Human cloning: It can’t happen vs. It can but wouldn’t matter much.
Tag: Michael Egnor
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor takes on a materialist neurologist
Egnor: Novella refutes himself. He first asserts that everything he knows is an illusion. Then he insists that his illusions have slapped him in the face with reality.
Life never originates where they say. But grants do.
Actually, the researchers are not so dumb when you consider that looking for chance events attracts the grants. Little else would.
Researchers: Comatose people do show self-awareness
Michael Egnor: This study is consistent with the work of Wilder Penfield, who showed that higher-level abstract thought did not seem to arise from the brain in a material way.
Materialism’s secret of success, Hint: It’s not evidence
Materialism enables irrational ideas about ourselves to compete with rational ones on an equal basis. It won’t work
Michael Egnor: Can animals “reason”? My challenge to Jeffrey Shallit
Could Shallit be replaced by even the most talented and methodical of counting ravens?
Woke U fires prof, hires chimp ;)
A light-hearted look by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at what would happen if we really thought that unreason is better than reason.
Michael Egnor: It’s a matter of fact, not belief, that only humans reason
Readers may remember philosopher Justin Smith, who thinks that we can understand life better if we “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.” Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor weighs in, responding point by point to the essay, for example: Material states of the brain can, of course, influence our power of reason—an ounce […]
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is really confused about free will
It really is quite funny. And physicists should stick to physics.
Michael Egnor: Jerry Coyne confirms a hypothesis about secular religion
He notes: Coyne rants that Staddon’s essay should never have been published. In other words, he responds to the observation that atheism is censoriously thuggish by… being a censorious thug.
Intelligent computers? You may as well believe that Penn and Teller really do magic
A computer is not—in and of itself—smarter than a pile of tinkertoys, philosopher Ed Feser argues
Michael Egnor: Apes are NOT spiritual beings
Never mind what Jane Goodall thinks: In an otherwise silly article about the “evolution” of religion, journalist Brandon Ambrosino quotes primatologist Jane Goodall on the topic of… religious belief among apes: “The chimpanzee’s brain is so like ours: they have emotions that are clearly similar to or the same as those that we call happiness, […]
The academic study of stupidity has turned up some interesting findings
As Michael Egnor tells us, scientism is not a cure for stupidity. But never mind, quite a few science savants have rushed in fearlessly: Evolutionary biologist David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, told Nautilus, “Stupidity is using a rule where adding more data doesn’t improve your chances of getting [a problem] right. In […]
Why Thomas Aquinas would like intelligent design research
It’s been fashionable for Thomistic philosophers to avoid harassment by claiming to oppose ID but their positions rarely seem to make any sense. And when they do, it so often sounds as if the Thomist would be happier as a naturalist (nature is all there is). It might be workplace issue, who knows?
Neurosurgeon asks, Do we have free will or not?
Michael Egnor: Determinism at the quantum level is not true. Nature is not deterministic.