It seems that self-aware mindedness is now on the table for discussion. In that context, I see that Reciprocating Bill is arguing: Given the fact that you entertain the notion that brains aren’t necessary for dreaming, why can’t that which dreams without a brain be a rock? This is a carry over from a discussion where I have pointed out: And also how a neural network is an example of how refined rock organised into a GIGO-limited computational unit still has not broken through from mechanical cause effect computation — which a raw rock obviously cannot do — to self-aware insightful reasoning contemplation: . . . in the brain:   That is, just as for a Thomson Mechanical Integrator: . Read More ›

Everyone seems to be writing about zombies lately: Edward Feser (Zombies: A Shopper’s Guide, December 19, 2013), David Gelerntner (The Closing of the Scientific Mind, Commentary, 1/1/2014), Barry Arrington (see here and here), Elizabeth Liddle (see here and here) and Denyse O’Leary. In today’s post, I’m going to throw my hat into the ring. A few preliminary definitions What is a zombie, anyway? First of all, what is a zombie? I’m not talking about the animated corpse that some Haitians believe in, or the creature from the movies. What I’m talking about is what’s known as a philosophical zombie. Professor Edward Feser concisely defines the term as follows: A “zombie,” in the philosophical sense of the term, is a creature Read More ›

Over at his blog, Professor Larry Moran is shocked, shocked, that the arguments of Professor William Lane Craig for the existence of God are treated with respect by Craig’s philosophical colleagues. “Is it true that philosophy departments have sunk to this level?” he asks. A few days earlier, Craig had written an article for The Washington Post entitled, Humanism for Children, in which he pointed to “a resurgence of interest in arguments for God’s existence based on reason and evidence alone” among philosophers, and added: All of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments, not to mention creative, new arguments, find intelligent and articulate defenders on the contemporary philosophical scene. Professor Moran Read More ›

Left: 2006 World Series Of Poker main event table. Right: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Images courtesy of http://www.lasvegasvegas.com, The United States Congress and Wikipedia. (Part one of a series of posts in response to Zack Kopplin.) Hi, Zack. I’ve been following your very well-organized campaign to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA). In 2011, at the age of 17, you managed to persuade no less than 43 Nobel Laureate scientists to sign a petition urging that the act be repealed, and your most recent list now has 74 signatures from Nobel Laureate scientists, plus one endorsement by Dr. John Sulston (2002 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine), making an impressive total of 75 Nobel Laureates who have endorsed the Read More ›

Over at the New Atlantis Raymond Tallis reviews David Chalmer’s new book The Character of Consciousness. Here is an interesting passage on all of those MRI experiments purporting to capture consciousness in mere brain activity: But none of these characteristics seems likely to deliver the difference between neural activity that is and is not associated with consciousness, not the least because they all aim to narrow down a phenomenon that is inherently multifaceted. And the approach faces other inherent limitations. For a start, as Chalmers points out, correlation is not causation: even if one identifies some neural feature correlated with consciousness (say, by stimulating a part of the brain and having the subject report being aware of some mental state), Read More ›

Like any member of the tenured entitlement class, University of Texas microbiologist Andy Ellington, is entitled to facts that support his beliefs.

Providing such facts is easier than in the past, thanks to the great gains made by the science of citation bluffing. In “Andy Ellington’s Citation Bluffs and the Scientific Debate Over the Miller-Urey Experiment,” (Evolution News & Views, July 21, 2011), Casey Luskin offers illustrations from his online testimony:

Ellington’s testimony cites a 2008 paper, “A Reassessment of Prebiotic Organic Synthesis in Neutral Planetary Atmospheres,” co-authored by Jeffrey Bada, one of my own professors at UCSD. He claims this paper (herein referred to as Cleaves et al. (2008)) shows “significant amounts of amino acids are produced from neutral gas mixtures.” However, Cleaves et al. (2008) does not show what Ellington claims it does: Read More ›

In the recent discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the Templeton Foundation distancing itself from ID, there’s been no mention that in 1999 the Templeton Foundation had a brief dalliance with ID. That year, in Santa Fe, Paul Davies convened a private conference titled “Complexity, Information, and Design: An Appraisal.” In attendence at the conference were Sir John Templeton himself, Charles Harper, Paul Davies, Charles Bennett, Gregory Chaitin, Niels Gregersen, Stuart Kauffman, Harold Morowitz, Ian Stewart, Laura Landweber, and yours truly. The proceedings of that conference then appeared with Oxford in 2003, edited by Niels Gregersen, under the new title From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning. Design, however, figured centrally in the discussions of the original conference. Moreover, the original title of the conference, “Complexity, Information, and Design,” was mine — I recommended it to Charles Harper, who then mentioned it to Paul Davies, who then ran with it.

At the time, I was in regular touch with Charles Harper, a senior administrator with the Templeton Foundation and currently a public voice of the foundation expressing disapproval of ID. He had received a preprint of my book The Design Inference, had it vetted in-house (notably by British statistician David Bartholomew), and found it not entirely without merit. Indeed, at the time we discussed expanding Templeton’s “portfolio” to include some representation of ID. A year or two later, Templeton interest in ID dried up. The official story has always been that ID is bad science, bad theology, and bad politics. But I would suggest that the real reason is Templeton’s craving for respectability among the scientific elites, and ID, for now, is too iconoclastic for Templeton’s comfort.

It might interest readers of this blog to know that Charles Harper and I had explored a much bigger follow-up conference to the 1999 conference in Santa Fe. What follows is a conference proposal that I sent to Harper in 1999. At the time, he was interested in making this conference happen. I would still be interested in doing a conference like this and would welcome Templeton’s involvement. Read More ›