I’d like to introduce my readers to two women of formidable intelligence who share a common first name. On the left is the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), as she appeared in her younger days. Anscombe, a famously forthright philosopher who translated Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations from German into English, is best known for her highly original monograph, Intention (1957) and for her 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy. On the right is our very own Elizabeth Liddle, who lectures in Translational Mental Health in the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham. Dr. Liddle is particularly interested in ADHD and schizophrenia, as well as neuroimaging. She has described herself as “a catholic turned atheist, an ex-professional musician turned cognitive neuroscientist and computational modeller of evolutionary learning algorithms.” She attributes her atheism to “a radical shift in stance over the nature of free will.” She has stated that reading Professor Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves in 2007 literally changed her life: “I changed from dualist to monist half-way through the book.”

The topic I’d like to discuss in this post is whether free will and physical determinism are compatible.

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Lizzie, You continue to astonish. In the first sentence of your reply to my prior post you wrote: “I know that it is possible for intelligent life-forms to send radio signals, because we do; my priors for the a radio signal to have an intelligent origin are therefore substantially above zero.” As I demonstrated earlier, the issue is not whether nature or intelligent agents can cause radio signals. We know that both can. The issue is whether we have any warrant to distinguish this particular signal from a natural signal. Then you write: “I know of no non-intelligent process that might generate prime numbers (presumably expressed as binary code), and so my priors on that are low.” Upon a moment’s Read More ›

In this post I demonstrated beyond the slightest doubt that Lizzie made a design inference based on nothing more than the existence of CSI embedded in a radio signal.  Lizzie responds:  Barry, I did NOT make the inference “based upon nothing but the existence of CSI”! My inference had nothing to do with CSI. It was a Bayesian inference based on two priors: My priors concerning the probability that other parts of the universe host intelligent life forms capable of sending radio signals (high) My priors concerning the probability that a non-intelligent process might generate such a signal (low). To which bevets aptly responded:  “Can you give any evidence based description of the ‘intelligent life forms’ other than the evidence Read More ›

Apparently.

Ian Binns, a science education researcher at Louisiana StateUniversity, told Science that a law such as Louisiana’s, which misdescribes established scientific theories such as evolution as controversial, “tells our students and teachers that there are problems that there aren’t” and distort their understanding of the nature of science;
NCSE’s Joshua Rosenau added, “Science is not about providing balance to every viewpoint that’s out there.” NCSE is now monitoring controversies over the teaching of climate change as well as controversies over the teaching of evolution, but the scope of the problem is as yet unclear; as Rosenau explained, “Just like with evolution, it’s difficult to know what a given teacher in a given classroom is teaching.” Read More ›