Everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. He writes sophistry denying free will but he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender.
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Part of the reason we don’t know exactly how anesthesia works is surely that we do not know what consciousness is (there are at least 325 theories out there).
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Good dialogue is like great poetry where the real meaning can sometimes be hidden or disguised beneath the words.
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Lê’s essay offers a much more sober assessment of transhumanism, the war on human exceptionalism, and the idea that machines think like people.
Read More ›Michael Egnor comments that academics often hold such beliefs because they make them sound clever, not because they make sense.
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We don’t have a reason to expect the eliminative materialism Carlo Rovelli recommends, which has not helped in the past, to be more help in the future.
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Where exactly is a popular song located? It lives in memory, human and recorded, in many forms. But it occupies no spatial location.
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Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agrees; the image of storing and erasing memories is popular due to computer technology but not relevant to memory.
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Neuroplasticity is a very interesting and important area of research. But the careless and casual attribution of unexpected mental states to it is junk science.
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The question isn’t whether AI will harm us. The question is actually whether we will remain human.
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Technology has a history but the human mind does not. We see it where we see it.
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Unfortunately, some of them spend a lot of time trying to discredit people who are willing to look at these questions.
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Some of the Neanderthals’ practices around skulls suggest that they followed a belief system.
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The simpler explanation, he says, is that percepts, perceptions travel through axons. Conceptions don’t travel through axons because they’re not material.
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A misguided article in Popular Mechanics gave neurosurgeon Michael Egnor a chance to shed light on a unique fact about people with split brains here.
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Accepting that we are merely flesh marionettes dancing to the strings pulled by our various biological processes would doom human decency.
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Some of the theories of animal mind are interesting but no one really has any idea how consciousness originated.
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In a Godless universe, love, self-sacrifice, friendship, relationships, pro-creation, art and literature are nothing more than relatively subjective illusions to pass the time and avoid boredom with no ultimate purpose or objective meaning.
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People are entitled to their own definitions of materialism, of course. But once we focus on a standard one, we see that it is false to the reality of the human mind.
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If this is what happens when people think that human consciousness has a purely material evolutionary origin, it is a strong argument for the opposite view.
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