Many people have watched the short Closer to Truth videos at YouTube, where Robert Lawrence Kuhn has interviewed over two hundred scientists and philosophers on consciousness and related fields. The short format and lively pace are geared to those of us who are generally interested in the ideas and the people but don’t have hours or days to spare. Now Read More ›
The left-wing bias of mainstream media may feel comfortable to many people but it’s apparently not enough to sustain the industry.
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AI-generated food images are easier to produce and customers prefer them — provided they don’t know that the images are not real.
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An anthropologist explains that “braiding” folk traditions with science, as now proposed, can mean “hanging devil’s claw in shelving areas” and so forth.
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The researchers hope that better technology will solve the problems but it is not clear how. They need conscious computers but don’t know what consciousness is.
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If a physical explanation of consciousness is impossible (so many theories, so little insight), what about those claims that computers will soon be conscious?
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Human consciousness is unique and the largely inanimate universe may indeed be a stage for our spiritual unfolding. It is hardly narcissistic to think so.
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Matt Taibbi: The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else.
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Yann LeCun doesn’t rule out super-intelligent AI but, he says, we can’t make machines smarter by cramming them with more chips and data.
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If the multiverse feels less frightening and more rewarding than the existence of God, some people will insist that it has more scientific merit. Not so.
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It’s hard to rule out the possibility that the Nobel Committee figures that, even if it’s not really physics, if Hinton is right, they will have been prophetic.
Read More ›Dembski: Are the choices we are offered in a political situation all the ones that are really available? Sometimes, that’s not true.
Read More ›As Gary Smith tells International Higher Education, it has automated common types of cheating. Reviewers may need to be paid to sort it out.
Read More ›ADF International reports that X is back online for its 40 million users in Brazil after a 39-day blockade — at least for now: Justice Alexandre De Moraes, who controversially banned the platform in August, has lifted the blockade following the conclusion of national elections. The stated objection of the ban was to prevent “misinformation” and “hate speech” ahead of Read More ›
The key challenge is that essentially, the internet crashed the cost of two things: individual content creation AND censorship. Which will win?
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Philosopher Susana Monsó admits that her thesis that opossums understand death is partly driven by her environment concerns — and her emotional needs.
Read More ›Former British prime minister Boris Johnson, best known for taking Britain out of the European Union (Brexit), is releasing a memoir later this month. Unleashed (Collins 2024) offers an interesting item for the bulging “Misinformation” file about COVID. At The Spectator, “Cockburn” tells us, In 2021, Johnson was adamant that Covid was a result of “demented” traditional Chinese medical practices, Read More ›
Rayne Beau (“Rainbow”) got lost in Yellowstone National Park during a June camping trip. His human friends, Benny and Susanne Anguiano of Salinas, California, sadly returned home without him. But then In August, the Anguianos received amazing news when a microchip company messaged them that their cat was at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Roseville, Read More ›
Last March, three language experts wrote a letter to top science journal Nature saying that the way chatbots (large language models or LLMs) are developed — while successful for the purpose — should not be confused with the way human language is commonly acquired: First, First, LLMs are probabilistic models of externalized language data, whereas human language is truly generative: Read More ›
In 2023, dualist philosopher David Chalmers unexpectedly won an important 25-year science wager with Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch. Chalmers took the view that no physical “consciousness spot” would be found in the brain by 2023 — and it wasn’t. Last month, Robert Lawrence Kuhn asked Chalmers at Closer to Truth, Kuhn: David, you are a great proponent of consciousness Read More ›