If the ability to hunt small prey requires a lot more intelligence, cats are definitely smarter than people, let alone smarter than dogs (a more frequently heard claim).
Mind
A science writer offers some interesting thoughts on free will
It’s interesting that a science writer sees through the most fundamental materialist rot. Unfortunately, it sounds as though he hopes to replace it with a different one.
Neuroscientists demonstrate that we can communicate with people while they are dreaming
At one time, the idea of communicating with people while they were dreaming would have been regarded by most scientists as hokey New Age stuff. But now a research group has done it.
Michael Egnor asks if materialist neuroscience is an unwitting Sokal hoax
Egnor thinks that while physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed postmodern journals (the famous Sokal hoax. of 1996), materialists like Francis Crick (1916–2004) seem to hoax themselves.
Michael Egnor: Materialists misrepresent Libet’s research on free will
Egnor is responding to a reader’s question about whether neuroscience has disproven free will.
Is “consciousness” a useless concept? Michael Egnor makes the case
Egnor: Our mental life is a composite of abilities — arousal, sensation, perception, locomotion, reason, etc., and these abilities appear to subsist in modified form despite dramatic changes in the body and brain.
Michael Egnor: From a medical perspective, “consciousness” adds nothing to the description of mental states
In his view, “ “Consciousness ” is a meaningless term that too often misleads us, and it shouldn’t be used in medicine, neuroscience, or philosophy: “Consciousness” is a very vague term and, ultimately, I don’t think it has any useful meaning at all, apart from other categories such as sensation, perception, imagination, reason etc. Aristotle Read More…
The thought determinism paradox, continued
Brain electrochemistry data does not describe actual thoughts; it certainly can’t trace thoughts to origins outside of the brain itself
Here’s a relatively new argument against the idea that our minds are an illusion
Stevens: Illusion theory has no rule of reproducibility. Yet, if you set up the infinity mirror experiment at another time, you will see the same effect.
Illusion theory has no rule about how other observers perceive their illusions.
Can we disentangle our minds from our experiences?
Consciousness: Why do you know you exist? A rock doesn’t know. Yet you both exist. What’s the difference?
How a Silicon Valley psychologist can believe consciousness doesn’t exist
The problem with Riach’s view is that the final level of complexity is immaterial and the computer is just not going there.
In new book, a psychologist tries to explain consciousness
Mark Solms clearly assumes, in his Psychology Today column, that the mind is just what the brain does. But that’s precisely the claim that the very existence of consciousness clouds.
Studies claiming to “read minds” debunked
At ScienceDaily: The Purdue researchers originally began questioning the dataset when they could not obtain similar outcomes from their own tests.
Universality of human emotion upheld by study
From UC Berkeley: “Researchers at UC Berkeley and Google used machine-learning technology known as a “deep neural network” to analyze facial expressions in some 6 million video clips uploaded to YouTube from people in 144 countries spanning North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.”
Can life’s mysteries really be solved by claims about hidden webs of information?
All the real problems occur at the boundaries, which means that they are not contained by anything.