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.
Tag: Robert J. Marks
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).
At Mind Matters News: George Montañez on what’s wrong with the Turing Test
Marks: It’s very easy to determine if who you’re talking to is a computer. You just ask them to compute the square root of 30 or something, because a human would take a while to get the square root of 30.
Eric Holloway: Why Bell’s theorem matters
Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Read More…
Robert J. Marks on why there cannot be an infinite number of universes
The Big Bang Theory sitcom’s Sheldon Cooper insists that in no universe would he dance with Penny. That mighrt be true, says Marks but there still isn’t an infinite number of universes: But, some claim, there is an infinite number of universes in the multiverse. That is ludicrous because there are no infinities in the Read More…
Robert J. Marks: Time to change the peer review system
Marks: The assumption that today’s peer-reviewed paper has been vetted by experts and therefore has been awarded a blue ribbon for excellence is far from the truth. Peer review often does not do its job. Consequently, today’s collection of scholarly literature is exploding in quantity and deteriorating in quality.
Selmer Bringsjord: Can human minds be reduced to computer programs?
In Silicon Valley that has long been a serious belief. But are we really anywhere close?