Bayesian statistics are used, for example, in spam filter technology, identifying probable spam by examining vast masses of previous messages.
Tag: Robert J. Marks
Could artificial intelligence change the mind–body problem?
Angus Menuge: I don’t see any reason from these amazing enhancements of the complexity of these [computer] systems to think that the systems would move from not having subjective awareness to having it or from moving to true intentionality about anything beyond themselves.
Robert J. Marks: How materialism proves unbounded scientific ignorance
Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that there is an infinite number of truths that are provably unprovable. That’s bad news for scientism, though not for science.
Gregory Chaitin on why human creativity is not computable
Creativity is what we don’t know. Once it is reduced to a formula a computer can use, it is not creative any more, by definition.
Math paradoxes show us that the world we live in is not and cannot be purely naturalist
Robert J. Marks sometimes uses the paradox of the smallest “uninteresting” number to illustrate proof by contradiction — that is, by creating paradoxes
Gregory Chaitin on the dead hand of bureaucracy in science
Chaitin: I have a pessimistic vision which I hope is completely wrong, that the bureaucracies are like a cancer — the ones that control research and funding for research and counting how much you’ve been publishing. I’ve noticed that at universities, for example, the administrative personnel are gradually taking all the best buildings and expanding. So I think that the bureaucracy and the rules and regulations increases to the point that it sinks the society.
Kurt Gödel was unhappy with atheism and finally he blasted one fashionable type to smithereens
More scandalous still, Gödel was not a Darwinist: “I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved.”
Gregory Chaitin (of Chaitin’s number fame) muses on what makes the great mathematicians stand out
Chaitin offers some thoughts on Georg Cantor and Srinivasa Ramanujan as well, both of whom thought that their math discoveries were divinely inspired.
Things that might surprise you about great scientists
How about juggling, riding a unicycle, and playing bongo? Or catching criminals or cracking safes? … Many people would be very surprised by the things that matter most to many famous scientists. Hint: Many are not atheists.
A new book discusses Walter Bradley’s life and legacy
Walter Bradley has been a key figure in the ID community. The biography, For a Greater Purpose, is by Robert J. Marks and William Dembski.
How is information present in life?
Marks: For example, if I burn a book to ashes and scatter the ashes around, have I destroyed information? Does it make a difference if there’s another copy of the book?
The quantum world underlies our universe but follows its own “rules”
Enrique Blair: Very tricky, those photons.
The replication crisis in science grinds on into another decade
At Vox: Most papers fail to replicate for totally predictable reasons.
Robert J. Marks on the “Listen to science” mantra
Marks points out that politicians who insist that their beliefs represent science might be surprised by the checkered history of that view.
Did Dan Brown’s hero stumble onto God?
Robert J. Marks and Oxford mathematician John Lennox discuss that in connection with Lennox’s new book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (2020).