Back to Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest: A CENTURY ago, if you asked a cosmologist the universe’s age, the answer may well have been “infinite”. It was a neat way to sidestep the question of how it formed, and the idea had been enshrined in 1917 when Albert Einstein presented his model of a static Read More…
Naturalism
Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne continues to worry about astrology, this time at the New York Times
He seems to have started noticing recently when astrology was touted at the Guardian and the Globe and Mail: In the past couple of days we’ve seen the Guardian tout astrology twice, and now the Globe and Mail. What I’d forgotten is that the New York Times has also been doing it occasionally—certainly more often Read More…
Our science betters tackle COVID-19 the only way they know how
Just stop people from talking
New Scientist asks if we have free will
Denying free will means that totalitarianism is a viable government idea.
Darwinian philosopher denies existence of mind gets snarled in it
If Rosenberg were right, science could not give us knowledge. If there is no mind, there is no knowledge because there is nothing that knows.
Proposed anxiety remedy: Your brain isn’t for thinking, just surviving
If the brain is really just a mechanism for deposits and withdrawals, who or what thought up the image that describes it that way? Unthinking things cannot characterize themselves. The brain is characterized, correctly or otherwise, by something that operates with but beyond the brain. For convenience, we refer to it as the mind.
Is Jerry Coyne undercutting his own argument against free will?
Michael Egnor: “Except for action of any quantum events”? I challenge Coyne: What in nature isn’t the action of quantum events? Certainly, every event in the brain is quantum in nature—every brain state, every action potential, every secretion of a neurotransmitter, every bit of protein synthesis or ion flow—is the consequence of quantum events.
A debate at Scientific American: Can a pill change your mind about basic issues in life?
Readers who remain skeptical that hallucinogens can change our values may wonder how religious and political values— so often rooted in decades of history, family history, and personal experience—could really be overturned by a mere trip.
Why do sciencey people believe in extraterrestrials but not ghosts?
People who have a fully naturalist worldview can believe that there are extraterrestrials, without evidence, but not ghosts. That’s worldview, not evidence as such.
The philosopher and the biologist offer a “fantasy” of how Darwinism can create minds
The problem isn’t with their believing that cells feature lots of intelligence but with their effort to equate human and cellular intelligence. Human intelligence is something quite different.
James Randi (1928-2020)
Thing is, the kind of skepticism Randi represented was based in a world where everyone agreed that 2 + 2 = 4. Today, it is NOT doubters of Darwin, etc., who are destroying science. Hardly! It is the ensconced science bureaucrats who are willing to entertain the destruction of math and—be sure of it—eventually, just plain literacy. It would be good to think that Randi never came to know of the doom.
Darwin’s man Jerry Coyne has begun to worry about Wokeness
Coyne: But violence, looting, and rioting aren’t the main things I worry about. I worry about Wokeness.
Michael Egnor addresses an objection to free will raised here at Uncommon Descent
Egnor: [fMRI isn’t decisive.] But fMRI is worthless in the neuroscience of free will. To understand why, note that fMRI has very poor temporal resolution. fMRI measures changes in blood flow in the brain in response to activity of neurons, and these changes lag neuronal activity by at least several seconds.
Silicon Valley tried to produce a mind but couldn’t. Why?
Quantum computers will not solve Silicon Valley’s problem. Quantum computers play by the same rules as digital ones: Meaningful information still requires an interpreter (observer) to relate the map to the territory.
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is being labelled “anti-science”
Also, let this sink in: Despite believing in determinism, Hossenfelder believes we should “decide” against a new particle collider… We can decide? On that account, to other naturalists, she is “anti-science.” Naturalism is weird like that. Eats its own.