The risk with neuroscience that tries to encompass Mozart is not that we will know nothing but that we will know just enough to get it all wrong.
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One reason there can’t be Final Answers in science is that the questions keep changing as we learn more, and in some cases we are asking the wrong ones.
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Science is more likely to be a decade-long fuss over the ninth decimal place of the muon than about Contact! or Boldly Go. But real learning is like that.
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Fundamentally, Barbieri wants a new information-friendly paradigm without dispensing with the old no-information one. But no one can ride two horses at once.
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Ours is an age of private truth but math and science both took hold in ages of public truth. Neither of them can survive private truth for long.
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Materialism impoverishes mind–brain discussions due to Egnor’s dilemma: If your hypothesis is that your mind is an illusion, then you DO NOT HAVE a hypothesis.
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Orwell noted that the intellectual censorship he encountered was spontaneous — not a campaign or conspiracy — just a sense that people shouldn’t read his work.
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Although Barbieri depicts the origin of life as the production of “artefacts,” he certainly does not see himself as an intelligent design theorist.
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Decades ago, better informed people trusted ongoing science research. Today, “Trust the Science!” is becoming a jibe — and for good reason.
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Amid claims for the Exact Spot in which selfhood lives and claims that the self is just an illusion, a real patient points inadvertently to the reality…
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In 2016, University of Ferrara theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri wrote a rather interesting open access paper on a key philosophical conflict in biology: Is life only chemistry or is it chemistry plus information? In it, he says that many biologists see information in life forms — biological information — as something that “does not really belong to science.” How did they get there from here? Author of Code Biology: A New Science of Life (Springer, 2015), Barbieri offers a history, a critique, and a proposed solution. In this three-part series, I will look at all three elements. First, the history. Molecular biology understands genes as transferring linear sequences of information to proteins that carry out instructions. That’s information as it Read More ›
What’s most interesting about this discussion is how well the life of the intellect, engaged by science, gets on without any form of eliminative materialism.
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When philosophers of science assume agency without an agent and laws without a lawgiver, they fare no better than ancestors placating fickle gods.
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Current treatments for dementia are not very effective; capturing the mysterious moments of paradoxical lucidity may point to new and better ones.
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No day that we can’t provide materialist explanations for everything can even be contemplated and that is where “emergence” stands bravely in the gap.
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Social justice messaging, right or wrong, is hardly going to help address the fact that American students lag behind most wealthy nations in math.
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Curiously, Seth used to criticize those who see consciousness as a “mystery” but he describes it that way himself when discussing the famous wager.
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At Scientific American, Lydia Denworth brought up an interesting topic earlier this month: The way that brain waves synchronize between two people who are communicating successfully: Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns, like dancers moving together. Auditory and visual areas respond to shape, sound and movement in similar ways, whereas higher-order brain areas seem to behave similarly during more challenging tasks such as making meaning out of something seen or heard. The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain.” – Lydia Denworth, “Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact,” Scientific American, July 1, 2023 For example, Read More ›
Physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser (pictured) offered some thoughts recently on faith and science, noting that the scientific revolution has hardly changed the picture of faith much: “the great scientific advances of the past four centuries have not radically diminished the number of believers” in transcendent realities: If science is to help us, in the words of the late Carl Sagan, by providing a “candle in the dark,” it will have to be seen in a new light. The first step in this direction is to admit that science has fundamental limitations as a way of knowing, and that it is not the only method of approaching the unattainable truth about reality. Science should be seen as the practice of Read More ›
Not surprisingly, given that philosopher David Chalmers won the famous wager with neuroscientist Christof Koch last month, the topic of consciousness has been in the news a lot. In 25 years of research, no one has found a specific consciousness circuit, spot, wave, or whatever in the brain. Consciousness is still the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” At Vox, Oshan Jarow, a writer who knows the field, tells us that the bet has been renewed for another 25 years and offers an interpretation of why scientists haven’t “cracked” consciousness so far: “we still lack a definitive, falsifiable explanation. We even lack consensus on whether one may ever exist.” Eventually, in this view, the field might coalesce around a unified theory and Read More ›