For decades, researchers were transfixed with the idea of humanizing great apes by raising them among humans and teaching them language. Emerging from the ruins and recriminations of the collapse, philosophy prof Don Ross has a new idea: Let’s start with elephants instead…
Mind
Scientists: For the last time, plants are NOT conscious!!
We know something’s changed when scientists need to make these points. Maybe underestimating the significance of human intelligence plays a role. After all, if we are just clever apes, maybe lettuce is just-as-clever apes too. Maybe salad is murder…
Artificial vs human intelligence: Sabine Hossenfelder offers us 10 differences
As AI types like to say, the system is so easily fooled because it doesn’t “know” anything. We are slowly learning, in consequence, more about what it means for a human being to “know” something.
“Descartes’ mind-body problem” makes nonsense of materialism
The mind-body “problem” is the nonsense materialists are led into in order to make the obvious meaning of the experience of an immaterial mind disappear in a dense weed jungle of verbiage.
Paper claiming kids’ religiosity decreased altruism retracted
But what was the paper doing in a biology journal anyway? Maybe the underlying assumptions should be unpacked.
Philosopher puts a positive spin on contemplating human extinction
So many scandals and impasses that science faces today stem in large part from the problem Moynihan avoids. Facts don’t validate themselves outside a structure that posits meaning from beyond the system. The system does not validate itself.
Do you remember when IBM Watson (Jeopardy winner) was going to revolutionize medicine?
It seems Watson couldn’t determine which medical information was more meaningful than a lot of data in a given situation.
Our brains did not evolve to know facts about science?
For those who take Darwinism seriously, that’s not good news for science. Of course, believing it requires that you buy into Hoffman’s computer sim as well.
Michael Egnor: Why human-ape similarity argues for human exceptionality
When everything is the same except the one thing that matters most, we can be sure we are onto a real difference.
Why does an AI pioneer think that Jeopardy winner Watson is a “fraud”?
The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anything.
Panpsychism: Scientists who believe that the universe is conscious
Some prominent physicists and neuroscientists who cannot accept the idea of a separate immaterial reality (dualism) turn to the simplest alternative, that the whole universe participates in consciousness (panpsychism).
Eric Holloway: No materialist theory of consciousness is plausible
He says all such theories either deny the very thing they are trying to explain, result in absurd scenarios, or end up requiring an immaterial intervention.
Computers can’t think like people; they only do symbolic logic
Engineering prof Karl D. Stephan: Symbolic logic says nothing about the truth or reality of what you give it. To understand what things really are, you have to get outside the pristine mathematical structure of symbolic logic and embrace what Prof. Kreeft calls Socratic logic.
Bob Marks: Bias is inevitable in AI; time to admit it
Marks’s point is that such biases are not a matter of villains taking over. It’s a normal feature of the way people think. And people program computers. Doubtless, it finds its way into evolution issues for which people say they ran a simulation on a computer.
Bob Marks on what happens when people try to write creative computer programs
It seems that the programmer would have to make the computer smarter than he is, which means smarter than itself. That’s a challenge.