Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Denyse O'Leary

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Old computers from the 80s in an abandoned computing center

When materialist assumptions about the mind begin to sound dated…

A 2017 profile of Roger Penrose and his consciousness theory was penned before slow changes and major tumults rocked the discipline — and it shows
Paulson’s Penrose profile is written as if materialism is going to prevail but that seems much less likely now than it perhaps did in 2017. Read More ›
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A bunch of pink and purple scheme with a DNA strand in the background. concept XX, XY chromosome.

Olympics: The Woke Have a Message for Science: Scram

Science no longer has a seat at the High Table. I hope readers will think through the implications of that and what it portends for all of us
Science — when it gets in the way of Woke culture — is beginning to get the same treatment as religion: ignored, mocked, rewritten, and eventually attacked. Read More ›
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DNA sequence. Generative AI

Biology Needs a Fresh Look — But Is It Afraid of What It’ll Find?

A science writer’s musings make clear that intelligent design is the only reasonable explanation for the human genome’s ordered complexity
But Philip Ball doesn’t want to go there and neither do most biologists — thus there are so many issues they just can’t raise. Read More ›
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TV News studio - recording and broadcasting media in a modern set design with blue background for journalists. Generative AI

As Trust in Media Declines, Media Seek Allies in Government

The internet crashes the cost of almost every factor except time so more and more independent sources are jumping in
Legacy media want something DONE about the new bottom-up news media that are an existential threat to traditional top-down media. Read More ›
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Emergency Department: Doctors, Nurses and Surgeons Move Seriously Injured Patient Lying on a Stretcher Through Hospital Corridors. Medical Staff in a Hurry Move Patient into Operating Theater.

The Mind Is Not Annihilated at Death, Emergency Room Doctor Says

ER specialist Sam Parnia is making waves with his challenge, based on his clinical experience and research, to the claim that the human mind is annihilated at death
Parnia says he is not religious. Rather, his views are the outcome of clinical experience in a field where doctors have literally never gone before. Read More ›
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Man having dementia while sitting on his living room, trying to remember some place inside a sea of memories

A Status Report From the War on Late Life Dementia

Almost half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed, researchers believe
Increasing longevity and widespread early diagnosis will mean that delaying the progress of the disease becomes very important over the next few decades. Read More ›
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Female robot face, Artificial intelligence concept. Generative AI

Programmer: AI could certainly become conscious

From Casper Wilstrup's perspective, we can't demonstrate that anything is NOT conscious so creating conscious AI is simply a matter of using the scientific method
The reason Casper Wilstrup is so sure is that he has adopted panpsychism — the view that everything participates in consciousness. Read More ›
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People with banners protest as part of a climate change march

Rocks’ Lives Matter: The Political Face of “Everything Is Conscious”

When it comes to rights, just being human is becoming much less of an advantage
In a world where panpsychism is the science and neo-paganism is the art, environment activists’ rights will increase and workers’ rights will decrease. Read More ›
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Ultrasound of a fetus at 20 weeks

Unborn Child Learns the Accents, Rhythms of Mom’s Native Language

There is, however, a dark, little-told tale about how we learned much of what we know about unborn children today
Although Narayanan frowns on pro-lifers using information to show the individual humanity of the unborn child, that’s clearly where the science points. Read More ›
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Periodic Table Science

How a Chemist Came To Think That All Life Forms Are Conscious

Emeritus professor of chemistry Addy Pross explains the reasoning process: A universal Darwinism can generate cognition in chemistry
Tracing the “chemical roots of consciousness,” he ends up affirming panpsychism, but insisting that nature is a “technologist.” Someone must do the thinking. Read More ›
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Group of neanderthal people walking by river ,

Did the Wily Neanderthal Save Time While Preparing Meals?

An enterprising archaeology team tried cooking birds using methods only available to Neanderthals — and learned some things, including how to avoid burned fingers
The separateness and intellectual inferiority of Neanderthal man was at one time constantly emphasized but the evidence doesn’t support it. Read More ›
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Comatose male patient in hospital.

Heart attack doctor asks, is death now reversible?

If new findings in resuscitation techniques hold up, says Sam Parnia in his new book, brain conditions now deemed irreversible may be reversible

Resuscitation specialist Sam Parnia, reflects in his new book, Lucid Dying (Hachette, August 6, 2024), on the recent discovery that brains can be resuscitated hours after death. From the sample pages offered at the book’s Amazon site, we learn that in 2019, a writer at prominent science journal Nature sent Parnia a copy of the embargoed results of a study of pig brains from a slaughterhouse, kept alive for hours after death. “I was left totally stunned and speechless” he recounts: For at least a decade, I had tried to draw attention to the fact that our concept of life and death should be redefined. Death should no longer be viewed as a specific black-and-white moment. Instead, it should be Read More ›

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The Threshold of Near-Death Experience, Between Two Worlds

Heart Attack Doctor: Science Shows That Death Is Not the End

Sam Parnia began by wondering how brain cells can give rise to thoughts. He came to see that the message “from science” was not what he had been led to expect
Parnia concludes that science suggests, at a minimum, that our consciousness and selfhood “are not annihilated when we cross over into death.” Read More ›
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Anonymous crowd of people walking street wearing masks during covid 19 coronavirus pandemic

Let Him Who Would “Represent” Science Beware…

James B. Meigs looks at Anthony Fauci’s new book, On Call, asking what happened? What turned the highly esteemed doctor into a scheming authoritarian?
Fauci’s early career was brilliant; he gained the trust of angry opponents during the AIDS years. But the art of listening seemed to desert him later. Read More ›
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Mini pig and dog on the field with dandelions

When Dogs and Pet Pigs Both Heard Humans Cry, What Happened?

Have humans changed dogs’ behavior over thousands of years of domestication?
Sensitivity is a two-way street. Dogs study us but we also extensively study and catalogue our dogs’ facial and body expressions as well. Pigs not so much. Read More ›
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Feigning Opossum

Once Again: Near-Death Experiences as Possum Tales

In the recent Scientific American article, we learn once again that NDEs evolved as a human way of “playing dead”
Hypotheses based on evolution sometimes proceed without establishing basic evidence, for example, whether thanatosis is even common in humans. Read More ›
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tunnel of light

Scientific American: Near-Death Experiences Compared To Drug Trip

Now that NDEs are accepted as a clinical fact, more effort is underway to account for them as part of physical nature, like hallucinogenic chemicals
There are significant differences between NDEs and drug trips, as psychologist Steve Taylor notes. Read More ›
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Neural landscape with densely packed neurons, selective focus on a synapse releasing neurotransmitters, vibrant blue and white colors, high-resolution digital illustration

Is Panpsychism Putting Francis Crick’s Pack of Neurons to Flight?

Science writer John Horgan remembers Crick in the ‘90s when reductionism was riding high in neuroscience. What’s happened since?
As the years wear on, consciousness will likely remain irreducible and the neuroscientists may end up having to address plausible claims for dualism soon too. Read More ›
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Censored book

View: Universities Should Not Speak Up Against Dissenting Profs!

Jay Bhattacharya and Wesley J. Smith respond to an article in a medical journal arguing that universities SHOULD censure dissenters on the faculty
How much good science would have seen the light in the last 600 years if “Institutional Voices” had been heard from even more often than they were? Read More ›
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white mouse

Sleeping Mice Show How the Brain Lays Down Memories

Studies of mice running mazes have shed light on the sharp waves of neurons that assist in forming memories
As we learn more about memory, it takes a while to even process what we are learning but the research may help treat memory-related disorders. Read More ›