A vast army of boosters is portraying chatbots as magic when their usefulness is limited by realities that are probably a hard limit.
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Human intelligence is different. For one thing, we think about what we are thinking about — the ultimate abstract process because both elements are immaterial.
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But, while the mind generally depends on a healthy brain, sometimes lucidity can come surging back to a demented person briefly and unexpectedly.
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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.
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Because great creativity and left-handedness are both relatively rare, people may tend to associate them, researchers suggest.
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The fat factory required a good deal of co-ordination of the work of many hands and co-operation.
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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.
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Koch hoped that the “shared brain” experiment would demonstrate materialism. He may have been unprepared for Egnor’s response.
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Egnor: Consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be split, and there’s no evidence that one person can ever become two people.
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Knowledge of what is happening (which babies lack) often helps to contain and suppress pain.
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It will be most interesting to see what the AI comes up with. but its range of analysis should include body language in order to capture much animal communication.
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Apes probably don’t need to simplify their language as much because there just isn’t nearly as much to get across.
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It’s not just about religion. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans could save their Republics once most people stopped believing in the values that created them.
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There seems no sense of embarrassment over claims that defy evidence — so long as the reality of human exceptionalism is trashed.
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15%? Whew. Genetics makes a difference in how life forms look and act… So Crick and Watson, Collins and Venter and all the rest were onto something after all…
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At minimum, slime molds should warn us against false certainties that we have, for example, “found the secret” of animal intelligence or “know how it evolved.”
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Goff’s eclectic philosophical journey is not likely over. But, generally, it is best to assume that the New Testament authors meant what they said.
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Or just an end to conundrums that aren’t really conundrums if that fact is faced. There is a lot we could be doing with the same expenditure of time, energy, and intellectual skill.
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Perhaps the fact that Sapolsky opposes free will somehow makes his viewpoint more “scientific” in the eyes of many than the viewpoint of someone who, with equally good arguments, supports it.
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