Is Materialism Falsifiable? Yes, Easily.
Neurologist Steven Novella is sure that materialism is not falsifiable by scienceContrary to Steven Novella's claims, cosmological singularities refute materialism. Kurt Gödel can explain
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Why Richard Dawkins Thinks AI May Replace Us
He likes the idea because it is consistent with his naturalist philosophyDawkins thinks we didn’t evolve so as to understand consciousness. But that our odd situation points nowhere. Isn’t all this past its sell-by date?
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Lovelace: The Programmer Who Spooked Alan Turing
Ada Lovelace understood her mentor Charles Babbage’s plans for his new Analytical Engine and was better than he at explaining what it could doTuring thought that computers could be got to think. Thus he had to address Lovelace’s objection from a century earlier, that they could not be creative.
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Elon Musk’s Myths About the Mind
According to Musk, everything in the brain is an electrical signal. That’s pretty naiveNeuroscientists used to think that each neuron was as complex as a switch. But newer research shows that each neuron is more similar to a microprocessor. Musk’s 3,000 Neuralink electrodes controlled by a single processor does not remotely match your brain’s 80 billion processors, all linked together.
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Einstein’s Only Rejected Paper
It was the only one reviewed anonymously, as is the practice todayToday’s collection of scholarly literature is exploding in quantity and deteriorating in quality. One solution is to return to review practices at the time of Einstein. The reviewers were much better qualified and were not anonymous.
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Thinking Outside the Box Is Not a Disease
Enforced orthodoxy, often described euphemistically as “scientific consensus,” is an impediment to scienceAt the Skeptical Inquirer, we read about the“Nobel Disease,” whereby Nobel Prize-winning scientists ditch critical thinking and embrace unorthodox views. In reality, unorthodoxy helped them win the Prize.
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Vitamin D and COVID-19: Is It Data or Noise?
Because random clusters occur naturally in large numbers, only randomized, controlled trials can tell usRandom data shows geographic clusters. Thus some locations will inevitably have higher COVID-19 rates than others. As my example shows, associating these clusters with personal characteristics after the fact is not convincing scientific evidence. That’s where randomized, controlled trials are needed.
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Physicist Rejects Free Will — and Thus Fails Logic
If we accepted his argument for materialism, we would have to stop believing in it—a curious, self-refuting resultCarroll’s argument that man is wholly governed by physics is self-refuting. Because physics and logic share no commonality, materialists like Carroll implicitly assert that their own arguments lack logic. One might say that the only thing materialists get right is that their ideas are nonsense. If man is all physics, he can have no logic.
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Data Mining: A Plague, Not a Cure
It is tempting to believe that patterns are unusual and their discovery meaningful; in large data sets, patterns are inevitable and generally meaninglessFindings patterns in data is easy. Finding meaningful patterns that have a logical basis and can be used to make accurate predictions is elusive. We can see this from 18th-century attempts to cure scurvy through 21st century claims about the stock market or history.
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Gödel and God: A Surprising History
A thought-provoking account of master logician Gödel’s largely unknown proof of the existence of GodIn an unsanitized, politically incorrect (but factual) history, Selmer Bringsjord talks about how the tormented genius Kurt Gödel took up a quest that dated back a thousand years to prove the existence of God by formal logic. His original version didn’t quite work but his editor’s version passed an important logic test.
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Should AI Hold Patents? The Flash-of-Genius Answer
To understand why AI cannot independently invent, let’s look at how famous inventors have actually done itLike Excel, AI assists programmers in their design work. AI can search through trillions of possibilities, using data from a million sources, to find a successful design. But the structure of the search and the source of the data is the choice of the programmer. A look at how famous inventors developed products that changed the world sheds some light on the process.
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Philosopher: Consciousness is Not a Problem. Dualism Is!
Physicalist David Papineau says consciousness is just “brain processes that feel like something”Physicalist David Papineau argues that consciousness “seems mysterious not because of any hidden essence, but only because we think about it in a special way.” In short, it's all in our heads. But wait, say others, the hard problem of consciousness is not so easily dismissed.
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Calvin and Hobbes Explain Why AI Will Never Rule the Battlefield
The creativity needed for successful command is beyond the capability of AIAI sifts enormous amounts of accumulated data. But successful military strategy often depends on creating a new approach to a problem, one that lies outside the historical data available to the opposing forces. Muhammad Ali and Hannibal were famous for using such strategies.
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Why Is Science Growing Comfortable with Panpsychism (“Everything Is Conscious”)?
At one time, the idea that “everything is conscious” was the stuff of jokes. Not any more, it seemsA recent article at New Scientist treats panpsychism as a serious idea in science. That’s thanks to the growing popularity of neuroscientist Giulio Tonioni’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which offers the opportunity for mathematical modeling, along with the implication that inanimate matter and/or the universe may be conscious. If IIT continues to gain a sympathetic hearing, panpsychism could become, over time, a part of normal science.
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Through AI, a Paralyzed Man Has Regained the Sense of Touch
In 2016, through advanced technology, he regained the ability to move individual fingersAccording to researchers, Ian Burkhart, whose hands and legs were paralyzed in a diving accident in 2010, has regained the sense of touch,, through a brain implant, as opposed to simply the ability to move a hand: The breakthrough came from analysis of years of data collected from NeuroLifeTM program study participant Ian Burkhart, who suffered a spinal cord injury in 2010 when diving into the ocean, and now lives with paralysis in his hands and legs. “When the chip was placed on the surface of Ian’s motor cortex in 2014, it was not known that the signals related to object touch could be observed because of the paralysis,” said lead author and Battelle Principal Research Scientist Patrick Ganzer. “Furthermore, Read More ›
Coronavirus: Is Data Mining Failing Its First Really Big Test?
Computers scanning thousands of paper don’t seem to be providing answers for COVID-19If Alphabet’s Deep Mind or Microsoft had successfully data mined the 29,000 papers and found useful coronavirus information, that would be pretty impressive. But they appear to be giving others a chance to try instead, raising issues once again about the value of data mining in medicine.
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Five Ways COVID-19 Is Changing Education for Good
Parents, students, and teachers worldwide have been finding ways to use the internet in creative ways they would never have considered beforeRecently, a Harvard prof chose to launch an attack on homeschoolers, portraying them as driven by narrow religious concerns. Given how many parents COVID-19 has forced to homeschool, the attack was, at best, poorly timed. But it usefully focused attention on the ways education needs to change in an online world.
COVID-19: When 900 Bytes Shut Down the World
A great physicist warned us, information precedes matter and energy: Bit before itThe COVID-19 virus contains about as much information as a sticker in WhatsApp. Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón explore a dreadful truth: “Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world.”
COVID-19: Getting to the Bottom of What Happened in China
China knowingly violated the terms of a World Health Organization (WHO) disclosure agreementIt is widely recognized that medical professionals and journalists in China are being silenced if they publish any information about COVID-19 that contradicts the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s official narrative. But now mainland Chinese scientists must ensure that their research publications also toe the CCP party line. If we sift carefully, however, we can uncover real information.
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Why Our Minds Can’t Really Be Uploaded to Computers
The basic problem is that human minds aren’t “computable.” Peter and Jane are not bits and bytesThe underlying problem with creating immortality by uploading our minds to computers is that people are conscious and even the most sophisticated foreseeable computers are not. And we are not at all sure what consciousness even IS.
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