It’s telling that the obvious evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe, implying design, is — in sharp contrast — evaluated in a hypercritical way.
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English argues that science research, which is already mostly paid for by taxpayers, should be open access so more of us can see what’s happening.
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If we grasp the psychological role that the belief that we live in a sim universe plays, it’s easier to see why it persists in the absence of evidence.
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Panpsychism is very much a materialist theory. It avoids absurdity by admitting that human consciousness is real — but then tries to make it part of nature.
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AI can help detect fake papers but it is not going to save researchers from a partly AI-driven dystopia.
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Our conversation about the ethics of collecting and using genetic data brought out two important themes that are often addressed here at Mind Matters News.
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In a discussion at Psychology Today, a philosopher notes that her dissertation supporting the reality of near-death experiences was received without hostility.
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Invisibility is one of those interesting concepts that started out as imagination: What if I were invisible? Or— in the hands of a storyteller — what if my character were invisible? Tolkien famously made it a power granted by the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The concept is used in science fiction too, for example, in the form of the cloaking device: However, as science fiction writer Douglas Adams (1952–2001) noted satirically in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in everyday life, “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not Read More ›
When one of the world’s most prominent research neuroscientists goes off the classic materialist script — and gets away with it — things are changing.
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Whether it’s good science terminology, the Anthropocene concept broadcasts so much cultural vibe that it may not just go away after a No vote.
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In their essay, Blind Spot authors Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson seem to sense that dredging up pat materialist answers that don’t really work won’t help much.
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Researchers could end up being constrained by the limits of what AI can do, cut off from what it can’t do, and possibly unaware of the embedded viewpoint.
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It doesn’t sound as though any solution that doesn’t tackle the basic honesty problem is likely to work. Meanwhile, the public should not be blamed for doubt.
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In my book Distrust (Oxford 2023), I recommend that journals not publish data-driven research without public access to nonconfidential data and methods used.
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Recently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.” But that wasn’t the big surprise. The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors: In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values Read More ›
Fruitful science depends in part upon character as well as intelligence and training. A dose of humility seldom goes unrewarded.
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If generating testable theories in empirical science is the standard of success, theology has certainly succeeded, as the record will show.
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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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It’s worth keeping all the biases, hopes, uncertainties, and value judgments in mind when we are told that we should “trust the science.”
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When Scientific American withdrew its offer of a column, on learning that Mims doubted Darwinism, we all learned what matters most to the science elite.
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