Mind

It would appear so from Stanford Plato: The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” (Krikorian 1944; Kim 2003). So understood, “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just Read More ›

And much harm follows from believing so. From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: Cutting-edge DNA identification techniques used by the office of New York City’s chief medical examiner were less reliable than claimed, some experts say. … “I’m 100 percent convinced that there are many people who are incarcerated who were convicted with DNA evidence who are innocent,” Bicka Barlow, a lawyer with a background in genetics and molecular biology, tells the Times. At issue in the letter are techniques called “high-sensitivity testing,” or low copy number analysis, which detects trace amounts of DNA, and the Forensic Statistical Tool (FST), a software program to calculate whether a given person’s genetic material is likely present in a sample of mixed DNA. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Monkeys had higher confidence in their ability to remember an image when the visual contrast was high. These kinds of metacognitive illusions — false beliefs about how we learn or remember best — are shared by humans, leading brain and cognitive scientists to believe that metacognition could have an evolutionary basis. Actually, they merely assume that and rely on increasingly casuistical experiments to provide support. Instead of getting a reward right away — to eliminate decisions based purely on response-reward — the monkey next sees a betting screen to communicate how certain he is that he’s right. If he chooses a high bet and is correct, three tokens are added to a token bank. Once the token bank Read More ›

From The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth: In an interview in the Irish Times newspaper, Dr Kevin Mitchell from Trinity College Dublin, spoke about this some years ago. He pointed out the idea “that we are effectively androids, though made out of carbon”. He says that the “mind emerges from the workings of my brain and nothing else”. If God does not exist and Naturalism is all there is, then Dr Mitchell’s views would be correct. But on theism, how can the reliability of his statement be true if it’s coming from an android made out of carbon? Surely carbon androids are primarily evolved for survival-of-the-fittest values, with truthful statements being less significant? Furthermore, an android does Read More ›

From Fern Elsdon-Baker at New Scientist, reporting on that recent study of people who question evolution, It sounds startling. Nearly 30 per cent of adults in the UK say evolution can’t explain the origin of humans. That rises to nearly 50 per cent for human consciousness. Does that mean we’re increasingly following a vocal minority in the US who deny the science on fringe religious grounds? … Unexpectedly, 44 per cent felt that evolutionary processes cannot explain the existence of human consciousness. It might be tempting to assume that this is just a reflection of the number of religious believers. However, while faith does appear to amplify individual doubts about evolutionary explanations, it is not the only factor at work. Read More ›

From Andrew Masterson at Cosmos: The development and employment of tar in tool-making, however, implies a significant level of intelligence in its makers. “Neanderthals must have been able to recognise certain material properties, such as adhesive tack and viscosity,” the scientists conclude. “In this way, they could develop the technology from producing small traces of tar on partially burned bark to techniques capable of manufacturing quantities of tar equal to those found in the Middle Paleolithic archaeological record.”More. Some science writers might need to find another dumb primate that isn’t an ape (because for PC reasons they wouldn’t b allowed to call th ape dumb). See also: Neanderthal Man: Neanderthal technology was hardly dumb The long-lost relative turns up again, Read More ›

From Alexander P. Burgoyne and David Z. Hambrick at Scientific American: In a GWAS recently published in Nature Genetics, a team of scientists from around the world analyzed the DNA sequences of 78,308 people for correlations with general intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. … Of the over 12 million SNPs analyzed, 336 correlated significantly with intelligence, implicating 22 different genes. One of the genes is involved in regulating the growth of neurons; another is associated with intellectual disability and cerebral malformation. Together, the SNPs accounted for about 5% of the differences across people in intelligence—a nearly two-fold increase over the last GWAS on intelligence. Examining larger patterns of SNPs, the researchers discovered an additional 30 genes related to intelligence. Read More ›

What? In the world of “social justice,” someone actually noticed biology prof Bret Weinstein? Someone took time out from hearing the angst and hoo-haw of “[fill in the blank] studies” students to look at the science education issues? From Michael Shermer at Scientific American: One underlying cause of this troubling situation may be found in what happened at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in May, when biologist and self-identified “deeply progressive” professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in a “Day of Absence” in which “white students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities.” Weinstein objected, writing in an e-mail: “on a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based Read More ›

Like flaky therapists claim? If it is, then the embedded genes are not very evenly distributed among humans. From Josh Gabbatiss at Sapiens: The 2015 paper that resulted from Carrier’s research showed that a buttressed fist, one with the thumb closed against the index and middle fingers, provides a safer way to hit someone with force. Given that none of our primate cousins have the ability to make such a fist, Carrier and his co-authors propose that our hand proportions may have evolved specifically to turn our hands into more effective weapons. The research is just the latest in a string of studies Carrier has conducted to define “a suite of distinguishing characteristics that are consistent with the idea that Read More ›

From cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan at Aeon: n 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds. There are, for example, the minds of other animals, such as chimpanzees, crows and octopuses. But the space of possibilities must also include the minds of life-forms that have evolved elsewhere in the Universe, minds that could be very different from any product of terrestrial biology. The map of possibilities includes such theoretical creatures even if we are alone in the Cosmos, just as it also includes life-forms that could have evolved on Earth under different conditions. We Read More ›

Says neuroscientist Anil K. Seth at Aeon: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery. But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how Read More ›

Notes. See also: An evolutionary challenge: explaining away compassion, philanthropy, and self-sacrifice

A friend sends us some thoughts from well-known persons for our reflection: Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will, in an interview with science writer John Horgan (July 27, 2014): Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating Read More ›

From Sarah B. Puschmann at LiveScience: In 2014, one of Roy Caldwell’s octopuses went missing. Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, had kept the reef octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus) he and his team collected on Lizard Island in Australia in separate, sealed tanks. Puzzled, he peered into the female octopus’s tank and found spermatophores, the capsules that contain octopus sperm, floating in the water. He looked closer and found the male there, too, buried in the gravel. The only way the male octopus could have made it into the female’s tank, Caldwell said, is for the male to have wriggled through the pipe that fed water into both octopuses’ tanks, an act some might deem Read More ›

Remember that if you are stuck for something to say.  From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost, interviewing neuroscientist Paul Silvia: Paul Silvia: The 2015 paper was our first toes-in-the-water. The whole brain view is really a good way to think about it. Traditionally with creativity and brain work, investigations have addressed: What’s the creative part? Where’s creativity in the brain? What’s the part that lights up? And traditionally, the view has been: The right side is the creative part. But there’s really no part or piece or even single system. Creativity is a very complex thing. Our earlier study was really a pilot study. We had a small number of people and we were pretty limited in how we were looking at Read More ›