Mind

From ScienceDaily: Human ‘self-domestication’ is a hypothesis that states that among the driving forces of human evolution, humans selected their companions depending on who had a more pro-social behavior. Researchers have found new genetic evidence for this evolutionary process. Human ‘self-domestication’ is a hypothesis that states that among the driving forces of human evolution, humans selected their companions depending on who had a more pro-social behavior. Researchers from a team of the UB led by Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics and member of the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS), found out new genetic evidence for this evolutionary process. The study, published in the science journal PLOS ONE, Read More ›

From the Max Planck Institute: At least 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens used perforated marine shells and colour pigments. From around 40,000 years ago he created decorative items, jewellery and cave art in Europe. Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, now demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects, and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe. The researchers conclude that our cousins’ cognitive abilities were equivalent to our own. … “Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places”, says Paul Pettitt from University of Durham, also a team member and cave Read More ›

From Robert Wright and Galen Strawson at Meaning of Life TV: 0:30 Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think 14:42 Galen explains panpsychism 27:36 What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? 32:48 Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? 40:35 Do physical laws come from somewhere? 44:35 Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) 50:57 Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago The reader who sent this link suggests that panpsychism may be “better than pure materialism.” But one wants to ask, better in what sense? If everything is conscious, nothing is. So the primary materialist (naturalist) assertion, that your consciousness (and his) is an illusion, Read More ›

From Maria Temming at Science News: Computers get a say in these life-changing decisions because their crime forecasts are supposedly less biased and more accurate than human guesswork. A comparison of the volunteers’ answers with COMPAS’ predictions for the same 1,000 defendants found that both were about 65 percent accurate. “We were like, ‘Holy crap, that’s amazing,’” says study coauthor Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth. “You have this commercial software that’s been used for years in courts around the country — how is it that we just asked a bunch of people online and [the results] are the same?” There’s nothing inherently wrong with an algorithm that only performs as well as its human counterparts. But this finding, Read More ›

From David Snoke at the Christian Scientific Society: Quantum mechanics is a strange theory, and it has been used to justify all manner of religious claims such as extra-sensory perception. This year we bring together five experts on the physics of quantum mechanics to discuss what we know and what we don’t know. We will work both to make the basic laws of quantum mechanics accessible to the non-expert, while at the same time addressing cutting-edge debates in the philosophy and application of quantum physics. Location: The Twentieth Century Club, 4201 Bigelow Blvd., Pittsburgh, PA Speakers include: 7:45 P.M. Dr. Erica W. Carlson, “Quantum Mechanics For Everyone” Abstract: Can I use quantum mechanics to create my own reality? Does God Read More ›

From U Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks: Bernard Wood’s research group has a new paper on brain size evolution in hominins, led by Andrew Du in Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B: “Pattern and process in hominin brain size evolution are scale-dependent”. In this paper, I notice that the researchers have done a really weird thing: Their analyses include only hominin fossils before 500,000 years ago. … The specimens reflect every hominin species from Australopithecus afarensis up to “Homo heidelbergensis”. Modern humans and Neanderthals have been left out of the dataset—they don’t fall within the pre-500,000-year time range. On the basis of this dataset, the authors conclude that the entire hominin lineage is compatible with a single pattern of gradual Read More ›

From Nicola Davis at the Guardian: “Erectus needed language when they were sailing to the island of Flores. They couldn’t have simply caught a ride on a floating log because then they would have been washed out to sea when they hit the current,” said Everett, presenting his thesis at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin. “They needed to be able to paddle. And if they paddled they needed to be able to say ‘paddle there’ or ‘don’t paddle.’ You need communication with symbols not just grunts.” It is unknown when language emerged among hominids; some argue that it is a feature only of our own species, Homo sapiens, which suggests a timing Read More ›

From Stephen Skolnick at Physics Buzz: At the intersection of physics and philosophy, there’s a question that’s weighed on the minds of great thinkers for centuries: Is there truly such a thing as free will? When we make a choice, are we fundamentally any different than a calculator “choosing” which segments of its display to light up when the = button is pressed? The question has its roots in the acceptance that humans are, for all our astounding complexity, purely physical systems. Once you drop the notion that we’ve got an intrinsic, metaphysical soul that sits behind the eyes and pulls the levers, the question of why we make the choices we make becomes urgent…if only philosophically. Funny no one Read More ›

He continues (HT, BA77): >>Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time …. … Come again … DB: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with Read More ›

Math prof Peter Zoeller-Greer writes in response to “Rob Sheldon: Why human beings cannot design a conscious machine”: — I became a theist years ago because of my works in quantum physics (by the way: I did my Dissertation in Math on a quantum-mechanical problem). I came to a similar rejection myself when I read Roger Penrose’s book “The large, the small and the human mind” years ago. He proposed that quantum mechanical effects in our brain have to do with free will and mind. What he wrote is similar to Rob Sheldon’s comments: QM may have very unpredictable and incalculable effects that can never be reproduced simply by exchanging e.g. a neuron through a chip. The chip may mimic Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: — Some have suggested that we could replace the neurons in a human brain one at a time with, say, electronic circuits. Size shouldn’t be an issue, but even if it is, we can imagine thin silver wires connecting the electronics cabinet with the brain under vivisection. As I interpret it, the question is “How many wires will it take before we have transferred the consciousness to the electronics cabinet?” Now a single neuron has 10,000 or so synapses where it connects to other neurons. Each of these synapses uses some complicated chemistry to enhance or inhibit neighboring cells. Each of those chemical reactions involves tens or hundreds of membrane-spanning active Read More ›

From Philip Cunningham at YouTube: It all began in 1922, when Einstein and Bergson met in an unplanned but fateful debate. Einstein had been invited to give a presentation in Paris on his theory of relativity. Time was central to Einstein’s work. It was, however, also the central issue in Bergson’s philosophy. Their conflicting views on the meaning of time set the scholars on collision course. In the debate, Bergson made it clear he had no problem with the mathematical logic of Einstein’s theory or the data that supported it. But for Bergson, relativity was not a theory that addressed time on its most fundamental, philosophical level. Instead, he claimed, it was theory about clocks and their behavior. Bergson called Read More ›

From Chelsea Gohd at Futurism: Our species has long agonized over the concept of human consciousness. What exactly causes it, and why did we evolve to experience consciousness? Now, a new study has uncovered a clue in the hunt for answers, and it reveals that the human brain might have more in common with the universe than we could have imagined. According to a team of researchers from France and Canada, our brains might produce consciousness as something of a side effect of increasing entropy, a process that has been taking place throughout the universe since the Big Bang. More. The research is based on a small study done on epileptics. If the theory that consciousness is a natural side Read More ›

From Michael S. Gazzaniga at Nautilus: Perhaps the most surprising discovery for me is that I now think we humans will never build a machine that mimics our personal consciousness. Inanimate silicon-based machines work one way, and living carbon-based systems work another. One works with a deterministic set of instructions, and the other through symbols that inherently carry some degree of uncertainty. In the end, we must realize that consciousness is part of organismic life. We never have to learn how to produce it or how to utilize it. On a recent trip to Charleston, my wife and I were out in the countryside looking for some good ole fried chicken and cornbread. We finally found a small roadside diner Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to say: Today at 8pm British time (3pm Eastern / 2pm Central / 12noon Pacific), I will be hosting a live interactive webinar featuring Baylor University’s Dr. Robert Marks II His topic will be artificial intelligence and human exceptionalism. There will be plenty of opportunity for live Q&A and dialogue after the presentation. Join here. Note: Robert Marks is the senior author of Evolutionary Informatics. See also: Evolutionary informatics has come a long way since a Baylor dean tried to shut down the lab