CategoryPhilosophy of Mind
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 ›
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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Younger Thinkers Now Argue That Free Will Is Real
The laws of physics do not rule it out, they sayAssuming this trend among younger thinkers persists, the philosophical discussions around AI are not making determinism seem necessary or inevitable. And that, when you think of it, is an odd fate for determinism.
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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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Can Physics Prove There Is No Free Will?
No, but it can make physicists incoherent when they write about free willIt’s hilarious. Sabine Hossenfelder misses the irony that she insists that people “change their minds” by accepting her assertion that they… can’t change their minds.
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The Human Brain: Even Basic Facts Are Hotly Contested
Keep that in mind when AI boosters claim that their product will function like a human brainWhen we read that “Scientists Are Closer to Making Artificial Brains That Operate Like Ours Do”, we might ask: If career researchers dispute the question of how the brain works at basic levels, how can non-experts be so sure they have replicated it?
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Computers Are No Smarter Than Tinkertoys
Philosopher: You may as well believe that Penn and Teller really do magicPhilosopher Ed Feser wrote a great post recently on why it is irrational to believe that artificial intelligence is really intelligent. He begins with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s assertion, he points out, can be taken two ways: people can be fooled into thinking that advanced technology is magic and, as a metaphysical assertion, that advanced technology really is magic. He defends the first assertion and, of course, denies the second: There are, however, many people who believe a claim that is analogous to, and as silly as, the metaphysical thesis that sufficiently advanced technology really is magic — namely the claim that a machine running a sufficiently advanced computer Read More ›
Even Bacteria Are Purpose-Driven
The recent finding that bacteria can make individual decisions may help design better antibioticsDoes this mean that bacteria have free will? Not really; as Michael Egnor reminds us, free will is an immaterial quality of the reasoning mind. Life forms that lack a reasoning mind make decisions based only on their needs or desires.
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The Origin of Language Remains Obscure
One problem is that information is not measured in science in a way that relates to matter and energy.Human language is much more than a system of signals. And two recent articles in Inference Review provide insight into some of its ongoing puzzles in the huge unmapped territory of the interaction between the mind and the brain.
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Does “Alien Hand Syndrome” Show That We Don’t Really Have Free Will?
One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it?Alien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.
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The Flawed Logic behind “Thinking” Computers, Part III
No program can discover new mathematical truths outside the limits of its codeNot only is it valid to ask whether artificial intelligence is impossible but the argument can be pursued on a scientific basis with quantifiable, empirical evidence.
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The Flawed Logic behind “Thinking” Computers, Part II
There is another way to prove a negative besides exhaustively enumerating the possibilitiesI am publishing, in three parts and with his permission, an exchange with Querius, who is looking for answers as to whether computers can someday think like people. In the first part, we discussed why human thinking cannot be indefinitely compressed. Here is the second part: Recapping for myself what I said in Part I and mulling it over: “If all symbol strings do have a shorter representation, then so must their shorter representations. Thus, we’d end up concluding that all symbol strings can be represented by nothing, which is incoherent.” Wait, I’m getting lost. “Therefore, we conclude that only some symbol strings have a compressed representation. As a consequence, compression intelligence is only true if the physical effects of Read More ›
The Flawed Logic behind “Thinking” Computers, Part I
A program that is intelligent must do more than reproduce human behaviorIf an algorithm that reproduces human behavior requires more storage space than exists in the universe, it is a practical impossibility that also demonstrates the logical impossibility of artificial intelligence.
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Creativity Does Not Follow Computational Rules
A philosopher muses on why machines are not creativeHe worries about something quite different from the usual robots-are-coming scare: “It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.”
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Are Electrons Conscious?
A classical philosopher can explain why the belief that everything is conscious is wrongIn response to the utter inadequacy of materialism to account for the mind, several philosophers have suggested panpsychism as a solution to the mind–body problem. Here's why not.
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Scientism is not a cure for stupidity
But never mind, quite a few science savants have rushed in fearlesslyA science writer tackled a big issue recently: stupidity. Who does he ask? Why, scientists of course. Surprisingly enough, it’s a question few scientists have grappled with, perhaps out of a desire not to wade into a subject that could so easily offend. After all, the field of intelligence studies is rife with controversy. Ross Pomeroy “What is Stupidity?” at Real Clear Science But never mind, quite a few science savants, unafraid to offend, have rushed in: Evolutionary biologist David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute,told Nautilus, “Stupidity is using a rule where adding more data doesn’t improve your chances of getting [a problem] right. In fact, it makes it more likely you’ll get it wrong.” I won’t contradict Read More ›
The Real Reason Why Only Human Beings Speak
Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractlyIn his discussion of why only humans have language, science writer Tom Siegfried gets a lot right, but he misses the crucial reason.
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