It really is quite funny. And physicists should stick to physics.
Tag: Michael Egnor
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.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has become Darwinian Jerry Coyne’s “archenemy”
Coyne has good taste in archenemies. It shouldn’t go unrewarded.
Michael Egnor: Is your brain a billion little biological machines?
As pop neuroscientist Anil Seth claims in a TED talk? What the brain “is” depends on how you study it. We live in a mechanical age, so we study it as a machine. But our method of study determines what we learn. Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg noted perceptively that “…what we observe […]
Michael Egnor: Does your brain construct your conscious reality?
Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk Anil Seth’s talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors. Part II Does your brain construct your conscious […]
Michael Egnor: Apes can be generous. Are they just like humans then?
Reading the claims for ape generosity in The New York Times, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a clarification: There is a fallacy about the human mind that regularly appears in research on animal behavior, and this fallacy is related to the pervasive misunderstanding about machine “intelligence.” It is a misunderstanding about the most basic characteristic of […]
Jeffrey Shallit takes on Mike Egnor: Machines really CAN learn!
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor tells us that computer engineer Jeffrey Shallit, known for attacking ID, has responded to his recent parable explaining why machines can’t learn. According to Shallit, a computer is not just a machine, but something quite special: Computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit takes issue with my parable (September 8, 2018) about “machine learning.” The […]
Is Darwinism “completely worthless to science”?
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t mince words: I despise Darwinism. It is, in my view, an utterly worthless scientific concept promulgated by a third-rate barnacle collector and hypochondriac to justify functional, if not explicit, atheism. Richard Dawkins got it right: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. A low bar, admittedly, but “natural […]
Neurosurgeon: We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses
From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, reflecting on Tom Wolfe’s new The Kingdom of Speech at Evolution News & Views: I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities — the intellect’s ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing — and […]