Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryPhilosophy

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Female warehouse worker scanning a barcode on a package with a scanner. Logistics and inventory management in a modern distribution center

Elite Publisher Pulls Book Due to Fake Quote

The quote, in a New York University Press book, originates in a series of misrepresentations of something a Lehigh University biochemist had written

The challenge, moving on, is that better scholarship means listening to those who challenge conventional ideas instead of serially editing them.

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The School of Athens in Rome Italy

AI Companies are Hiring Philosophers

In 2010, Stephen Hawking said "philosophy is dead"

We now await an army of predominantly middle-aged, bearded male philosophy graduates, out of work for the past 20 years, raising their wrists, thus pointing their fingers to the sky as they make the journey for an interview in Silicon Valley.

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Anonymous crowd of people walking street wearing masks during covid 19 coronavirus pandemic in New York City November 2020

A Science Education Group Tackles the Fauci Hearing and Diary

They have every reason to be concerned about what these revelations about the Covid years are doing to the public perception of science

At one time, it was the less well-informed people who trusted science less. But repeated episodes like the Covid Crazy will mean that the better informed people will trust less.

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Doctor conference audience, Presentation education lecture in hospital, Group of doctor are meeting in hospital.

How NOT to Get More People to Trust Science, in Four Easy Lessons

Ethan Siegel had the singular bad luck to write his condescending column about how we should Trust the Science more in the very wake of Fauci’s Covid “diaries” coming to light…

Siegel’s essay at Big Think can have one very desirable result: It is a good, though unwitting, summary of attitudes that must change if public trust in science is to be improved.

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Cosmic Dance of Gravitational Waves: Abstract representation of two merging black holes, emitting luminous, swirling gravitational waves in a cosmic ballet.

Polling Physicists: What the Big Mysteries Survey Shows — and Doesn’t

Physicists who think that the constants of nature are brute facts without need of explanation simply have an incoherent opinion

If nature’s beginning has no explanation, the door is left open to embracing unexplained occurrences anywhere in nature, undermining the practice of science.

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space of time dimension concept,universe,illusion,time theory

More Scientists Are Talking About a Mind Behind the Universe?

An urban affairs analyst thinks so and he also suggests some reasons why

If being a scientist means that one must refuse to consider the evidence for design, it’s no wonder if many are looking for alternatives.

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Hospital staff operating an automated external defibrillator AED during a code blue, emergency response

A Genuine Science-Based Debate About Near-Death Experiences?

Such a debate seems to be developing. It would make materialism much hard to just take for granted

Explainaways protect the system from unwanted evidence by ignoring or dismissing it. But when the weight of such evidence grows, they stop sounding persuasive.

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AI generated view of the multiverse

Science Writer Takes Aim at Many Universes Theory

Phillips sees it as a materialist dodge. But a proposed alternative is definitely not your everyday theory either

What these speculations point to is the way new findings have destroyed classical materialism. Materialism isn’t so much dying out as breaking up.

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Human brain illuminated by intense lightning strikes in dark clouds.

Near-Death Experiences: Do Brain Jolts Really Explain Them?

In the wake of evidence for changed lives, attempts to debunk NDEs as “just this or that” are starting to sound less certain

Materialist theories intended to explain away NDEs need only sound plausible and scientific; they need not enlighten. A new one will be along shortly anyway.

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Colorful space galaxy cloud nebula. Stary night cosmos. Universe spiral science astronomy. Supernova background wallpaper

How Do You Cram the Universe Into A Story — and Keep it Focused?

Philosopher Stephen Meyer narrates the film but never gets in the story’s way

At last, the end of materialism escapes the lecture room; it becomes a story about real people in real time in the midst of a civilizational struggle.

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Particles, quantum entanglement (quantum correlation), quantum mechanics. 3d illustration

COSM 2025: Entanglement in Physics —What It Means for Materialism

Physics is sometimes weirder than we imagine or physicists can explain. It does not favor a tidy materialist explanation of our cosmos

Initially, many scientists felt that non-locality or “action at a distance” was too spooky to be correct. But it is correct.

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science fiction wallpaper. Beauty of deep space. Colorful graphics for background, like water waves, clouds, night sky, universe, galaxy, Planets,

Bonnassies, coauthor of French bestseller, interviewed on Humanize

The science world appears to be moving away from the assertive atheism of James D. Watson, who died earlier this month

A downloadable audio file is available from Humanize of an interview with Olivier Bonnassies, author with Michel-Yves Bolloré of God: the Science, the Evidence (2025).

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Female Engineer Walks Through Factory Workshop with Augmented Reality 3D Models CNC Machinery Production Line. Industry 4.0 Graphics Visualization in Factory. VFX Special Graphics and Visual Effects

Physicists: Math Shows That the Universe Can’t Be a Simulation

The physicists argue that pure information underlies the universe of matter and energy, as a Platonic realm of ideas

We seem a long way now from the once-dominant science view of eliminative materialism in which even human consciousness was not considered real.

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Active Sperm Cells Swimming Towards the Egg in Long Exposure Motion Illustration

A War Between Evolutionary Biologists May Be Looming

Nathan Lents says it doesn’t make a lot of sense” to think of sex in humans as binary. Colin Wright says, “Stop misleading the public”

Science is incompatible with the onslaught of post-modernism. A major rift in biology may be looming straight ahead.

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Silhouette of a man standing in front of a gigantic wall, sunlight shining through a narrow gap, symbolic image for near-death experience, hope, depression, life crisis, psychology, grief, redemption, AI generated, AI generated, AI generated

Science on Near-Death Experiences: Explaining vs Explaining Away

The first rule of a scientific approach to near-death experiences should be to take seriously what is happening before rushing in with a “science can explain this” hypothesis

The reason medical researchers now take NDEs seriously is a growing body of evidence that can’t just be tossed off with a simple explanation.

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Abstract film texture background

When the Big Bang Cost Physicists Their Lives

A new book from France tells the astonishing story of how governments murdered or drove out scientists to hush up the reality that our universe has a beginning

I was hardly prepared for what Bolloré and Bonnassies reveal about efforts to discredit the idea of a beginning to the universe — by any means necessary.

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beautiful girl protests with the help of her hands her protest and emotions of denial

Denial? Science seeks trust but avoids the need for inner reform

Current science seems to be going full steam ahead to Cancel the means by which it formerly advanced knowledge of the world

Despite a swamp of scandals, the focus of discussion seems to be getting the public to trust again, not reform of the system.

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Silent Forest in spring with beautiful bright sun rays

This Is New: Top Thinkers Debate Terminal Lucidity

Steven Pinker tells Charles Murray at the Wall Street Journal that people are merely imagining a sudden gain in awareness before dying

But today, the serious problem is not modernism and scientism, which are fading. It is post-modernism, which rejects reason and evidence.

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Spiral aloe vera with water drops, closeup

Wikipedia Qualifies Its “Pseudoscience” Label re Design in Nature

Not only that but newly launched Grokipedia’s entry seems to be written to actually inform the reader rather than to enlist the reader against the topic

On ID, it sounds like Grokipedia, unlike Wikipedia, follows the time-honored rule of letting people explain themselves and saving the commentary for later.

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