Naturalism

From cognitive psychologist and physicist Yaïr Pinto at Aeon: We’ve got to admit that split-brain patients feel and behave normally. If a split-brain patient walks into the room, you would not notice anything unusual. And they themselves claim to be completely unchanged, other than being rid of terrible epileptic seizures. If the person was really split, this wouldn’t be true. To try to get to the bottom of things, my team at the University of Amsterdam re-visited this fundamental issue by testing two split-brain patients, evaluating whether they could respond accurately to objects in the left visual field (perceived by the right brain) while also responding verbally or with the right hand (controlled by the left brain). Astonishingly, in these Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: We know almost nothing about the human consciousness but naturalism must treat it as evolved from unconscious elements. Much confusion is avoided by recognizing that that is a core assumption, not a discovery. Naturalist theories of consciousness currently proliferate with abandon because there is no basis for deciding among them. They are tossed, like hats, into a ring. … The third proposal, that everything is conscious, is the subtlest: If everything is conscious, nothing is. If rocks have minds, humans, for all practical purposes, do not. We are back to the first proposal, that consciousness is an evolved illusion, having learned nothing. There is an irony here: Naturalists have learned nothing for Read More ›

From Ferris Jabr at Scientific American: Consciousness, most scientists argue, is not a universal property of all matter in the universe. Rather, consciousness is restricted to a subset of animals with relatively complex brains. The more scientists study animal behavior and brain anatomy, however, the more universal consciousness seems to be. A brain as complex as the human brain is definitely not necessary for consciousness. On July 7 this year, a group of neuroscientists convening at Cambridge University signed a document officially declaring that non-human animals, “including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses” are conscious. Jabr makes a useful distinction between “conscious” and “self-aware.” Self-awareness is supposed to reside in the cerebral cortex, which is much Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: You never know who’s going to turn up at Q&A with Jonathan Wells and John West. The Discovery Institute biologist and political scientist, respectively, answered questions from the audience following a performance of the play Disinherit the Wind in Hollywood, California – which was a pretty interesting event in itself. But then there stands up a biologist from a local university, unidentified, who proceeds to blow everyone away with an account of his experience as a younger man in a formerly Communist country. He explains that under the totalitarian culture of his youth, “Communism was literally welded to Darwinism.” We recorded his remarks and they form a new episode of ID the Read More ›

From Paul Nelson at Evolution News & Views: Seriously: Carroll himself announces this “poetic naturalism as religion” Facebook option on his webpage, without a trace of irony. If we think of religion as the sphere of one’s deepest values – i.e., those bedrock truths and commitments for which we would willingly offer ourselves, and by which we try to order our daily lives – then it is clear that “poetic naturalism” means far more to Carroll than a clever atheistic philosophy with debating tricks to throw naïve theists off-balance. He intends for poetic naturalism to provide a trustworthy guide for living, and his most recent book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself,…is a Read More ›

From What Is Thought? by AI expert Eric B. Baum (2004, pp 226-27): Consciousness has many aspects. We are aware of our world and our sensations. We have a sense of self. We have goals and aspirations. We seem to have free will and moral responsibility. Yet, as I’ve said, the mind is equivalent to a Turing machine. Moreover, we have arisen through evolution and are descended from microbes by a smooth chain of evolution, with more complex mental processes at each stage evolved from the processes at the one before. Where in this process did consciousness enter? Why are we conscious? What is consciousness?” “The conclusion that we do not really have free will, discussed earlier in the context Read More ›

Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, is a sociologist who studies, among other things, the ID community. In a recent paper in European Management Journal, he reflects on the relationship between expert opinion in a field and the evaluations by educated outsiders. He opposes Brexit, but says, First, I consider Brexit in relation to my own long-standing anti-expertist approach to social epistemology, which in many ways makes me a kindred spirit to the Brexiteers. Next, I turn to the struggle of parliamentary elites which eventuated in the win for Brexit, focussing on the Brexiteers’ distinctive epistemic and ethical strategy with regard to public opinion. Finally, I consider the unforeseen emergence of a Rousseau-style ‘general will’ with regard to Brexit, which is where Read More ›

From philosopher Bernardo Kastrup at Scientific American: An article on the neuroscience of infant consciousness, which attracted some interest a few years ago, asked: “When does your baby become conscious?” The premise, of course, was that babies aren’t born conscious but, instead, develop consciousness at some point. (According to the article, it is about five months of age). Yet, it is hard to think that there is nothing it feels like to be a newborn. The question seems to turn on the ability to recognize and represent one’s own consciousness to onself or others. By mistaking meta-consciousness for consciousness, we create two significant problems: First, we fail to distinguish between conscious processes that lack re-representation and truly unconscious processes. After Read More ›

Our Jonathan Bartlett (johnnyb) wrote recently at Answers in Genesis: Lawrence Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer surprised the cosmology world in 2007 when they published an essay titled “The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology.” The paper showed that, assuming the truth of the current big bang model, in the far future (hundreds of billions of years from now) many evidences for the big bang itself will be gone, preventing future cosmologists from even being able to detect evidence for it. … The conclusion that Krauss and Scherrer come to after this examination of the present and future state of cosmology is that we live in a very special time in the universe. We live in Read More ›

It would appear so from Stanford Plato: The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” (Krikorian 1944; Kim 2003). So understood, “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just Read More ›

Physicalism is a variant of naturalism: “Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. ” (Stanford Plato) Naturalism: “… reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’” (Stanford Plato) Philosopher of physics Dr. Bruce Gordon (Houston Baptist University) talks about the tension between Quantum physics and physicalism: Note: Gordon was one of the editors of The Nature of Nature See also: Consciousness as a state of matter Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

From Jonathan B. Losos, author of Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution at Nautilus: Is convergence pervasive, a demonstration of inherent structure in the biological world, channeled by predictable forces of natural selection toward outcomes predestined by the environment? Or are examples of convergent evolution the exceptions, cherry-picked illustrations of biological predictability in a haphazard world in which most species have no evolutionary parallels? We could argue these points back and forth until we’re blue in the face. I’d throw out the platypus, you’d counter with convergent hedgehogs; I’d postulate the unique, algae-encrusted, upside-down-hanging tree sloth, you’d retort with bipedal-hopping mice independently evolved on three continents. And that is how, essentially, this controversy has been debated historically, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Monkeys had higher confidence in their ability to remember an image when the visual contrast was high. These kinds of metacognitive illusions — false beliefs about how we learn or remember best — are shared by humans, leading brain and cognitive scientists to believe that metacognition could have an evolutionary basis. Actually, they merely assume that and rely on increasingly casuistical experiments to provide support. Instead of getting a reward right away — to eliminate decisions based purely on response-reward — the monkey next sees a betting screen to communicate how certain he is that he’s right. If he chooses a high bet and is correct, three tokens are added to a token bank. Once the token bank Read More ›

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), philosophy professor at the University of California (Berkeley), sometimes said that what is termed science in one culture is called voodoo in another: To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts—their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity,’ [or] ’truth’—it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.” Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975, 1993), 18-19. ) Just came across an interesting contrarian piece by John Horgan in Read More ›

From SCIO: Scholarship and Christianity at Oxford, Application Deadline: 15 September 2017 Bridging the Two Cultures of Science and the Humanities II, 2017–19, is a significant opportunity for up to 25 early- to mid-level career faculty members from the CCCU and across the globe to experience an enhanced summer programme aimed at developing interdisciplinary skills in Science and Religion. … The Oxford-based seminars, which will take place from 1 to 29 July 2018 and from 30 June to 28 July 2019, will focus on the development of interdisciplinary skills and understanding central to the field of Science and Religion, within the unique setting of Oxford. Social and natural scientists will join those in the humanities to explore established and emerging Read More ›