One outcome of Simpson’s Paradox is that machines cannot replace statisticians in analysing results. A great deal depends on interpretation, as Marks shows. “Clustering remains largely an art.”
Mind
At Inference Review: Human language is much more than a system of signals
University of maryland linguist: The formal structures of linguistics and neurophysiology are disjoint, a point emphasized by Poeppel and David Embick in a widely cited study. There is an incommensurability between theories of the brain and theories of the mind…
Artificial intelligence is not dangerous. Only natural intelligence is dangerous
There is a huge media pundit industry anxious to persuade us that machines will come to think like people when the actual concern should be quite the opposite… people will come to think like machines and won’t see through their pretensions. See, for example, A Short Argument Against the Materialist Account of the Mind.
From The Poached Egg: How Darwinism dumbs us down
From Nancy Pearcey: In a famous essay called “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” Dewey said Darwinism leads to a “new logic to apply to mind and morals and life.”
Video: How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate
From Philip Cunningham: Notes: In this present video I would like to further refine and expand on the argument that I made in the “Albert Einstein vs. Quantum Mechanics and His Own Mind” video with more recent experimental evidence from quantum mechanics. and to thus further strengthen the case that the present experimental evidence that […]
Transhumanists want to fix our morality for us as well
That would appear to make transhumanism an enemy of free will and of freedom generally. But give them credit for being honest about it.
Human brains have grown smaller since the Stone Age
The trouble is, it’s not clear what the impact of the size of a human brain really is, vs. its organization. Then there’s the question of what opportunities a brain has to develop and what type of difference that makes.
Wesley J. Smith: Human exceptionalism is as close to a self-evident truth as one can find
Increasingly, the “scientific” view of many questions involves looking reality in the face and spitting at it. Why is that?
Free will: One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it?
Does “alien hand syndrome mean that we don’t really have free will? Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses
Human experience is what makes sense of the written word
The fact that creativity does not follow computational rules may well be a ceiling for machine writing and it is not made of glass.
Researchers: Complex tools don’t show ancient humans were smart
Experience from recorded history is clearly of humans getting just such ideas as the authors claim to be impossible in remote antiquity — and to make their point, they use modern students! Most likely, the felt need to identify a subhuman state of mind lies behind such a claim. Unlike the claim that the Neanderthals never produced art, this one can’t just be exploded. It can never be demonstrated either but in the present environment, that doesn’t matter. If the claim is made enough times, it will become orthodoxy.
Did complex societies predate moral gods?
Sometimes an argument from Naturalism Inc. becomes too complex to follow. Here’s just such an argument: The appearance of moralizing gods in religion occurred after—and not before—the emergence of large, complex societies, according to new research. This finding upturns conventional thinking on the matter, in which moralizing gods are typically cited as a prerequisite for […]
It is possible to demonstrate that AI will never think as humans do
Based on what we know of how algorithms work, it can be demonstrated mathematically that algorithms cannot deal with non-computable concepts: There is another way to prove a negative besides exhaustively enumerating the possibilities With artificial general intelligence (AGI), if we can identify something algorithms cannot do, and show that humans can do it then […]
“Thinking” computers? Some logical problems with the idea
If an algorithm that reproduces human behavior requires more storage space than exists in the universe, it is a practical impossibility that also demonstrates the logical impossibility of artificial intelligence, Eric Holloway argues. He engaged in a three-part debate on the subject. Here’s the first part: The most basic sort of algorithm that can mimic […]
AI is not the artist’s new “robot overlord”
Software engineer and musician Brendan Dixon thinks AI is the perfect tool for creating social noise: If you believe all you read, AI is once again nipping at the heels of our humanity, this time by “creating” music all on its own (lyrics included). Soon we must submit to our “robot overlords.” Or not. The […]