world is one of uniquely individual minds that can, with effort, be got to work together — for a while.
At Mind Matters News: Researchers: Humans process information differently from monkeys
The researchers found that, from an information theory perspective, human brains engage in less redundant and more synergistic processing than macaques. So information theory supports human exceptionalism where Darwinism doesn’t?
At Mind Matters News: Study: Eight-week mindfulness courses do not change the brain
O’Leary: Eight-week courses don’t provide enough time. Tibetan monks can control metabolism and even brain waves through meditation but they devote their lives to it. It would be more surprising if that fact had no effect on their brains than if it does.
Claim: Human cognitive abilities a consequence of walking upright
The explanation sounds rather contrived and, curiously, makes “evolution” sound like a theistic evolutionist’s God.
Unusual finding: Nature does NOT generally help human mental health
The Woke are eating their own at a faster rate than ever.
At Mind Matters News: Yes! There is evidence for the intelligent design of the brain (Michael Egnor)
When we believe that our perceptions and concepts point to the truth, we implicitly acknowledge the existence of God who designed them.
At Mind Matters News: Memory leans more on the brain’s electric field than on neurons
The neurons associated with our memories may change; it’s the electric field that holds the memories together, the neuroscientists say. That’s a very different picture of memories than the idea that memories are “stored” in the brain. It’s not quite like that … It’s closer to the quantum world.
At Mind Matters News: Consciousness experiments confirm each research group’s theories
And that’s frustrating because science advances by disconfirming some theories.
At Mind Matters News: John Horgan at Scientific American: Does quantum mechanics kill free will?
Horgan sides, somewhat tentatively, with free will. He notes that humans are more than just heaps of particles. Higher levels of complexity enable genuinely new qualities. What humans can do is not merely a more complex version of what amoebas can do — in turn, a more complex version of what electrons can do. Greater complexity can involve genuinely new qualities. A philosopher would say that he is not a reductionist.
At Mind Matters News: Science writer: Explain-away-the-mind book doesn’t succeed
Ball notes that the Journey of the Mind authors’ (phantom) reductionist revolution relies on a single cognitive scientist’s work. It’s not that he thinks it’s a terrible book. But he supposes (unusually in this area) that critical standards matter and that he should apply them.