AI ‘Claude’ Can Never Be a Person
A rabbi noted that if Claude is a person, Anthropic is engaging in slavery that must stopThat makes me wonder how serious they really are about claiming AI personhood or reflecting on its consequences.
Read More ›CategoryPhilosophy of Mind
Why Do Market Economies Succeed? Minds Are the Key Driver
Millions of minds — and billions of choices, tradeoffs, and expectations, as people try to improve their situationsA market economy is like a universe-size system of interacting human minds weighing factors of present and future, making choices, and taking purposeful actions.
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Right Now, Science Seems To Be Growing Stale…
If we judge by the number of dead end controversies... And this is just when we might expect it to be boomingPerhaps the endless theorizing with so little result reflects what chance can produce. If researchers ever felt they could risk trying design, we could see if more insight follows.
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Slime Molds and the Growing Controversy Around “Intelligence”
How they solve problems with no brain, no nervous system, no conventional sense organs is creating challenges in defining intelligenceInstead of claiming, like the eliminationist, that neither humans nor slime molds are really intelligent, the panpsychist will claim that they both are — and then minimize the difference between them.
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Neurosurgeon: Why Deny the Mystery of the Mind?
At YouTube, Michael Egnor talks about how he came to see that the mind is not the brain - and much else follows from thatEgnor offers a serious challenge to anyone who thinks the whole of a human being is purely material.
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Scholars’ Mag Offers Sympathetic Review of Non-Materialist Books
The books are Antony Flew’s There is a God and Michael Egnor’s The Immortal Mind. Unusually for these times, NAS’s mag listens to both sidesMaterialists cannot apply common standards for assessing evidence because they must refute all evidence of non-materialism. That makes them hard to argue with.
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Economics: It’s All About the Human Mind
What an ice-cold cola teaches about value, choice, and exchangeThe sometimes-forbidding terminology economists use is rooted in very basic principles of human behavior, ones that can easily be illustrated.
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Unexpected: Plants Undermine Materialist Consciousness Theory?
Plant scientist Calvo’s critique of neuron-based theories appears not to be hippie panpsychism; he is asking hard science questionsIf cognition can exist without a specific material substrate, one possible implication is that an underlying force seeks expression by whatever means are available.
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Former Atheist: Materialism Cannot Explain Consciousness
"Emergence," the claim that consciousness somehow emerged from matter, faces serious obstacles, he saysO’Connor “argues that radical emergence may not exist at all. If that’s true, consciousness may not emerge from the brain but instead be fundamental to reality itself.”
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The Mind–Body “Interaction Problem” Is Desperately Overhyped
Why would our mental states NOT be "causally relevant" to the way we behave?The universe contradicts the eliminativist point of view. The laws that govern it are not physical things but they are real.
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How Can We Make Sense of Claims for Plant Consciousness?
Plants are cognitive but consciousness means something rather larger than cognitiveComputers are not conscious simply because they are programmed to make decisions; plants are likely in the same position.
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Hotter water? Neuroscientist Christof Koch plans to study NDEs
Having survived an effort to Cancel him, he makes no further commitment to a conventional materialist viewKoch might wish to consider William James’s neglected theory of consciousness: the brain does not create the mind; it focuses it.
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Neuroscientists Who Don’t Endorse Materialism Face Career Ruin
In a recent podcast with Pat Flynn, Michael Egnor offers an anecdote that shows how far the field is in the tank for materialismMaterialism in neuroscience is not a finding, it is a tenet. It does not need to be true. It simply needs to be enforced.
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Human Evolution Needs Subhumans, and Needs Them Badly
Archeologists are quietly revising the human origins story in a way that does not follow a Darwinian pattern but they don’t quite come out and say itWithout a subhuman, the human mind has no history. That is a serious blow to any Darwinian materialist project.
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Did Art Really Invent Humanity — as Opposed to the Other Way Around?
It’s an intriguing concept, and a welcome departure from more pedestrian claimsArt cannot have helped make us more human if we did not start out that way. And that in turn could not have happened without some impetus that was simply not granted to any other life form.
Read More ›Is the Mind Reducible to the Brain? The Debate in Krakow
Free will, abstract thought, and all the rest...?The debate in Krakow, Poland, sponsored by education foundation Fundacja En Arche is now available, with translation, at YouTube.
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Is “The brain is a computer!” One of Science’s Biggest Mistakes?
If so, the mistake throws a wrench into claims that conscious computers can ever be builtThe messy processes of the brain that enable the various layers of consciousness bear no relationship to what happens in computers.
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Do Cats Have Souls? Some Reflections
At the close of his article, Richard Stevens asks, “As humans have an immortal mind, might some animals have such a mind beyond biology, too?"We can’t do more than wonder but the main thing to see here is that the special position of humans might enable it.
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Consciousness is not a problem to be solved
It’s not even a problem that CAN be solved. It is an experience to be lived and it did not randomly evolveConsciousness is an immaterial creation given only to human beings to enable us to have a relationship with a higher power and to understand our universe better.
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Science Can Fully Explain Consciousness? By 326 Theories…
To call consciousness studies a degenerating paradigm might be too charitable. How much of it rises to the level of falsification?It’s supposed to be a given that machines or brain organoids might be conscious despite not knowing what that is or how it works — but preborn children can’t be…
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