Are Monkeys with Some Human Genes Partly Human?
If they are somewhat smarter than other macaques, do they have minds and souls?In my ongoing dialogue with Querius, I say no; a human is not reducible to a handful of genes.
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Human-Ape Similarity Shows Humans Are Exceptional
If man is an animal biologically, but so unlike an animal cognitively, the obvious implication is that some aspect of the human mind is not biologicalIronically, if humans and apes were biologically more different, materialists could claim that the material biological differences rather than immaterial spiritual differences account for our powers of abstract thought. The biological similarity precludes such an argument.
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Why an AI pioneer thinks Watson is a “fraud”
The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anythingGary N. Smith explains that a computer’s inability to understand what “it” means in a sentence is because it doesn’t understand what any of the words in the sentence mean.
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Researchers: Apes Are Just Like Us!
And we’re not doing the right things to make them start behaving that way…In 2011, we were told in Smithsonian Magazine, “‘Talking’ apes are not just the stuff of science fiction; scientists have taught many apes to use some semblance of language.” Have they? If so, why has it all subsided? What happened?
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Henry Kissinger on Why We Must Adapt to AI
He thinks chessbot AlphaZero is “no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge.” But is the story much simpler?Walter Bradley Center fellows aren’t really in a position to respond to the demands for "metamorphosis" (total transformation); they could and did, however, respond to specific claims made in the article for winning chessbot AlphaZero.
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Scientists Clash Over Why Octopuses Are Smart
New findings show, the brainy seafood breaks all the rules about why some life forms are smart
Is Deep Virtual Reality the Next Big Market Disrupter?
When media moves from capturing attention by being different to capturing ever smaller slices of users' time, the market is ripe for disruptionHow can internet-based media consume more user time? First, they will move away from a screen interface to a voice- and face-recognition interface. But the next logical step is probably deeply immersive virtual reality seeping into everyday life.
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Those Puppy Dog Eyes Are No Accident
The babyface dog is, according to a study of animal shelters, more likely to be adoptedOver thirty-three millennia of selective breeding shaped “a scant, irregular cluster of fibres” found around wolves’ eyes into eyebrows that communicate—to humans—a look-after-me doggy expression.
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Philosopher: Gloom and doom over AI is “silly”
Jay Richards thinks that historian Yuval Noah Harari is wrong to think that AI will necessarily subvert democracyThe idea that machines are capable of replacing us is the topic of many books he has read but, he argues, the thing that really distinguishes us is the capacity for developing creative freedom.
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Could AI think like a human, given infinite resources?
Given that the human mind is a halting oracle, the answer is no
Michael Medved Talks With Robert J. Marks About Animal vs. Human vs. AI Minds
With a glance at unique human creativity
Can Animals “Reason”? My Challenge to Jeffrey Shallit
He believes that animals can engage in abstract thinking. What abstractions do they reason about?Dr. Jeffrey Shallit is an atheist mathematician who holds to the odd belief that animals, like humans, are capable of reason. It would seem that a highly intelligent man who makes his living by doing mathematics would understand that animals don’t, and can’t, do mathematics. But Dr. Shallit remains confused on this point, as he makes clear in his response to my recent post on that inability of animals to think abstractly or to reason (“An atheist argues against reason”). I observed that reason is defined traditionally in a very straightforward manner as the capacity for abstract thought. Shallit comments, Whenever Egnor talks about something being “accepted” or “simple and straightforward”, you can be pretty sure that the opposite is Read More ›
Non-Invasive Healing for the Wounded Brain
One method does not involve invasive surgery but rather stimulating the tongueJonathan Sackier emphasizes that, when dealing with sufferers from severe or chronic brain injury, medicine must not raise false hopes: “So we have a profound obligation to be honest, open, transparent, and to do darn good science!” But he is optimistic.
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University Fires Philosophy Prof, Hires Chimpanzee to Teach, Research
A light-hearted look at what would happen if we really thought that unreason is better than reasonDissociated Press – According to sources from the Funny Papers News Collective, officials at the Université Paris Diderot announced today that philosophy professor Justin Smith has been dismissed from his teaching and research duties at the university, following publication of his new book, Irrationality. In the widely acclaimed book, Smith argues forcefully that reason is highly overrated, and generally of less survival value than brute animal instinct. Citing 16th-century diplomat Girolamo Rorario in his treatise “That Brute Animals Make Better use of Reason than Men”, Smith argues: [H]uman deliberation – the period of hesitancy when we survey our various options and eventually select what appears to be the best of them – far from being an advantage over other beings, Read More ›
Wasps can reason? Science media say yes, researchers no
Media stories explicitly claim that wasps use logical reasoning, which researchers disavowThe media’s monolithic obsession with denying human uniqueness comes at a cost. The remarkable fact that two life forms have the same number of neurons but one displays significantly more complex behavior than the other is drowned out by the volume of misrepresentation.
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An Atheist Argues Against Reason
And thinks it is the reasonable thing to doJustin Smith is leading the way to the abandonment of rationality. There’s not a shred of reason in his essay.
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How the Injured Brain Heals Itself: Our Amazing Neuroplasticity
Jonathan Sackier is a pioneer in non-invasive techniques for speeding the healing of traumatic brain injuriesPeople who have come back from catastrophic injuries like Bill Zoller's intrigue neuroscientists because they offer a glimpse into the neuroplasticity that enables the brain to restore lost functions, which we can learn to augment.
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Philosopher Argues, Human Reason Is Inferior to Animal Reactions
Smith offers to resolve the problem of human exceptionality by dethroning reasonHe hopes that artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”) will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.”
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George Gilder: Why Entrepreneurship Can’t Just Be Automated
In business, an entrepreneur is the “oracle,” the one element that cannot be programmed or computedCreativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t need it. We could program it on our machines. But because it’s always surprising, it can’t be planned.
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We Need a Better Test for True AI Intelligence
Better than Turing or Lovelace. The difficulty is that intelligence, like randomness, is mathematically undefinableThe operation of human intelligence must be non-physical because it transcends Turing machines, which in turn transcend every physical mechanism.
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