If the evidence suggests that aspects of the human mind are immaterial, what does it mean to say that “science” says it can’t be true?
Read More ›
Sidelsky, Larson tells us, thinks our problems stem not from the machines themselves but from the stories we’ve told about them.
Read More ›
As long as access to the internet continues, it is still easy to get around most restrictions. But no one should see this fact as a healthy news environment.
Read More ›
It’s not impossible but, given technical issues and security protocols, it is much more difficult than the chatbot’s database seemed to be informed about.
Read More ›
So CAN a chatbot really scheme? No, but the problem posed is a familiar one: We sometimes see what we need to believe.
Read More ›
The controversy around possible homo Naledi burials (335,000 to 245,000 years ago) has also broken out again.
Read More ›
The human mind has no history. We see it when and where we see it. But we must be looking for it — not for some brute who may never have existed.
Read More ›
What Christians thought about the claims of classical science should be seen in light of the fact that the science, not the faith, was later overturned.
Read More ›
If there is no intelligent source of design in nature, the development over time of elaborate mimicry in insects is a conundrum.
Read More ›
As a veteran journalist puts it, once you build a co-dependence like that, you lose public trust. People are just not going to believe you.
Read More ›
Our model of how life form acquire and show intelligence is drawn from theory, not from observation.
Read More ›
The findings from experiments with polycephalum have been “contentious,” probably because they raise issues about how these traits actually work.
Read More ›
A vast army of boosters is portraying chatbots as magic when their usefulness is limited by realities that are probably a hard limit.
Read More ›
Human intelligence is different. For one thing, we think about what we are thinking about — the ultimate abstract process because both elements are immaterial.
Read More ›
But, while the mind generally depends on a healthy brain, sometimes lucidity can come surging back to a demented person briefly and unexpectedly.
Read More ›
Michael Egnor and I wrote The Immortal Mind to show that the mind is not simply what the brain does and this story is but one example among many.
Read More ›
Because great creativity and left-handedness are both relatively rare, people may tend to associate them, researchers suggest.
Read More ›
The fat factory required a good deal of co-ordination of the work of many hands and co-operation.
Read More ›
A recent article by James D. Walsh at New York magazine worries that AI is dooming education — such as it is these days. In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a Read More ›
One thing that stood out was the commenters’ appreciation of a cordial discussion of often-controversial topics.
Read More ›