Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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Rainbow over stormy sky. Rural landscape with rainbow over dark stormy sky in a countryside at summer day.

Idealism: Rethinking Reality Through a Divine Lens

Douglas Axe’s defense of idealism as a philosophy in a recent podcast should prompt deep questions: In what sense is the physical world real?
Idealism’s challenging alternative to physicalism and dualism proposes a resolution to metaphysical issues that aligns with quantum mechanics’ peculiarities. Read More ›
charming-little-boy-sits-on-the-bench-with-a-bernese-mountai-197003702-stockpack-adobestock
Charming little boy sits on the bench with a Bernese Mountain Dog

How Two Dogs May Have Foiled a Kidnapping

Did these two dogs just follow their programming? Or do they really care? How do they come to care?
Nobody knows how instinctive information develops in a dog, or where it is stored, or how it is fetched, decoded, or executed. Read More ›
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Mock code for an AI Large Language Model (LLM) that could intelligently answer questions. LLMs are one of the most popular implementations of recent Artificial Intelligence research

LLMs Still Cannot be Trusted for Financial Advice

The limitations of Large Language Models (chatbots) are illustrated by their struggles with financial advice
The real danger remains: we may think computers are smarter than us and consequently trust them to make decisions they should not be trusted to make. Read More ›
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Circus lion. Ai art

Monday Micro Softy 23: Barnum’s Circus Receipts

Circus master Barnum's ticket seller had not kept proper track of the tickets sold. Can the limited information — and some algebra — help Barnum figure it out?
The solution to Micro Softy 22, given here, depends on the assumptions we make about Timmy's surgeon. Read More ›
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Mix Media 3D Render - Brain blue fire smoke effect on the black background

Scientists Dare To Hint That the Mind Can’t Just Be the Brain

They start with astonishing facts about the brains of caterpillars and worms and end up discussing human near-death experiences
Whether they continue to push the boundary, or someone else does, they can only bring up so many unaccounted-for facts before it’s time for a revolution. Read More ›
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Silhouette of Ancient Greek Galley Ship at Sunset, Majestic Ocean Scene

The Ship of Theseus: The Mystery of Personal Identity

If all your parts are slowly replaced, in what sense are you still you? A Mind Matters podcast discussion explores that
Walter Myers, an engineer and philosopher, sees the human soul as soul is what ultimately grounds human identity in something more than matter. Read More ›
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Highly detailed close up portrait of an adult Raven in Yellowstone National Park, species name Corvus corax

At Quanta: High Bird Intelligence Developed on a Different Path

High intelligence developing on different paths is consistent with convergent evolution. It’s also consistent with design in nature
It is ironic that otherwise intelligent people must play the “we’re just another animal” game while demanding attention for ideas that only humans can give. Read More ›
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Close up of an AI Artificial Intelligence GPU chip on motherboard. Concept of LLM, Large Language Models.

Large Language Models: A Lack-of-Progress Report

They will not be as powerful as either hoped or feared
LLMs are enormously expensive yet it is increasingly clear that they will never be reliable enough to be trusted in complex situations where mistakes are costly Read More ›
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Glowing blue and white nebula with stars in deep space.

Is the Human Race Evolving Toward a Final Spiritual Unity? Part 2

Teilhard thought that evolution needed to be seen from the inside, viewing humans not only as observers of evolution but also as its products
Teilhard noted the same weakness in evolution theory as Thomas Nagel does today: Excluding the origin of mind and consciousness makes it at best half a theory. Read More ›
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Nobel Prize Medal on a Velvet background

University Science War: Ideas vs “Dollars per Net Square Footage”

Katalin Karikó, obscure and mistreated at the University of Pennsylvania, won the Nobel Prize. Shouldn’t we have some questions?
Karikó’s story, as outlined in her book, highlights a big problem with universities: ideas matter less than sheer numbers of papers published. Read More ›
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a sticky note with an angry face drawn on it by a disgruntled employee

Facebook Ends Fact-Checking, Moves to Community Notes Format

Top executive admits that there was "too much political bias" at Facebook, Instagram, Threads…
For the social media user at X, the advantage of a Community Notes approach is that the volunteer contributors address specific claims, not overall worldviews. Read More ›
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Cave entrance with sunlit stone steps, man ascending stairs towards bright light at end of tunnel. Symbolizing afterlife, near-death experience, inspiration, or hope beyond darkness.

Near-Death Stories: Has An Undiscovered Country Been Discovered?

A Catholic priest looks at ways we can understand these brushes with an unseen world
Fr. Hilbert notes that such documented lucid experiences as he recounts can hardly be the mere outcome of a dying brain shutting down. Read More ›
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old warehouse on a wharf at night

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 6: Things Certainly Speed Up

But unfortunately, that means that built-in complications become even more tangled
Curiously, once Kyle Reese is safe, he is transformed from a confident, well-meaning soldier into an idiot with a surprising lack of common sense. Read More ›
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Shot of Corridor in Working Data Center Full of Rack Servers and Supercomputers with Cloud Storage Advantages Icon Visualisation.

The Cloud: Why It Is More Reliable Than It Sounds At First

Walter Myers III assures us that the data cloud is designed with failure in mind. Encryption and redundancy are backbones of digital storage security
Perhaps the most common myth Myers wants to bust is the idea that someone else can access your data in the cloud. Only you — and those you authorize — can. Read More ›
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An abstract representation of the human brain with sound waves, symbolizing mind and sound interaction.

What Damaged Brains Tell Us About the Mind

They often provide mute evidence that the human mind is not simply the output of the brain
A recent research paper looks at the way minds work with what’s available, something I often encounter in my practice as a neurosurgeon. Read More ›
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2 Seifenblasen

Yes, the AI Stock Bubble Is a Bubble

It's unfolding the way a financial bubble typically does
Unlike the Internet, LLMs are not useful enough to prompt customers to pay prices that reflect the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to develop them. Read More ›
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Ultramoderne Androide Roboter unterhalten sich in einer Sprache, die Menschen nicht verstehen können. Der Gibberlink Modus kann zur Gefahr für die Menschheit werden.

Chatbots Alone Together: “Let’s Skip the Small Talk …”

Did you know that humans empower AI bots to confer with each other in Gibberlink code? Nothing could go wrong with that, right?...
Proposals to prevent misuse by “aligning AI behaviors with human intentions” confer no protection because some human intentions are themselves malign. Read More ›
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a red squirrel sits on a tree in the forest and eats a nut

How Fruit Flies, Bees, and Squirrels Beat Artificial Intelligence

AI researchers assume they are on the path to intelligence, yet intelligence itself remains a mystery and many animals do better than current AI
Real intelligence is embodied. It exists within a living system, interacting dynamically with an environment. AI, on the other hand, is an abstraction. Read More ›
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3D Molecular Visualization: Complex Biomolecule Structure Models. Generative AI.

AI in Biology: The Future AI Didn’t Predict

It doesn’t look like the past. Physical systems that evolve over time but don’t follow a fixed formula have always presented a deep challenge to AI
The problem of outliers or “edge cases” has frustrated AI scientists and engineers (and now structural biologists) for decades, and there’s no good answer yet. Read More ›
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Ability.

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
Is science about following the evidence or about confirming a materialist ideology about science? This is the big neuroscience question of our century. Read More ›