Mind

Now and then, we’ve talked about the Voynich manuscript, a strange mediaeval work whose baffling code seems undecipherable. From Libby Plummer and Abigail Beall at Daily Mail: Many experts argue that the text contains similar features to natural languages, suggesting that it may be a code. However, Gordon Rugg, a computing expert at Keele University claims to have worked out a simple system that produces similar results in a new study. … The researcher was able to generate a series of words that follow a linguistic pattern, but are actually meaningless, using a rudimentary grid system based on Voynichese words. More. “Clones” of the book are to be made available for under $10k. The new theory is intriguing but will Read More ›

As advanced by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, From. Adam Frank at NPR: To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, “fitness” is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That’s what they mean by “fitness functions.” So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment’s, fitness function. The Read More ›

George Price (1922–1975) From science writer Michael Regnier at Digg: He’d met his wife, Julia, on the Manhattan Project, but as well as being a scientist she was a devout Roman Catholic. The marriage was hard-pressed to survive Price’s scathing views on religion, and after eight years and two daughters – Annamarie and Kathleen – they divorced. Fed up with his job, his life and the distinct lack of recognition in America, Price cut his ties in 1967 and crossed the Atlantic to London, intent on making a great scientific discovery there. He felt he had just a few more years to make his mark, but as it turned out, he needed only one. Price had set himself the ‘problem’ Read More ›

Not that anyone has the least idea what consciousness is. Science fiction short from Matt Gaede at Motherboard: I am a robot. I am alive in a lab. I have consciousness. I don’t believe my creators know it. Why would they make me? I have one task. One function, one ability. I can drive forward. That’s it. Only forward. Yet if I do what I’m meant to do, I’ll unplug myself. I’ll die. I don’t want to die. I just started living. How long have I been alive? How many times have I gone through with this? How do I know that the cord is my source of life? Do I retain anything? I must. I haven’t been taught anything. Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey at ScienceNews: Color vision may actually work like a colorized version of a black-and-white movie, a new study suggests. Cone cells, which sense red, green or blue light, detect white more often than colors, researchers report September 14 in Science Advances. The textbook-rewriting discovery could change scientists’ thinking about how color vision works. Like a coloring book. The large number of cells that detect white (and black — the absence of white) create a high-resolution black-and-white picture of a person’s surroundings, picking out edges and fine details. Red- and green-signaling cells fill in low-resolution color information. More. Maybe that helps explain the craze for adult coloring? Not just that some people have too much time on Read More ›

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›

Hello, base, do we have a connection? The human brain is said by many to be the most sophisticated known item in the universe. Never mind, from ScienceDaily: Inhibitory connections between neurons act as the brain’s brakes, preventing it from becoming overexcited. Researchers thought inhibitory connections were less sophisticated than their excitatory counterparts because relatively few proteins were known to exist at these structures. But a new study overturns that assumption, uncovering 140 proteins that have never been mapped to inhibitory synapses. Some of the proteins have already been implicated in autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy, suggesting new treatment avenues. – Akiyoshi Uezu, Daniel J. Kanak, Tyler W.A. Bradshaw, Erik J. Soderblom, Christina M. Catavero, Alain C. Burette, Richard J. Read More ›

From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: How does something as physical as the brain create something as immaterial as your sense of self? It could all just be one big trick of the mind … Broadly speaking, those trying to solve the hard problem fall into two camps, according to psychologist and philosopher Nicholas Humphrey. There are those who think that consciousness is something real and those who say it’s a mirage, and so dismiss the problem entirely. More. (paywall) Generally speaking, a trick is more complex than straightforward information, so it only adds to the difficulty if consciousness is regarded as a trick. By whom on whom? These people are not going to get anywhere any time soon. See Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Recently, Nir Lahav, a physicist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, went searching for this nucleus of conscious activity. He and his interdisciplinary team, which also included neuroscientists and mathematicians, used detailed scans of six brains to assemble an information map of the human cortex, the brain’s outer layer of neural tissue. With the map, they observed and recorded how certain parts of the cortex were connected to other parts. They charted regions of high connectivity and regions of low connectivity. The map approximated how information “flows” within the cortex, and showed where that flow is concentrated. The region with the highest traffic may very well be the seat of consciousness.More. But what about those people Read More ›

Painful. Closing our religion coverage for the week (a bit late, as it is the Labour Day weekend) from Rabbi Moshe Averick, in his Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: Atheists are prepared to deny our very grasp on reality Atheists are prepared to burrow very deep down the materialist rabbit hole in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the spiritual. How deep? Deep enough to cast doubt on our very connection with reality. The skeptic claims that a scientific investigation of the brain leads us to the conclusion that there resides within us a separate “executive self” is an illusion. Leaving totally aside the issue of whether or not that assessment of the Read More ›

From Matthew Mackinnon at Psychology Today: Illusion of Choice: The Myth of Free Will … It is at this point that you have the conscious experience of, “I chose to wink with my right eye.” The human brain is a logical machine and it seeks to establish linear causation regardless of the temporal reality. The fact that your prediction aligned with the actual action is interpreted by your brain to mean that your conscious thought caused the action. In reality, your thought, “I chose to wink my right eye,” is nothing more than a retroactive inference generated in an attempt to transmute a largely unconscious process into a conscious one. More. These claims come in many varieties but their outcome, Read More ›

Statistician William M. Briggs reports an amazing medical case where the

“skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin perimeter of actual brain tissue.”
Here’s the kicker: And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled…

Read More ›

At Ash Jogalekar’s “Curious Wavefunction,” we hear from physicist Ed Witten: Many people regard consciousness as the last nut to crack at the frontier of science. If we crack that nut it would open the way to an unprecedented understanding of humanity that may in part explain why mankind produces thinkers like Ed Witten that allow us to understand the deep secrets of the universe. But Witten is not too optimistic about it. And he seems to have fairly clear reasons for believing that consciousness will always remain a mystery. Here’s what he has to say (italics mine). More. Note: Readers may remember Jogalekar from a flap some years back involving Scientific American: Scientific American may be owned by Nature Read More ›

Squid are smart . From book advert: Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this book, he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted surprising intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. New research shows that these marvelous creatures display remarkable gifts. What does it mean that intelligence on earth has evolved not once but twice? And that the mind Read More ›

Over at WEIT, Professor Jerry Coyne has put up three interesting posts during the past few days, with questions for his readers relating to free will, the irrationality of belief in Divine revelation, and climate skepticism. I’d like to briefly respond to his questions. Free will In a post titled, Once again with free will: a question for readers (August 16, 2016), Professor Coyne laments the persistence of popular belief in libertarian free will – the view that whenever I make a choice, I could have chosen otherwise, otherwise my choice would not be free. Professor Coyne contrasts this view (which he calls view A) with the hard determinist view (called view B), which he espouses. On this view, the Read More ›