Mind Neuroscience

Great debates: William Lane Craig versus Sam Harris tomorrow night

Topic: Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? (Thursday, April 7 – 7:00pm – 9:00pm Eastern time) Facebook page Live webcast: www.ndtv.net One viewer commented … the atheist damage control machine is going full throttle! Craig absolutely wiped the floor with Krauss. It might be the worst debate performance ever versus Craig, adding Check Read More…

Biology Culture Darwinism Design inference Evolution Evolutionary biology Evolutionary psychology Informatics Intellectual freedom Intelligent Design Mathematics Mind Multiverse Natural selection Neuroscience Origin Of Life Philosophy Physics Science

The Nature of Nature — sticky

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this Read More…

Atheism Mind

Soul Time: Well, it must be, because we are hearing from the New Humanists again

(Who were the old Humanists, by the way? Anyone know?) In “Natural history of the soul”, Caspar Melville profiles “the man who thinks that spirituality is essential to consciousness, and science can tell us why.” That would be Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist and author of Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness who claims to Read More…

Darwinism Evolutionary psychology Intelligent Design Mind Philosophy

Why isn’t the argument that “Darwinism is false because it rules out the mind” decisive? You could also call this “The Trouble with Thomism”

Recently, Bantay, a commenter on a post addressing the origin of language, quoted …because Darwinists need to chase their tails by denying precisely what language itself affirms (meaning, order, and purpose)” and asked Does that mean that when Dawkins speaks, it is meaningless, orderless and purposeless? Well, let me try to unpack that a bit. Read More…

Mind Neuroscience

Interview with Dutch journalist: On trolls, free will, the self, and nakedness

Here’s an introduction to Henk Rijkers’ review/profile/interview with me about The Spiritual Brain (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary) in a Dutch Catholic newspaper. The book covers the failure of materialism to fulfil its promises and offers a look at a non-materialist approach to neuroscience, hence the controversy. Update: Here’s the complete text. You’ll need Google Read More…

Mind Neuroscience

But I thought that thought was thought to be just the random buzz of neurons …

Scientists Steer Car With the Power of Thought ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2011) — You need to keep your thoughts from wandering, if you drive using the new technology from the AutoNOMOS innovation labs of Freie Universität Berlin. The computer scientists have developed a system making it possible to steer a car with your thoughts. Using Read More…

Mind Neuroscience

Last call: Pop science not quite too stupid to parody properly?

A good laugh will help you sleep: Brain area for empty news stories discovered Satirical website Newsbiscuit has a cutting article making fun of the regular ‘brain scans show…’ news items that are a staple of the popular science pages. Scientists are heralding a breakthrough in brain scan technology after a team at Oxford University Read More…

Mind Neuroscience

Hush! Your brain is talking: “Forget all that crap they told you about me”

Why you should swear off all popular science media (except for Uncommon Descent and other sensible blogs) for your own mental health: Where does all this leave us?Let me return to the beginning, to Cordelia Fine and how we can think better about science, neural function, and human difference. The essentialist view of the brain Read More…

Atheism Cosmology Culture Media Mind Philosophy Physics Religion Science

Do atheists know enough about the concept of God to reject it on rational grounds?

Sometimes I think atheists are simply having arguments with themselves – or, more precisely, with phantoms bred by their own ignorance. It’s easy to see why atheism does not make more headway, even in modern secular society: Once atheists begin to spell out the sort of deity they are rejecting, it becomes clear that they Read More…

Mind

Mind and popular culture: Placebo effect increasing? Big pharma not exactly delighted

This very interesting article by Steve Silberman in Wired (“Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why,” 08.24.09) notes True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or Read More…