News
Grappling Honestly With Science’s Blind Spot
An astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher all walk into a bar and say, “At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible” Um… yes!
Oppenheimer Steals the Show
Cillian Murphy wins Best Actor, Nolan Best Director
If AI Speeds Up Science, Does It Risk Squashing Some Parts?
A Yale anthropologist and a Princeton psychologist warn of the dangers of overreliance on AI in science
Consciousness Observes Different Laws From Physics
At Closer to Truth, British philosopher and pastor Keith Ward provides an example to host Robert Lawrence Kuhn
The Singularity — When We Merge With AI — Won’t Happen
Futurist predictions depend on the assumption that the human brain is like a machine, says, computer scientist Erik Larson. But it isn’t
Programmer: How We Know Computers Won’t Surpass the Human Mind
Winston Ewert points out that we can only devise a “halting detector” less powerful than the ones our own minds have
Over a Cliff? It’s That Bad for Venture-Backed Startups?
Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith think that much high-tech today is not producing value. Chatbots? Their “main successes have been in generating disinformation and phishing scams”
Programmers: Why Materialism Can’t Explain Human Creativity
Eric Holloway and Robert Marks explain why it’s unlikely that the mind that enables human creativity is merely the product of animal evolution
Can Informational Realism Help Sort Out the Mind–Body Problem?
According to William Dembski, informational realism asserts that the ability to exchange information is the defining feature of reality
Do New Findings Make Fine-Tuning of the Universe Harder to Deny?
To judge from this episode of Closer to Truth, cosmologists like Alan Guth are finding it harder than ever to rule out intelligent design of the universe
How One Woman’s Campaign Nearly Destroyed Pornhub
In 2020 it was the 10th most visited website on the internet, now just a shell of its former days
Is AI the Triumph of Left-Brained Thinking? What Follows?
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that it is and asks us to consider what its cultural lean toward the “left brain” is doing to us
Near Death: Why Corroborated NDEs Can’t Just Be Explained Away
In some cases, Gary Habermas recounts, patients who had NDEs while in a state of clinical death report dates and numbers that are later found to be accurate
Astrophysicist: Don’t Say That Chatbots “Hallucinate”
Adam Frank points out that human-type “hallucination” is not at all what drives a chatbot to claim that the Russians sent bears into space
Near-Death: What People Learn When They Are (Briefly) Dead
In this excerpt, Prof Gary Habermas reports that sometimes the returned experiencer says that someone else has died — but the official news only comes later
Prof: There’s a Growing Number of Verified Near-Death Experiences
Gary Habermas notes more than 110 NDEs where experiencers’ detailed reports of what they saw when they were flatlined have been corroborated later
How Data Can Appear in Science Papers — Out of Thin Air!
At Retraction Watch, Gary Smith explains how one author team apparently copy pasted missing data about green innovation in various countriesRecently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.” But that wasn’t the big surprise. The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors: In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values Read More ›
AI Decodes Scrolls Scorched by Vesuvius’ Eruption
In 79 AD, Vesuvius reduced a library to charcoal. Remarkably, machine learning technology has begun to decipher scrolls that humans could not unwrap