Russ White: It is not enough, as Turing proposed, to trick a person into thinking a computer is a person. Somewhere there must be a person who intends this result. If the artificial intelligence cannot provide that intent, then the person who designs the system must.
Naturalism
Late stage materialism?: Panpsychism (your coffee mug is conscious) sounds crazy but…
If you believe that nature is all there is and you can’t otherwise explain the mind, the mind must be part of nature and therefore electrons are conscious. Unless you want to say that the mind is an illusion.
Science pros reckon with the fallout from Jeffrey Epstein – and it’s grim
Rogers asks, “How did these geniuses find themselves cozying up to a child rapist?” and provides us with some of the many answers that will filter in.
John Gray thinks that the humanities cannot now be saved
Gray: “‘Critical thinking’ has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths.” Gray’s thesis is that liberalism tiself led inevitably to the collapse of standards (which now threatens the sciences). Agree, disagree, read the whole thing.
Jeffrey Shallit also holds forth on Yale’s David Gelernter
Shallit: “Gelernter is not a biologist and (to the best of my knowledge) has no advanced formal training in biology.” We weren;t aware, at UD, that math prof Shallit had serious biology credentials either but perhaps one can dispense with them if one supports Darwinism.
We don’t often hear debunking debunked
Making it easy for you: When post-modernism declared war on modern science, there could only be one winner and postmodernism looks like surviving.
When the war on objectivity hits Big Tech
Maybe Google hired crackpot cosmologists to do their theorizing. Now that commercial enterprises are into this stuff, where will we turn for an attempt at objectivity?
“Descartes’ mind-body problem” makes nonsense of materialism
The mind-body “problem” is the nonsense materialists are led into in order to make the obvious meaning of the experience of an immaterial mind disappear in a dense weed jungle of verbiage.
Philosopher puts a positive spin on contemplating human extinction
So many scandals and impasses that science faces today stem in large part from the problem Moynihan avoids. Facts don’t validate themselves outside a structure that posits meaning from beyond the system. The system does not validate itself.
Panpsychism: Scientists who believe that the universe is conscious
Some prominent physicists and neuroscientists who cannot accept the idea of a separate immaterial reality (dualism) turn to the simplest alternative, that the whole universe participates in consciousness (panpsychism).
Eric Holloway: No materialist theory of consciousness is plausible
He says all such theories either deny the very thing they are trying to explain, result in absurd scenarios, or end up requiring an immaterial intervention.
Computers can’t think like people; they only do symbolic logic
Engineering prof Karl D. Stephan: Symbolic logic says nothing about the truth or reality of what you give it. To understand what things really are, you have to get outside the pristine mathematical structure of symbolic logic and embrace what Prof. Kreeft calls Socratic logic.
Bob Marks: Bias is inevitable in AI; time to admit it
Marks’s point is that such biases are not a matter of villains taking over. It’s a normal feature of the way people think. And people program computers. Doubtless, it finds its way into evolution issues for which people say they ran a simulation on a computer.
Why the science spin snowball can’t stop
The bigger problem is overlooked. The basic philosophy of the people doing the science spins the story for them. We live in the age of the space detritus that was supposed to be an extraterrestrial lightsail and the conscious plants. And the talking apes. Oh yes, and the multiverse
Now Steve Pinker is getting #MeToo’d, at Inside Higher Ed over Jeffrey Epstein
The rap against cognitive psychologist Pinker, who always seemed ready with a Darwinian explanation for everything, is that he offered some interpretation of language to Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.