TagFeatured
Consciousness: Reductionism’s Final Hill — the One To Die On?
The reductionist has no more information than anyone else about the origin of human consciousness and isn’t making any better sense of the evidence we do have
AI in Biology: AI Meets Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
Protein folding — the process by which a protein arrives at its functional shape — is one of the most complex unsolved problems in biology
Why LLMs Are Not Boosting Productivity
If LLMs were as reliably useful as economist Tyler Cowen alleges, businesses would be using them to generate profits faster than LLMs generate text. They aren’t.
Clinical Psychologist Defends Human Exceptionalism
Gregg Henriques is responding to an evolutionary biologist who sees recognition of human uniqueness as “speciesism,” akin to racism and sexism
Intelligence Requires More Than Following Instructions
Post-training improves the accuracy and usefulness of LLMs but does not make them intelligent in any meaningful sense — as the Monty Hall problem shows
The Large Language Model (LLM) “Superpower” Illusion Dies Hard
Historic confirmation bias around ESP and spirit cabinets makes for an interesting comparison with the current need to believe in the abilities of LLMs
How Can We Know If Patients With Split Brains Have a Single Mind?
Just ask themReaders have brought to my attention a review article on the effect of split-brain surgery on consciousness. “Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for Understanding Consciousness” (2020) by Yair Pinto and his colleagues is an interesting open-access article, well worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. From the abstract: [Split-brain surgery] leads to a broad breakdown of functional integration ranging from perception to attention. However, the breakdown is not absolute as several processes, such as action control, seem to remain unified. Disagreement exists about the responsible mechanisms for this remaining unity. The main issue concerns the first-person perspective of a split-brain patient. Does a split-brain harbor a split consciousness or is consciousness unified? The current Read More ›
Does Brain Surgery Prove That Free Will Isn’t Real?
My fellow neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz is mistaken in thinking that free will is an illusion. It is quite real
AGI, the Halting Problem and the Human Mind
Pat Flynn continues the conversation with Dr. Winston Ewert
A Catholic Priest Talks About Human Evolution
Fr. Martin Hilbert approaches the topic from the perspective of evidence, reason, and faith — and realism about what is at stake in the discussion
Why Humans Aren’t That Biased, and Machines Aren’t That Smart
Claims about the cognitive biases that supposedly overwhelm our judgment should be taken with a helping of salt
Unequal Profits: Why AI Needs Successful Applications
Readers may be surprised to learn that these widely touted AI advances are not making their developers much money
AI Generated Content May Now Be Copyrighted
AI-generated work can be copyrighted if it involves “meaningful human authorship.”
Proof of Darwinism Lies in a Book That Was Never Written…
Terry Scambray looks at Robert Shedinger’s Darwin’s Bluff, which tells the tale of the proof that Darwin was always “going to” provide
Douthat: Our Minds Are Tied to Reality
The New York Times columnist thinks everyone should be more religious“The world is intelligible,” Ross Douthat said to Jonah Goldberg on “The Remnant” podcast. Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, has a new book coming out on religion and why “everyone should be more religious,” and he joined Goldberg to discuss the book along with our current political landscape. Douthat, a Catholic, referenced fine tuning and the profound evidence of intentional design in nature as one of the motivations for his own faith. He told Goldberg that it’s remarkable that we have minds that are able to accurately comprehend the world around us, let alone the chemical makeup of the universe. Our questioning natures, bent on discovering the truth of things, demonstrate that we live in something Read More ›
Some Lessons From DeepSeek, Compared With Other Chatbots
I tested OpenAI o1, Copilot, and Gemini Flash, along with DeepSeek, on a question about Tic-Tac-Toe
DeepSeek’s AI Model Shakes the Market
A wake-up call for U.S. tech
AI Specialist Explains Why AI Can’t Replicate Human Experience
A profound recent experience crystallized the difference for him between brain and machine