Holloway: : The human mind can do tasks that an artificial neural network (ANN) cannot. Because the brain works like an ANN, the mind cannot just be what the brain does.
Mind
How does a human being thrive normally with “quite a bit” of brain missing?
Suppose a man said, “I am one of a really small minority of people who fell twenty thousand feet from a plane and survived, despite my injuries…” We’d want to know more.
Jerry Coyne fires back at Egnor and Luskin
Having stated that he wouldn’t engage in a dialogue (which he would presumably be doing if he responded), Coyne conceded shortly afterward that “I may be forced by the laws of physics in making a few remarks.” And he makes more than a few. But he presses on: “one more before I grow ill.” Physics is a harsh master.
At Mind Matters News: Mike Egnor to Jerry Coyne: If evil exists, so must good — and real choices!
Egnor to Coyne: … when you find that your metaphysics was shared by the defense counsel at the Nazi war crime trials, you ought to reconsider your metaphysics. And I think Coyne should reconsider.
Quantum theory of consciousness put in doubt by underground experiment
“Penrose and Hameroff…argue that consciousness is based on the non-computational collapse of coherent quantum superpositions between cellular structures within neurons known as microtubules.”
At Mind Matters News: Human brain has many more language connections than chimp brain
Among the many differences between the human brain and other animal brains is the role of the arcuate fasciculus that connects lobes of the brain. If we are really 99 percent chimpanzee, as some claim, it doesn’t appear to be showing up in the brain.
Robert J. Marks on “machines with minds” vs. the real-life dweebs in his evolutionary programming:
A machine mind didn’t “just evolve” in this experiment; it was programmed in — even if its output was a surprise. The same is likely true of the human mind.
Robert J. Marks: 4. How Almost All Numbers Can Encode the Library of Congress
Re math: Almost every number between zero and one, randomly chosen by coin flipping, will at some point contain the binary encoding of the Library of Congress. That’s why infinity is a concept in math but not in the real world. Note: You should ask, how do we come to have concepts that are not part of the real world?
At Mind Matters News: The Software of the Gaps: An excerpt from Non-Computable You
Robert J. Marks reminds us of the tale of the boy who dug through a pile of manure because he was sure that … underneath all that poop, there MUST surely be a pony!
At Mind Matters News: The human brain has neural networks not found in lab mice
In a just-published study that he led, the researchers examined human tissue removed by neurosurgeons during operations. Studying it, they discover neuron networks (connectomes) unknown in mouse brains… The interesting part is that this network exists mainly in order to silence other neurons…
Michael Egnor: Is consciousness the sort of thing that could have evolved?
Material processes cannot, for example, account for the power to grasp infinity or perfection — which are not material ideas.
Five Reasons Why AI Programs Are Not “Human”
Wesley J. Smith gives us “five reasons to reject granting personhood, or membership in the moral community, to any AI program.”
At Mind Matters News: The battle over the human mind split two great thinkers
Philosopher Neil Thomas points out how neuroscience today has undermined a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role but that’s what happened.
At Mind Matters News: Computer prof: You are not computable and here’s why not
Dr. Robert J. Marks’s new book, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022), comes out just as Google has placed an engineer on leave for claiming an AI chatbot he tends is a real person…
Saturday night fun: Optical illusions: What causes them? Try some out!
Essentially, our brains — which would otherwise be overwhelmed — take shortcuts with the information they feed to our minds. Clever illusions reveal the shortcuts.