Holloway: This test for intelligence, the Turing Test, was invented by and named after the mid-twentieth century computer pioneer Alan Turing. It is a subjective test in that it depends on whether an artificial intelligence is capable of convincing human testers that it is a human. But fooling humans, while impressive, is not really the same thing as actually possessing human-level intelligence.
Naturalism
Michael Egnor: Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist, doesn’t know how computers work
Egnor: It’s remarkable that Dr. Shallit—a professor of computer science—doesn’t understand computation. Materialism is a kind of intellectual disability that afflicts even the well-educated. To put it simply, machines don’t and can’t think. Dr. Shallit’s wristwatch doesn’t know what time it is.
Eric Holloway: Math shows why the mind can’t be reduced to a formula
Holloway: The fundamental implication is that nothing within math, science, and technology can create information. Yet information is all around us. This problem arises in many areas: evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, and physics.
At New Scientist: There’s a basic fact about the universe that we “still don’t understand”
Here’s a question: What if the basic fact we “still don’t understand” is that the evidence shows that the universe is fine-tuned and that therefore, fine-tuning is not an illusion that needs explaining away? Would that simplify things? If so, how? Another question (now that we’re here anyway): How much publicly funded cosmology exists simply to promote a naturalist atheist (no fine-tuning) worldview? And what is the science rationale for that?
Looking back at a 2017 paper that risks saying that ID is “not necessarily stupid”
One would feel vaguely sorry for Raymond Bergner if he found himself dealing with a horde of Darwin trolls. But it is so much easier to sympathize with people who are prepared to acknowledge facts more forthrightly and honestly.
Darwin skeptic Robert Shedinger calls out Paul Davies
Shedinger, author of The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion (Cascade, 2019), offers some thoughts on origin-of-life theorist Paul Davies’ decades-long dance around design in nature.
How did “wanting” things evolve?
We take the fact that life forms seek things for granted. We don’t ask why. Agency (“wanting” or “deciding” things) is as hard a problem in physics as consciousness.
Science historian asks, What kicked off the ID movement?
He offers three events that he thinks boosted ID specifically: You can read about the first two for yourself at the link but you may not even have ever heard of the third (the discrediting of the Vienna Circle): …
Why Economics and ID go Hand-in-Hand
In my previous post about Bob Murphy’s support of ID, some people commented that Bob Murphy, being an economist, doesn’t count much in support of ID. However, those comments would be misplaced. Although Bob Murphy did not get into this in this podcast episode, there is actually a direct connection between ID and economics. First Read More…
Michael Egnor:Why the human mind is the opposite of a computer
Egnor: Mental activity always has meaning—every thought is about something. Computation always lacks meaning in itself. A word processing program doesn’t care about the opinion that you’re expressing when you use it.
The “connectome” means we may never “understand” the brain
In the sense of “There. That’s that.” It’s just too big. Machine learning might help but machines don’t explain their decisions very well. If the brain is immensely complex, it may elude complete understanding in detail. Deep Learning may survey it but that won’t convey understanding to us. We may need to look at more comprehensive ways of knowing
Materialist Matthew Cobb: We will never “solve” the brain
That’s not good news for reductive materialism. Wasn’t “science” supposed to explain all this stuff away ages ago? Instead, it’s science causing the problems.
A just-so story about the origin of religious beliefs
Some of us would be more impressed if the authors of this type of work attributed their OWN beliefs to these types of sources. How about this: Belief that there is no design in nature comes from spending a lot of time reading and writing boring, useless papers and sitting in boring, useless meetings, Eventually, homo academicus evolved to believe that all nature is like that.
Michael Egnor: Why the mind cannot just emerge from the brain
Egnor: Thoughts have emotional states; matter doesn’t have emotional states, just matter. So it’s not clear that you can get an emergent property when there is no connection whatsoever between that property and the thing it supposedly emerges from.
Michael Egnor: Why eliminative materialism cannot be a good theory of the mind
Thinking that the mind is simply the brain, no more and no less, involves a hopeless contradiction.