Stevens: Illusion theory has no rule of reproducibility. Yet, if you set up the infinity mirror experiment at another time, you will see the same effect.
Illusion theory has no rule about how other observers perceive their illusions.
Neuroscience
Martin Luther King on materialism vs. design in nature
Why was the racists’ idea about brain size considered at all? Materialism does that to people and King was right to see it and call it out.
Can we disentangle our minds from our experiences?
Consciousness: Why do you know you exist? A rock doesn’t know. Yet you both exist. What’s the difference?
It turns out the gut operates on a separate nervous system
In humans, the abdominal brain is thought to play a role in emotion, though not in reason or moral choice. It would be interesting to know if the abdominal brain dates back to the Cambrian.
In new book, a psychologist tries to explain consciousness
Mark Solms clearly assumes, in his Psychology Today column, that the mind is just what the brain does. But that’s precisely the claim that the very existence of consciousness clouds.
Studies claiming to “read minds” debunked
At ScienceDaily: The Purdue researchers originally began questioning the dataset when they could not obtain similar outcomes from their own tests.
Universality of human emotion upheld by study
From UC Berkeley: “Researchers at UC Berkeley and Google used machine-learning technology known as a “deep neural network” to analyze facial expressions in some 6 million video clips uploaded to YouTube from people in 144 countries spanning North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.”
At New Scientist: Aliens inside you create your sense of you
New Scientist seems to be back to their usual schtick. Their 13 reasons for questioning Darwinism were probably some kind of aberration.
The latest “more complex than thought”: Visual short-term memory
We need a new expression for things that are surprising, apart from the complexity of life forms, which simply cannot have arisen from Darwinism acting on randomness. But around here it is okay to scoff at that stuff anyhow.
Michael Egnor: The mind refutes materialism in a rather straightforward way
Egnor: I agree that design in nature is an effective challenge to materialism. But I also believe that the mind refutes materialism in a rather straightforward way—and in much the same way that evidence of intelligent design in biology refutes materialism…
Is the continuity of our selves just an illusion?
Researchers: The ‘continuity of the self’—the capacity for self-awareness and self-recognition— remains stable whereas other components such as physical aspects, physiological processes and even attitudes, beliefs and values are more liable to change.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor challenges neurologist Steven Novella to prove that the mind is just what the brain does
Novella has said that a recent study of mice disproves mind-body dualism.
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.
Futurist George Gilder: Humans don’t treat physical and chemical forces or clock pulses the way computers do
As one of the fundamental dimensions of the universe, time doubtless has a regular flow. But people stuck behind a flock of Canada geese crossing a road don’t experience time in the same way as people rushing to complete a report in time for the Big Board Meeting in two hours.
Researchers: The human brain and the universe are remarkably similar
Even though the universe is 27 orders of magnitude bigger than a singe human brain, remarkable similarities emerged.