Coyne has good taste in archenemies. It shouldn’t go unrewarded.
Mind
Attempting to define stupidity
Krakauer notes that many people study intelligence but no one studies stupidity. That may have to do with the social awkwardness of explaining the research project to prospective subjects… 😉
Why simple but useless theories of consciousness get so much attention
Because science writers need simple sound bites and catch phrases: Dennett’s integration of popular evolution theory into his work appeals to many science writers, as this snippet from a BBC news item shows: From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to think is no different from our ability to digest, says Dennett. Both these biological activities can […]
Will AI art end the artist’s life?
Artists can instantiate their ideas more efficiently using better tools. Michelangelo could be more precise than the Stone Age cave artists. But artists can’t just use AI to automate creativity so that the machine writes masterpieces while they doze off. Information does not create and arrange itself via magic.
How can consciousness be a material thing?
Maybe it can’t. But materialist philosophers face starkly limited choices in how to view consciousness. Galen Strawson argues for materiality.
We’re NOT easily fooled by fake news
And the science paper that claimed so has been retracted. A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”: “The paper found that even though individuals may […]
Be more afraid of the hype vendors than of the AI
The release of the Top Ten over hyped AI stories of 2019 has led the way for further promising ones, including this one, says engineer and philosopher Jonathan Bartlett: Was the machine cleverand sneaky or was it just programmed wrong? You decide. First, just to be clear, at Mind Matters we have nothing against AI. […]
Artificial intelligence: Machines do not see objects as wholes
Mistaking a teapot shape for a golf ball, due to surface features, is one striking example from a recent open-access paper: The networks did “a poor job of identifying such items as a butterfly, an airplane and a banana,” according to the researchers. The explanation they propose is that “Humans see the entire object, while […]
But if humans are meat machines, how do ethics come into the picture?
Montanez: The AI and ML systems we have in place today are not sentient, but they are still dangerous. I am not worried about the future of AI, but I am concerned about the dangers artificial learning systems currently pose.
Real Intelligence Can Never Be Matched by the Artificial
Scary predictions are a thriving business but that does not make them a road map to the future.
Will artificial intelligence design artificial super-intelligence?
Current indications are that Moore’s law’s speed has already slowed or even ceased to be a true description of the information technology (IT) industry today…
Rob Sheldon: Did humans see the color blue before modern times?
Perhaps we should say, we cannot discriminate “blue” without a word for it? For sure. This is the property of language. As linguists will say, a word excludes more than it includes. And if we don’t have a word, we lack the ability to discriminate (or, as Aristotle shows us, we make up a word on the spot, we “categorize”.)
Why artificial intelligence (AI) cannot produce a Universal Answers Machine
Okay, let’s start with Can an algorithm be racist? Well, the machine has no opinion. It processes vast tracts of data. But, as a result, the troubling hidden roots of some data are exposed.
A definition of consciousness: “The intentional power of the mind”
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers this definition by way of explaining that there is one sense in which consciousness IS an illusion: We are not aware of our consciousness; only of its objects. I believe that the most satisfactory definition of consciousness is the intentional power of the mind — the ability of thought to be “about” […]
Theoretical physicist takes on panpsychism. Bam! Pow!
It’s the basic problem of the coffee mug. If naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” is true, either you and the mug are both conscious or neither of you is. The comments at BackRe(Action) illustrate the difficulty many have grasping that that is a serious problem.