Cancel Culture at universities aims to protect a set of core beliefs from challenge by new evidence. If a discipline is to thrive, it must defeat the Cancel mob
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The COVID lockdowns often introduced people to a different approach to time from what they were used to, with mixed results.
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In the first big replication crisis, the effort to root out a 2011 paper supporting ESP turned up the fact that only 36% of approved papers could be replicated.
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It’s interesting that science fiction gets so much right — but then, about our relationship with AI, it gets the key thing so wrong.
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The film implies the existence of the human soul, as that seems to be pretty much all that Alex Murphy has left as he begins a new life as a robocop.
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He notes, “ AI … has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context—or even scale and extent—changes everything.”
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The disinformation experts claim to be defending democracy — and yet their principal weapon is indoctrination.
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Giuseppina D’oro’s essay introduces two 20th-century idealist philosophers — Oakeshott and Collingwood — and their critique of psychology as a science.
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The article, unfortunately, doesn’t address the way the panic around COVID leaned heavily on claims about “the science” — which likely discredited science.
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Dembski sees the breathless and implausible claims for computers that think like people as the modern equivalent of ancient idols. Here are some highlights.
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What’s becoming clear is that, while dementia itself may not be preventable, its severity may potentially be mitigated by timely health care interventions.
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What if we had a machine that could access and manipulate the internals of the human mind? It would fall victim to the halting problem.
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As computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks puts it, AI is no more creative than a pencil. You can use it like a pencil — but the creativity comes from you.
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Why should we believe what materialists say anyway? Generally, the sciences whose ultimate message is meaningless void-ism are running aground.
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Given that both Pinker and Horgan are Darwinian materialists, their coldness toward the idea that there is no free will is worth keeping an eye on.
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Many people have a hard time accepting the fact that we may never know if we are the only intelligence in the cosmos. Unusual psychologies may result.
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The risk with neuroscience that tries to encompass Mozart is not that we will know nothing but that we will know just enough to get it all wrong.
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Ours is an age of private truth but math and science both took hold in ages of public truth. Neither of them can survive private truth for long.
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At Scientific American, Lydia Denworth brought up an interesting topic earlier this month: The way that brain waves synchronize between two people who are communicating successfully: Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns, like dancers moving together. Auditory and visual areas respond to shape, sound and movement in similar ways, whereas higher-order brain areas seem to behave similarly during more challenging tasks such as making meaning out of something seen or heard. The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain.” – Lydia Denworth, “Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact,” Scientific American, July 1, 2023 For example, Read More ›
For some decades, we heard claims from studies of identical twins (formed when one fertilized egg splits) that everything from exam results to homosexuality might hinge on genetics. Therefore, any similarity in later choices or behavior might be due to genetic factors (read “predetermined” or “inevitable” here). How has that assumption held up, especially in the age of genome mapping? Identical twins comprise roughly 1 in every 250 births. Studies of twins who were separated at birth, have been especially prized because the twins were assumed to grow up in different environments. Thus any significant similarities pointed to genetic influences. Several problems emerged though. For one thing, what about the assumption that separation at birth means that twins experience different Read More ›