Another blow to iconic Hollywood’s finances
The stifling of creativity that Cancel Culture imposes and the warping of classics that Wokeness inflicts are symptoms, not causes of decline.
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Denyse O'Leary
As Scholars Use AI To Write Papers, Are They Courting Doom?
Questions arise like, what even IS an author? Why does authorship matter? Why should students learn to write? And who needs scholars?If academic papers in a discipline can be mostly AI written, why credential scholars anyway? Perhaps the discipline itself is obsolete.
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Those Demons at the Core – a Novel
Dr. Geoffrey Simmons’s taut new thriller, Oppenheimer’s Demon, envisions a nuclear threat aimed at the citySimmons is, among other things, a disaster preparedness expert. He portrays the growing panic in and around Chicago as word of a potential nuclear blast leaks out.
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Unexpected: Plants Undermine Materialist Consciousness Theory?
Plant scientist Calvo’s critique of neuron-based theories appears not to be hippie panpsychism; he is asking hard science questionsIf cognition can exist without a specific material substrate, one possible implication is that an underlying force seeks expression by whatever means are available.
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Data Centers Challenge Our Usual Politics — Will They Change It?
True, they use a lot of energy. But much of the controversy seems to suggest a shift in the political landscapeThis year, Harvard Magazine featured an article that asserts that the Democrats have lost key tech industry endorsements. Let’s see if that matters.
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Not This Again?! The Lizard Brain Is Back? Wait. It’s NOT Back…
A useful item from Georgia Tech examines the claim that an ancient lizard brain controls our emotionsIt’s easy to see why people might latch onto the idea of a reptilian brain as an explainer for complex topics. But the neuroscience underpinning it is just not that persuasive.
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Trends: Eminent Journal Nature Gets Community-Noted (!) at X
The critics of its Jason Arday editorial are the very people who would once have gone to bat for Nature and similar journalsCommunity notes are usually the fate of people who pass on debunked or fake news. But Nature took that risk with its surprising approach to the Jason Arday tragedy/scandal.
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The Mind–Body “Interaction Problem” Is Desperately Overhyped
Why would our mental states NOT be "causally relevant" to the way we behave?The universe contradicts the eliminativist point of view. The laws that govern it are not physical things but they are real.
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Elite Publisher Pulls Book Due to Fake Quote
The quote, in a New York University Press book, originates in a series of misrepresentations of something a Lehigh University biochemist had writtenThe challenge, moving on, is that better scholarship means listening to those who challenge conventional ideas instead of serially editing them.
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Prebunking: “Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”
We know we are living in a changing world, when Europe is striving to be ChinaAt the Brussels Signal, tech analyst Norman Lewis has been discussing a form of indoctrination that is becoming increasingly popular in the European Union, and doubtless elsewhere: prebunking — “a preventative measure that aims to prepare audiences to recognize and resist information risks.” (UNHCR) Prebunking is beloved of bureaucrats and you will hear a great deal about what a good thing it is from many sources — sources that should, under the circumstances, give pause for thought: ● “What Is Prebunking? It’s better to inoculate against disinformation than to debunk later.” (Psychology Today, 2021) ● “False information is everywhere. ‘Pre-bunking’ tries to head it off early” (NPR, 2022) ● “What is Pre-Bunking: The Power of Framing Before the Facts” (Simply Read More ›
How Can We Make Sense of Claims for Plant Consciousness?
Plants are cognitive but consciousness means something rather larger than cognitiveComputers are not conscious simply because they are programmed to make decisions; plants are likely in the same position.
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How Our Tech-Obsessed Age Responds to Grief: Grieftech
Just when we thought that the chatbot craze couldn’t get crazier — departed loved ones get uploaded as chatbotsGrieftech poses genuine problems when avatars seem to keep the deceased unchanged in a changing world — or change just when we want them to.
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Is Evolution Theory Canceling Itself? If So, It’s Not Alone
Darwinian biology, along with other areas of science, seems much less sure of itself todayNew information suggests that basic assumptions underlying many disciplines may be inadequate or mistaken. How they respond will predict their future.
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AI: A Boon or a Bane? Misunderstood, or Misused?
Pew Research finds that young people are losing faith in a glorious AI future. They have a point but...When the young people inherit the world, they can start getting tough with misuse and abuse but first they should take the time to learn how it works.
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Hotter water? Neuroscientist Christof Koch plans to study NDEs
Having survived an effort to Cancel him, he makes no further commitment to a conventional materialist viewKoch might wish to consider William James’s neglected theory of consciousness: the brain does not create the mind; it focuses it.
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Human Evolution Needs Subhumans, and Needs Them Badly
Archeologists are quietly revising the human origins story in a way that does not follow a Darwinian pattern but they don’t quite come out and say itWithout a subhuman, the human mind has no history. That is a serious blow to any Darwinian materialist project.
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Why do taxi drivers suffer low rates of late-life dementia?
Driving, as such, did not offer protection from the dread dementia; needing to constantly map place coordinates quickly in real time seems to enlarge the hippocampus.
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A Science Education Group Tackles the Fauci Hearing and Diary
They have every reason to be concerned about what these revelations about the Covid years are doing to the public perception of scienceAt one time, it was the less well-informed people who trusted science less. But repeated episodes like the Covid Crazy will mean that the better informed people will trust less.
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How NOT to Get More People to Trust Science, in Four Easy Lessons
Ethan Siegel had the singular bad luck to write his condescending column about how we should Trust the Science more in the very wake of Fauci’s Covid “diaries” coming to light…Siegel’s essay at Big Think can have one very desirable result: It is a good, though unwitting, summary of attitudes that must change if public trust in science is to be improved.
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Legacy media struggle to keep Fauci legend alive
For many media people, the revelations from Fauci’s papers are just something that needs explaining away. That is pretty much what they will continue to try to do.
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