Rob Sheldon: RE: Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time:At the risk of making the waters muddier, I think the problem we are all addressing by different methods is that of Dualism–the incompatibility of material and spiritual existence. When the Enlightenment put the emphasis of the objective experience, it produced an explosion of scientific and technological progress that misled the inte lligentsia into embracing Materialism. The 20th century showed the fruit of a materialist, atheistsociety, which wasn’t pretty. But the solution–attempted many times, for example by Romanticism in the 19th century– of grafting a spiritual dimension onto the material, never really took. The graft just never got enough sustenance to survive, and so Romanticism, Gnosticism, Liberalism Read More ›

From Discover: If a signal is ‘space-time separable’, this means in effect that one can hold either space or time constant, and then measure the other. For instance, in an EEG experiment, we typically consider the signal from one particular electrode (i.e. holding space constant) and plot a graph of how it varies over time. In a task-based fMRI experiment, we hold time constant and plot the spatial extent of activity at that time point. By doing this, we are assuming that activity in the brain takes the form of standing waves. However, Alexander et al. say that while we can treat brain activity in this way, we shouldn’t, because brain activity is dominated by travelling waves, activations or deactivations Read More ›

From O’Leary for News’s other desk at MercatorNet: Why screen addiction matters to children. Many parents seem unaware of the harm. Fake news is coming to your town. And mine. Big time. And we are talking genuine fakes here. Mobile phones: Accessible banking for developing Africa? Mobile phones simply make more logistical and environmental sense. Millennials feel buyers’ remorse over social media? Maybe because it is just not safe any more. Disney world joins attractions banning selfie sticks But this is a civilization issue, not just a safety issue Do Big Box stores go to heaven when they die? Innocent victims, murdered by the Internet? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Just add: Attention schema. Get published. Case you wondered. From Aeon: Artificial intelligence is growing more intelligent every year, but we’ve never given our machines consciousness. People once thought that if you made a computer complicated enough it would just sort of ‘wake up’ on its own. But that hasn’t panned out (so far as anyone knows). Apparently, the vital spark has to be deliberately designed into the machine. And so the race is on to figure out what exactly consciousness is and how to build it. I’ve made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness? Follow UD News Read More ›

… must’ve told a bud who seems to have put it up here: One thing the ENCODE consortium drove home is that DNA acts like a Dynamic Random Access memory for methylation marks. That is to say, even though the DNA sequence isn’t changed, like computer RAM which isn’t physically removed, it’s electronic state can be modified. The repetitive DNA acts like physical hardware so even if the repetitive sequences aren’t changed, they can still act as memory storage devices for regulatory information. ENCODE collects huge amounts of data on methylation marks during various stages of the cell. This is like trying to take a few snapshots of a computer memory to figure out how Windows 8 works. The complexity Read More ›

In his blog post this week on the neuroscience research of Columbia’s Sean Escola, NIH Director Francis Collins makes the obvious, yet too often overlooked point that each of the hundred billion or so neurons in the human brain is different. In our profound ignorance it is easy to view the brain like a pile of pudding, achieving its fantastic abilities through a lucky mixture of the right chemicals. But of course, nothing could be farther from the truth and Collins’ observations helps to disabuse us of such folly. If you have ever wired up a machine you will understand. It is not just a pile of wires that somehow happen to get it right. Each wire has its own, Read More ›

That is doubted in a new paper: Can we learn without being aware of what we’re learning? Many psychologists say that ‘unconscious’, or implicit, learning exists. But in a new paper, London-based psychologists Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks call the evidence for this into question. … Essentially, this suggests that the reason why only 21.5% of the studies detected a significant recognition effect, is that the studies just didn’t have a large enough sample size to reliably detect it. Vadillo et al. show that the median sample size in these studies was 16, so the statistical power to detect an effect of dz = 0.31 with that sample size is just 21% – which, of course, is exactly the proportion that Read More ›

From +plus Living Mathematics: Organisms — humans, animals and arguably even plants — have a striking ability to predict what their environment might throw at them. They use information from the past to respond to cues in the world and learn from surprises, meaning that when they encounter similar situations again in the future, they can act faster and more appropriately. In fact, this so-called predictive inference is such an important skill that it helps organisms to stay alive. But Susanne Still and Gavin Crooks think that this ability might also hold the key to understanding how all types of living systems behave efficiently in the natural world — perhaps with a little help from quantum information processing. Their work Read More ›

Darwin incidence: A planned event that must be treated as a coincidence, irrespective of probability. What do readers think? At 11.32am (EDT) on 8 July, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) computers went down, causing a four-hour suspension of transactions. In a four-hour period the NYSE averages about $400m (£259m) in trades – a substantial daily loss. The NYSE and Homeland Security both quickly announced the problem was not due to a cyberattack. At around the same time that the NYSE went down, the Wall Street Journal’s website went offline, as did that of popular financial blog Zero Hedge. United Airlines also experienced a “network connectivity issue” which impacted almost 5,000 flights worldwide. Given the criticality of technology to United Read More ›

Here is an article in Cosmos that apparently wasn’t edited by Chicken Little. It addresses defects in our current knowledge: Setting aside the vague definition, calculating the extinction rate is tricky. A logical method is to divide how many species became extinct over a certain time by the total number of species on the planet. But scientists don’t know how many different animal species exist. Estimates vary wildly. One recent example was published by University of Melbourne entomologist Andrew Hamilton and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hamilton calculated that the number of terrestrial arthropod species – which includes insects and spiders, and is the largest single group of animals – is around 6.8 million. That’s far Read More ›

(485 to 444 mya) We are told: From ScienceDaily: Spectacular Moroccan fossils redefine evolutionary timelines Some of the oldest marine animals on the planet, including armoured worm-like forms and giant, lobster like sea creatures, survived millions of years longer than previously thought, according to a spectacularly preserved fossil formation from southeastern Morocco. ‘Horseshoe crabs, for example, turn out to be at least 20 million years older than we thought. The formation demonstrates how important exceptionally preserved fossils are to our understanding of major evolutionary events in deep time’ says Peter Van Roy, also of Yale, who first recognised the scientific importance of the Fezouata fauna and is lead author of the study, part of a project funded by the National Read More ›

From Frank Wilczek, How Physics Will Change-and Change the World -in 100 Years: Unification VI: Mind and Matter Although many details remain to be elucidated, it seems fair to say that metabolism and reproduction, two of the most characteristic features of life, are now broadly understood at the molecular level as physical processes. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, put forward the “astonishing hypothesis” that it will be possible to bring understanding of basic psychology, including biological cognitive processing, memory, motivation, and emotion, to a comparable level. One might call that “reduction” of mind to matter. But mind is what it is, and what it is will not be diminished for being physically understood. I’d be thrilled to understand how Read More ›

From: Evolution: The Fossils Speak, but Hardly with One Voice 5. Far too much attention may be given to genes and DNA. So much current evolution thinking, including questionable fields like evolutionary psychology, depends on the alleged power of the gene. Does anyone remember that fellow who said in the early 90s that a CD of your genome is “you”? Not even close. From the New Statesman: “According to a growing number of researchers, the standard story of the influence of genes is overblown. So many other factors influence how we turn out as individuals and how we evolve as a species that the fundamentals of biology need a rewrite.” “This is no storm in an academic tearoom,” a group Read More ›

Perhaps the most unlikely part, of all the many unlikely parts, of evolutionary theory is the evolution of the brain, with all that that entails, including 200 billion nerve cells, one quadrillion synapses, and the thousand or more molecular-scale switches in each synapse. Not surprisingly researchers sometimes can hardly find the words to express what they are studying. The brain is “truly awesome” beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. (You can read more here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, and here).  Read more

From ScienceDaily: Those who are born to parents from diverse genetic backgrounds tend to be taller and have sharper thinking skills than others, the major international study has found. But can we unharness the cart from the horse here? Wouldn’t smarter people be more likely to look to genuine advantage as opposed to narrow bigotry, when picking mates? Researchers analysed health and genetic information from more than 100 studies carried out around the world. These included details on more than 350,000 people from urban and rural communities. The team found that greater genetic diversity is linked to increased height. It is also associated with better cognitive skills, as well as higher levels of education. It’s at least worth noting that Read More ›