Naturalism

From Robert Wright and Galen Strawson at Meaning of Life TV: 0:30 Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think 14:42 Galen explains panpsychism 27:36 What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? 32:48 Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? 40:35 Do physical laws come from somewhere? 44:35 Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) 50:57 Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago The reader who sent this link suggests that panpsychism may be “better than pure materialism.” But one wants to ask, better in what sense? If everything is conscious, nothing is. So the primary materialist (naturalist) assertion, that your consciousness (and his) is an illusion, Read More ›

Update: Lawrence Krauss, a world-renowned theoretical physicist who led Arizona State University’s Origins Project for nearly a decade, will not lead the initiative any longer, he announced on Twitter Thursday. Krauss was accused of sexual misconduct in a February Buzzfeed News story and placed on paid leave by the university in March while it conducted an investigation. The story included allegations of inappropriate comments and behavior from multiple women. Krauss has strongly denied the allegations. Rachel Leingang, “Renowned ASU professor Lawrence Krauss ousted from post after sex misconduct claims” at Arizona Republic, August 3, 2018 He was founder and director since 2009. — From Peter Aldhous: BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging Read More ›

From Scuzzaman, commenting at “Fine-tuning is easy to explain: The universe itself is conscious and somewhat like a human: The thing I find most amusing and dismaying is that, as long as one affirms some kind of pan-darwinian orthodoxy vis-a-vis common descent by modification, literally ANY kind of madness is back on the menu. It is this, more than anything else, that identifies evolution as a religious mania. It’s a perverse mirror image of the worst political aspects of historical religion wherein the only possible heresy is not dissent but disobedience. In modern science you can be respectable while disobeying every fundamental precept of the discipline, as long as you do not dissent from its primal dogma: common descent by Read More ›

That’s “cosmopanpsychism.” An earlier version is rocks have minds. From Philip Goff at Aeon: In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers Read More ›

In “contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model” From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at Back(Re)Action: Yes, I know the headlines said the LHC would probe string theory, and the LHC would probe supersymmetry. The headlines were wrong. I am sorry they lied to you. But the LHC, despite not finding supersymmetry or extra dimensions or black holes or unparticles or what have you, has taught us an important lesson. That’s because it is clear now that the Higgs mass is not “natural”, in contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model. That the mass be natural means, roughly speaking, that getting masses from Read More ›

From Katyanna Quach at UK Register: A team within Google Brain – the web giant’s crack machine-learning research lab – has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages… to varying degrees of success. Glitches remain: We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway. Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either. More. Google Brain is Read More ›

One would almost think they were the necrotic mainstream media. From Douglas Axe at ENST, on BioLogos’s Dennis Venema’s critique of his book Undeniable at what sounds like an attempted thugging: First, considering the critical view I take not just of Darwinism but also of the academic echo chamber that, with iron-lung-like artificiality, allows this otherwise dead theory to persist, it should be clear that I wrote primarily for people outside the echo chamber. The exclusion of anyone who fits that description from providing even one of the reviews of my book therefore raises questions about the true intent of the exercise. Second, although I was offered the advantage of having the last word, my response was restricted to about Read More ›

From Stephen Skolnick at Physics Buzz: At the intersection of physics and philosophy, there’s a question that’s weighed on the minds of great thinkers for centuries: Is there truly such a thing as free will? When we make a choice, are we fundamentally any different than a calculator “choosing” which segments of its display to light up when the = button is pressed? The question has its roots in the acceptance that humans are, for all our astounding complexity, purely physical systems. Once you drop the notion that we’ve got an intrinsic, metaphysical soul that sits behind the eyes and pulls the levers, the question of why we make the choices we make becomes urgent…if only philosophically. Funny no one Read More ›

Reflecting on Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, from Denyse O’Leary at ENST: Measurement, and thus categories, come to be seen as oppressive. Recently, David Klinghoffer drew attention to modern heretic Jordan B. Peterson, a once-obscure Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University Toronto (formerly of Harvard), who has achieved worldwide infamy for saying, as an academic, nothing more than what most people believe. Klinghoffer suggests that those in sympathy with intelligent design can learn from him: “unfailingly polite, unruffled, but razor sharp, deftly resisting manipulation and intimidation at every single step.” Indeed they can, and some background may be helpful. … I was surprised by the extent to which Peterson understands Read More ›

From David Reznick and Joseph Travis at Science: Questionable predictability is not specific to stick insects. Nosil et al. analyzed data sets for other long-term studies of evolution in various species, including Galapagos finches and the peppered moth, and show that they also offer low temporal predictability. In these cases, the likely cause is also multiple forms of selection the strength of which varies over time. These results show that an iconic example of a simple trait subjected to a single agent of strong selection is actually much more complicated. Similar lessons have been taught by other seemingly simple phenomena. For example, the complex ways in which known agents of selection on the color polymorphism of Cepaea snails meant that Read More ›

Because those people agree to use it at all. Referencing Tyler O’Neil’s article above, At ENST, David Klinghoffer writes, All the same, Klinghoffer did not say Wikipedia was worthless. “You can rely on Wikipedia for things that nobody cares about. If you want to know the population of Peoria, you can absolutely trust Wikipedia, but for anything that people are invested in and care about, you can’t trust it,” he said. Whenever you look up a controversial issue on Wikipedia, take the results with a grain of salt. Not to pat myself on the back, but that gets to the heart of the problem. As soon as it’s a subject that gets people riled — specifically, the sociological slice with Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: — Some have suggested that we could replace the neurons in a human brain one at a time with, say, electronic circuits. Size shouldn’t be an issue, but even if it is, we can imagine thin silver wires connecting the electronics cabinet with the brain under vivisection. As I interpret it, the question is “How many wires will it take before we have transferred the consciousness to the electronics cabinet?” Now a single neuron has 10,000 or so synapses where it connects to other neurons. Each of these synapses uses some complicated chemistry to enhance or inhibit neighboring cells. Each of those chemical reactions involves tens or hundreds of membrane-spanning active Read More ›

From Oxford University Press, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupre, – A radical new conception of biology and the metaphysics of the living world – Offers a new kind of process philosophy with a naturalistic grounding – The Introduction provides a state-of-the-art survey to orient readers new to the topic Here’s the abstract from a chapter by Daniel J. Nicholson, “Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream,” This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Each February 12, the scientific community celebrates the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday as both Darwin Day and Academic Freedom Day. The Discovery Institute also celebrates by naming a “Censor of the Year,” and on Monday they announced that “award” goes to none other than “the free encyclopedia,” Wikipedia. … The problem goes far beyond the entry for “Intelligent Design,” however. On every entry for an intelligent design proponent, the site does not fail to describe the theory as “pseudoscientific.” Last year, Wikipedia removed the page for notable insect paleontologist Günter Bechly, seemingly for his position on ID. Walter Bradley, a Baylor University professor and ID scholar, saw his entry whittled down, with many Read More ›

No really. From Evolution News: You thought you’d heard it all? All the desperate materialist theories seeking to explain the burst of biological novelty some 530 million years ago that Meyer writes about in Darwin’s Doubt? You were wrong. Along comes Lund University in Sweden with a “Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth.” Get ready for the cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion. Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key. [Emphasis added.] Not many of us who have seen friends suffer or die from cancer would Read More ›