Egnor: It’s remarkable that Dr. Shallit—a professor of computer science—doesn’t understand computation. Materialism is a kind of intellectual disability that afflicts even the well-educated. To put it simply, machines don’t and can’t think. Dr. Shallit’s wristwatch doesn’t know what time it is.
Mind
Eric Holloway: Math shows why the mind can’t be reduced to a formula
Holloway: The fundamental implication is that nothing within math, science, and technology can create information. Yet information is all around us. This problem arises in many areas: evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, and physics.
David Berlinski’s thought experiment: Darwinism vs. the obvious
A thought experiment by philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski echoes something Michael Egnor noted recently: Not only are human beings unique but we are unique despite being animals in nature. Here’s the thought experiment:
Michael Egnor: How Libet’s free will research is misrepresented
Sometimes, says Michael Egnor (below right), misrepresentation may be deliberate because Libet’s work doesn’t support a materialist perspective.
Michael Egnor: How a neuroscientist imaged free will (and “free won’t”)
At first, Libet thought that free will might not be real. Then he looked again…
Serious panpsychists are harder to ridicule now
For a long while, Darwinians have been able to get away with claiming that human consciousness evolved to increase our chances of survival. The trouble is, that’s unlikely. The relationship between intelligence and survival is unclear. Or that it is some kind of a “spandrel,” an accidental byproduct of useful qualities. But that’s merely a statement of faith in Darwinism as the total explainer. It’s evening and the chickens are coming home.
How did “wanting” things evolve?
We take the fact that life forms seek things for granted. We don’t ask why. Agency (“wanting” or “deciding” things) is as hard a problem in physics as consciousness.
Michael Egnor:Why the human mind is the opposite of a computer
Egnor: Mental activity always has meaning—every thought is about something. Computation always lacks meaning in itself. A word processing program doesn’t care about the opinion that you’re expressing when you use it.
The “connectome” means we may never “understand” the brain
In the sense of “There. That’s that.” It’s just too big. Machine learning might help but machines don’t explain their decisions very well. If the brain is immensely complex, it may elude complete understanding in detail. Deep Learning may survey it but that won’t convey understanding to us. We may need to look at more comprehensive ways of knowing
Materialist Matthew Cobb: We will never “solve” the brain
That’s not good news for reductive materialism. Wasn’t “science” supposed to explain all this stuff away ages ago? Instead, it’s science causing the problems.
Why pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield said the mind is more than the brain
He gave three lines of reasoning, based on brain surgery on over a thousand patients.
Michael Egnor: Pioneer neuroscientists believed the mind is more than the brain
neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talks about how many famous neuroscientist became dualists—that is, they concluded that there is something about human beings that goes beyond matter—based on observations they made during their work.
Michael Egnor: How can we study consciousness scientifically?
Egnor tells us that Tam Hunt offers some good ideas at Scientific American but his dismissal of objectivity is cause for concern.
Michael Egnor: The mind’s reality is consistent with neuroscience
Egnor: I think the best explanation of the relationship of the mind to the brain is Aristotelian hylomorphism which is the viewpoint that the soul is the form of the body and that certain powers of the soul, particularly the intellect and will, are not generated by matter but are immaterial things.
Researchers: Neanderthals really did bury their dead
Other researchers dispute it.