Last Friday, we reran our top story of the year: Another warning that the AI bubble is near bursting…

AI analyst Gary Marcus agrees, it seems, with our own Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk on that one. Next year we should be getting some hints as to whether their forecasts are correct.

Now here are the other nine of the Top Ten stories, with some brief comments on their significance:

#2 The Theory That Consciousness Is a Quantum System Gains Support. Hameroff and Penrose’s Orch Or Theory sees consciousness as the outcome of a quantum collapse of a wave function. How a quantum theory of consciousness will work out is anyone’s guess but here’s a prediction: It won’t help the cause of materialism much. (January 23, 2024)

Image Credit: Jorm Sangsorn - Adobe Stock

#3 Nobel Prize Physicist Thinks Consciousness Must Underlie Universe Brian Josephson, after whom the Josephson effect in electronics is named, hopes to find the answer to the conundrum of consciousness in biology. As Kuhn marvels, Josephson reasons his way to precisely the sorts of conclusions generally accepted in major world religions. (August 24, 2024)

Comment: It’s gradually sinking in that “science” is not going to suddenly discover something that makes human consciousness easy to understand in the sense that the workings of a mechanical device are easy to understand. We will learn valuable things about human consciousness but our discoveries will not reduce it to the mechanical process so earnestly sought by so many.

#4 Why Doesn’t God Just Do Something Dramatic to Prove He Exists? by Michael Egnor. The Divine Hiddenness argument for atheism, espoused by Matt Dillahunty, is that, if a perfectly loving God existed, reasonable unbelief would be impossible. Philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that God gives enough evidence for faith and leaves room for doubt because he wants our heart first — and reason follows. (February 25, 2024)

Comment: It’s worth noting that Dillahunty refused to debate Dr. Egnor any further.

#5 Decade-Long Study: No Evidence Found for Darwinian Evolution. After many generations, water fleas showed no evidence of changing genetically to adapt to their environment, as the theory would predict. What is the origin of the “complexity and subtlety” the researchers cite? Do they not suggest a mind in or behind the universe? (September 19, 2024)

Image Credit: StraSyP - Adobe Stock

Comment: Darwinian evolution — the idea that natural selection acting on random mutations produces the world of life around us — is often treated as proven beyond question because… the world of life itself proves it! Of course the logic is faulty but, as a profession of faith, it is seldom rigorously questioned. Now and then it is, with the sort of result we see here.

#6 The Backdoor to Control the Internet. By Jonathan Bartlett. We almost lost the Internet last week, but open-source developers saved the day. Few people are aware, but over the last several days, a perceptive developer foiled a multi-year plot to install a remote backdoor into, well, the entire Internet. (April 1, 2024)

Comment: We can count on many more such attempts. Every power-hungry outfit in the world wants to get control of the internet by one or another means.

#7 Why Panpsychism (Everything Is Conscious) Is Gaining Ground. Many life forms do unexpectedly remarkable things. It is simpler to broaden the circle of consciousness than to keep on trying to prove that human consciousness is just an illusion. Panpsychism will face a setback, however, when it tries to show that human consciousness is merely on a continuum with animal consciousness. It isn’t. (July 4, 2024)

Comment: Panpsychism is an effort to naturalize the human mind without eliminating it. That is, the human mind is thought to be a real but natural development of experience that begins with electrons and moves up through life forms. It was bound to become more popular as claiming that the human mind is merely an illusion began to seem increasingly untenable.

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#8 Science Team Argues, Consciousness Came Before Life Can the authors take issue with Darwinian evolution claims while maintaining a materialist stance? Apart from demoting evolution, “consciousness first” is yet another attempt to naturalize consciousness by making it a basic origin of life process. (May 13, 2024)

Comment: This is another instance of the slow but sure acceptance of panpsychism in science.

#9 Our Universe Works, Yet Doesn’t Make Sense … And So? How can so much uncertainty lie placidly at the basis of our universe but disrupt nothing in particular? We even build better computers because of it. The most reasonable theory of how the universe can be both uncertain at its base and yet reliable in everyday life is the least popular one in the sciences: deism or theism. (June 4, 2024)

Comment: We may be reaching the point where the presumption of atheism in the sciences is becoming a drawback. The need to pretend that the human mind is simply a gloss on the chimpanzee mind — when that is plainly not true — comes to mind, as does the fine-tuning of the universe.

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#10 The Cancel Culture Mob Comes For the Evolutionary Biologists. A number of them got into trouble recently for insisting, correctly, that humans, as primates, are sex binary. Science is as dependent on the concept of public truth as the great religions are. Thus, when private truth rapidly gains power, it is just as vulnerable. (January 28, 2024)

Comment: A short-term solution would be strengthening freedom of speech in academic life. But the evolutionary biologists might hesitate. After all, there are many problems with their passionately espoused Darwinian theory, which is often protected simply by Canceling the critic.

And Happy New Year to our readers, who make our work possible and worthwhile!