Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Computers can’t think like people; they only do symbolic logic

Engineering prof Karl D. Stephan: Symbolic logic says nothing about the truth or reality of what you give it. To understand what things really are, you have to get outside the pristine mathematical structure of symbolic logic and embrace what Prof. Kreeft calls Socratic logic. Read More ›

Bob Marks: Bias is inevitable in AI; time to admit it

Marks’s point is that such biases are not a matter of villains taking over. It’s a normal feature of the way people think. And people program computers. Doubtless, it finds its way into evolution issues for which people say they ran a simulation on a computer. Read More ›

A prof on looking into ID literature for the first time…

“this literature was far more scientifically substantive than the usual caricature, and this drove me to immerse myself in the scientific literature of evolutionary biology to see if it was as convincing as usually portrayed.” Um, yes. And the longer such critiques can be evaded rather than addressed, the more substantive they will be. Read More ›

Richard Weikart on yet another Darwinian rewrite of Darwin and the facts

Ruse can get away with simply misrepresenting Darwin on the subject of race. Being a Darwinist means, among other things, never having to answer critics. Critics can be dismissed, in all senses of the word. It’s true that nothing is learned but, under the circumstances, nothing need be learned. Darwinism is the default setting for pop science culture. It will always be preferred to evidence. One must wait until that culture self-destructs. Read More ›

BBC swings and misses: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, pt. 2 ( –> Being, Logic and First Principles, 24b)

The exploration in-the-wild on Heidegger’s pivotal question is turning out to be quite fruitful. Here, we see BBC swing and miss, leading to dancing stumps. Dancing stumps: Video, with one of the greats at bat: First, context, we are discussing here popularised forms of the idea that “nothing” has been defined by physicists to denote in effect a sub-universe that gives rise to quantum fluctuations and thus expanding sub-universes. Let’s clip from the parent thread LFP 24: [KF, LFP 24, 41:] Let us continue our “in-the-wild” exploration, here a Robert Adler BBC article (as representing what we might find in high-prestige media): [BBC:] >>Why is there something rather than nothing? By Robert Adler 6 November 2014 People have wrestled with Read More ›

Apes and humans: How did science get so detached from reality?

We’re not “one” with chimpanzees. The wall has not “been breached.” So far as anyone can tell, it is not even breachable. Nobody thinks chimpanzees are the same as humans except a few researchers who mayhave spent too long in the bush. Read More ›

Winston Ewert explains why the mind is not a computer

"An abstract mathematical device cannot experience qualia or consciousness. If they could, we would expect mathematical formulas like the quadratic formula or the area of a sphere to experience consciousness. But that seems absurd, so we must conclude that a computer cannot exhibit consciousness. Put another way, consciousness is not a form of computation." Read More ›

Forty years ago, Douglas Hofstadter was sure a materialist explanation of the brain would work…

"There is, quite simply, no mechanical explanation of how the human mind has emerged from brawling chimpanzees over the course of millions of years of evolution." That keeps happening with materialist theories. We thought their hat had way more rabbits. Read More ›