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At Mind Matters News: The battle over the human mind split two great thinkers

Philosopher Neil Thomas points out how neuroscience today has undermined a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role but that's what happened. Read More ›

Eric Hedin and our cultural moment

UD welcomes our new News anchor. As a starter for reflection, let’s clip from his current book: Naturalism holds that nature is all there is,and that the order of the universe, including the order of the living world,is merely the result of the laws of nature, or, as some put it, of “chance andnecessity.” [Jerry] Coyne went a step further. He insisted that this view cannoteven be questioned in a public university science course—or to be moreprecise, cannot be questioned even in a cross-disciplinary course on sci-entific discoveries and their larger cultural implications.But the question as to whether philosophical naturalism is true istoo important to shove into a corner. This and other closely related ques-tions are precisely those anyone striving Read More ›

What bats learn from echolocation: “much more complex than previously thought”

This raises an issue: Social intelligence seems to imply an underlying intelligence in the universe. It’s not at all clear that it is merely a matter of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism). For one thing, if there were no intelligence, there would be no need for social intelligence. Social intelligence is a response to existing intelligence. And no one knows how it arose. Read More ›

Why the origin of life is not reducible to physics

Just look what the hopeful researchers have to say in order to claim that. They are not able to get away from the need for design. Their actual claims sound panpsychist, which would be fine if it were admitted. Then we could at least discuss things honestly. Read More ›

Claim: Intelligent design theory is a science stopper

Cornelius Hunter takes it on. Incidentally, the fact that this promissory materialism, for which Darwinism is the origin story, is all hype and no hope never means anything. A fresh batch of media will bring up the same worn themes. And it's as close to science as large numbers of educated mediocrities ever want to get. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Why neuroscientist Mark Solms is no materialist

Mark Solms: Information, in neuroscience, is a crucial concept, and it’s very hard to think about quantum physics and the big questions that are unsolved that flow from it without the concept of information — which, I hasten to draw your attention to the fact, is not matter. I’m not a materialist for exactly that reason. Read More ›

At Claremont Review of Books: “The God Hypothesis should be considered as a possible explanation for our universe.”

Reviewer: Meyer argues that the materialist assumption now poses an obstruction to understanding, compelling scientists to embrace implausible and untestable hypotheses as a defense against the God hypothesis... But Gelernter and Nagel make a good case that religious zealotry, and a refusal to debate the facts honestly, now characterize Meyer’s opponents more than they do Meyer and his supporters. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Nautilus offers a primer on panpsychism

"What’s really interesting about [Massimo Pigliucci’s anti-panpsychism] comments is that even a decade or so ago, his was an utterly conventional view. Now he feels he must qualify it by saying “But that’s just one perspective and one way to look at it.” It seems that fewer researchers today expect the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” to suddenly yield to a new research finding — a situation that leaves many looking with interest and sympathy at a non-naturalist approach like panpsychism." Read More ›

Casey Luskin on what ID is and how we should defend it

Luskin: Something is specified if it matches an independent pattern. There is no special, independent pattern to the shape of Mount Rainier. Its complexity alone is not enough to infer design. It matches a pattern — the faces of four famous Presidents. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Would cognition in bacteria “dethrone” humans?

Takehome: Of course we can “see ourselves” as an earthworm. But it doesn’t work in reverse. And Pamela Lyon sheds no light on that fact, apart from denigrating humans. Read More ›