From Gregory Chaitin at UFRJ: In Chapter 8 of his 1996 Oxford University Press masterpiece The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers speculates on using information theory as the basis for a fundamental theory of consciousness. Building on his work, we attempt to flesh out an updated version of the Chalmers proposal by taking into account more recent developments including algorithmic information theory, quantum information theory, the holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound, and digital philosophy as sketched in two little-known monographs in Italian: Introduzione alla filosofia digitale and Bit Bang: La nascita della filosofia digitale … In the two decades since Chalmers published his panpsychism thesis that any physical system that processes information is conscious, it has become possible to put Read More ›

Says neuroscientist Anil K. Seth at Aeon: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery. But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how Read More ›

In a survey article of centuries of views, Jon Garvey offers at Hump of the Camel: God might indeed decide to make life on earth a unique case, and the vastness of a cosmos uninhabited by other physical beings a matter for himself alone. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of cosmic fine tuning is the realisation that a vast universe is necessary to enable the conditions a tiny inhabited world like ours requires. God’s prodigality in doing so much for us would make as plausible, and inconclusive, a case. Yet Chalmers once more shows that extraterrestrial life poses no inherent problem whatsoever for Christianity. Neither, though, does a universe in which life is unique to the earth – a Read More ›

From Drake Baer at New York Mag: Maybe it’s built into the structure of science itself. Oxford zoologist Antone Martinho makes the case in a new essay for Aeon. Martinho’s lab studies ducklings, while at home, he’s just adopted a pair of “celestial parrotlets,” a sublimely named species of mini-parrot indigenous to South America and suitable for a professorial apartment. As a pet owner, Martinho thinks that his new companions think, but he’d never say that as a scientist, even as his ducklings crane their necks at a new stimulus, in the classic body language of a confused dog. … Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Science can’t infer much about animal consciousness — if it’s there Read More ›

From Berit Brogaard at Psychology Today: A new volume of papers on panpsychism edited by philosophers Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla just appeared with Oxford University Press. It features paper by prominent philosophers David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Brian McLaughlin, among many others. According to the traditional version of panpsychism, everything around you is conscious: the chair your are sitting on, the rock you use as a doorstopper at home and the thick hurricane-safe windows in your office. Panpsychism literally means that particular kinds of psychological states are embedded in everything. An alternative to the traditional view is the view that everything around you has a form of rudimentary consciousness. More. Brogaard suggests, “…we can imagine that there is qualitative Read More ›

It is often claimed that methodological naturalism is a principle which defines the scope of the scientific enterprise. Today’s post is about thirty-one famous scientists throughout history who openly flouted this principle, in their scientific writings, by putting forward arguments for a supernatural Deity. The term “methodological naturalism” is defined variously in the literature. All authorities agree, however, that if you put forward scientific arguments for the existence of a supernatural Deity, then you are violating the principle of methodological naturalism. The 31 scientists whom I’ve listed below all did just that. I’ve supplied copious documentation, to satisfy the inquiries of skeptical readers. My own researches have led me to the conclusion that the principle of methodological naturalism is not Read More ›

From New York Times: A paper in The British Medical Journal in December reported that cognitive behavioral therapy — a means of coaxing people into changing the way they think — is as effective as Prozac or Zoloft in treating major depression. In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water. Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications. … This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly Read More ›

Jason Rosenhouse writes: We certainly do not know a priori that piles of bricks do not form images of imaginary unicorns, and it is not logically impossible that they do. UPDATE: I decided I could not resist adding Example 8,265 from the some post: I do not know how the chemical reactions and electrical firings inside my head lead to mental images, but there is copious evidence that they do and zero evidence that anything non-physical is involved Wow.  How does Rosenhouse deal with all of the evidence contrary to his position?  Easy peasy.  Fiat.  Just declare that it does not exist. Turns out the hard problem of consciousness is not so hard after all.  All David Chalmers needed to Read More ›

Learned scholars shout into the wind frequently re science writer myths about how stupid people were in the Middle Ages, etc. Such myths would include the odd claim that mediaeval Europeans believed that Earth is flat. Hint: They could not have believed that, due to other things they believed. Tales of an ignorant past give people today, who pay billions for bunk nutrition science and whole foods, several free virtue points for “science”without any need to think clearly. It’s no help but they feel much better. Just recently, I (O’Leary for News) dredged up something I’d written (2007) on a different myth, worth recapping in the religion story deck: Your local new atheist Twitter feed may tell you that traditional theologians Read More ›

From Margaret Wertheim at Aeon: I feel therefore I am … Giulio Tononi’s book Phi (2012) asks the question: ‘How could mere matter generate mind?’ As a neuroscientist, Tononi says this is a mystery ‘stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief’. Nonetheless, he offers us an explanation of consciousness grounded in information theory that has been admired by both Tegmark and Koch. He wants to do for psychic phenomena what Descartes, Galileo and their heirs did for physical phenomena: he wants to explain subjective experience by generalised empirical rules, and he tells us that such experiences have shapes in a multidimensional mathematical space. Personally, I don’t have a problem with the idea that subjective experiences might have mathematical Read More ›

The harshest places on Earth … and often finding it. We seem to find life everywhere on Earth, nowhere else. From PBS: Before Northeast Natural Energy can send down fluid to fracture the Marcellus Shales, buried more than 1.5 miles below the surface for 400 million years, Wrighton, Wilkins, and a team of scientists will be collecting rock samples hauled up from the deep. They might find life:. The discovery that microbes could live in environments far more extreme than anyone suspected opened a wide range of habitats to microbial exploration. While some scientists explored the frigid, windswept deserts of Antarctica, others, like Bo Barker Jørgensen and Karsten Pedersen, geomicrobiologists at Aarhus University in Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology Read More ›

I think BA77’s reply deserves to be headlined, as a part of the issue on self-falsification of evolutionary materialism. First, a picture: Now, the clip: >>as to Lombrozo’s comment here: “in the last 20 years or so, research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion has increasingly focused on another factor that contributes to evolutionary disbelief: the very cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition.” There is a mechanism underlying my cognitive abilities? Really??? Something smells rotten in Denmark! Let’s analyze this a bit more closely with our ‘mechanism’ of human cognition shall we?: Cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and Read More ›