The separateness and intellectual inferiority of Neanderthal man was at one time constantly emphasized but the evidence doesn’t support it.
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A little-reported 2021 case study published in Neurology Clinical Practice shows how resilient the human brain can be. A 29-year-old woman, CB, with no neurological or psychiatric history had a stroke, possibly due to medication issues. The damage was serious enough that a decision was made, with her consent, to remove almost all of the right side of her brain (hemispherectomy). As the study authors put it, “only a small disconnected right occipital pole was retained.” What impact would that have on her mind? The right hemisphere of the brain is thought by neuroscientists to play a specific role in “nonverbal” cognitive abilities. From Simply Psychology, we learn, Left hemisphere function The left hemisphere controls the right-hand side of the Read More ›
As a medical scientist, he looks at how new findings will help develop new treatments to revive people now considered hopeless and restore brain damage.
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Parnia concludes that science suggests, at a minimum, that our consciousness and selfhood “are not annihilated when we cross over into death.”
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There is no way to build a computer that does not rely on 1’s and 0’s (computation), so computers that understand meaning are not possible.
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The difficulty of defining consciousness could very well be one of the reasons why tech moguls can get away with extravagant claims about conscious AI.
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As the years wear on, consciousness will likely remain irreducible and the neuroscientists may end up having to address plausible claims for dualism soon too.
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It’s progress, perhaps, that researchers are defending the role of parsimonious inference. It’s possible to see too much in scattered beads — or too little.
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The fatal flaw in identity theory, as his view is called, is that there is no point of contact between the laws of logic and those of electrochemistry.
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Speaking of Skeptical Inquirers, perhaps we should be much more skeptical of the very concept of pseudoscience, at least as it plays out.
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The tide is turning. The idea that science will soon explain away human consciousness is ceasing to be a live discussion. Let’s hear the new discussions!
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Could an android at a child’s funeral read the mourners’ thoughts and emotions? Or would it view the death as a mere rearrangement of atoms in a wooden box?
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What we are really learning is that even the individual cells that mediate consciousness are very complex — even in the lab rats used in the experiments.
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The logical argument for free will coincides with recent neuroscience research findings.
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Problems like model collapse, hallucination and innumeracy may be inherent in chatbots, which would curtail progress toward thinking like humans.
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If man is biologically — but not cognitively — like an animal, the obvious implication is that some aspect of the human mind is not biological.
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The fate of the discipline may depend on how committed researchers are to finding out the facts vs. protecting a materialist view of consciousness.
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He blames our “folk intuitions” for the problem. Some thinkers would say that the problem arises from seeking a materialist solution to an immaterial reality.
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“Evolution” theories about the human mind play a key role in the manufacture of non-knowledge posing as knowledge, and we are urged to treat them as knowledge.
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The “human evolution” narrative that ignores the critical distinction handicaps the thinking of philosopher Hugh Desmond and many others.
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