There’s a common phrase in many freshman composition classrooms that goes: “To write is to think.” The notion here is simple: The more you organize your thoughts through writing, the more refined, exact, and fully developed your thoughts become. George Orwell, the great British novelist and essayist, wrote to this effect in his great 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell points out how poor thinking leads to bad writing, which in turn leads to worse forms of thinking. And on and on it goes. I’ve personally found this statement to prove true in my own work, and I know so many other writers will say the same thing. Oftentimes, we don’t even really know what we think until Read More ›
On this bingecast archive episode of Mind Matters News, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. Winston Ewert to the show to discuss Ewert’s chapter in the volume Minding the Brain.
In his contribution, titled “The Human Mind’s Sophisticated Algorithm and Its Implications,” Dr. Ewert argues that the human mind’s problem-solving cognition can be modeled as a sophisticated algorithm. Ewert explains that any cognitive task can be expressed as a version of the halting problem from computer science, where an algorithm either halts or continues infinitely. He suggests that humans are able to solve a large and sophisticated subset of these problems, but are limited in the same way that no algorithm can solve all halting problems. Ewert contends that this algorithmic view of human cognition has implications that challenge reductive materialist and neo-Darwinian views, despite resistance from some thinkers who believe human abilities transcend any algorithm.
On this episode of the Mind Matters News podcast, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. Robert Marks and Dr. Michael Egnor to the show to critique Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a popular mathematical model that attempts to explain consciousness through computational complexity.
Consciousness is an immaterial creation given only to human beings to enable us to have a relationship with a higher power and to understand our universe better.
The people trying to manufacture human language from ape laughter simply don’t have a better hypothesis. But much seems to depend on pretending otherwise.
The way AI is creeping into our cultural and religious institutions is worth keeping an eye on, especially since so many of us look to these places to understand what it means to be human in the first place.
He’s going to pull on your heartstrings to obfuscate from that all-important question: what is the definition of “real,” or to put it more directly, is endowed value real?
Is consciousness the exclusive domain of human beings? Proponents of a view known as integrative information theory argue that AI will eventually achieve that same level of consciousness as systems build up and integrate more knowledge in the future. On this archive episode of Mind Matters News, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. Selmer Bringsjord to discuss some of the flaws in this theory as well as a possible alternative.
On this archive “bingecast” episode of Mind Matters News, hosts Robert J. Marks and Angus Menuge welcome Dr. Mihretu Guta to discuss his contribution to the book Minding the Brain. The discussion covers a number of relevant topics, highlighting the profound and puzzling nature of consciousness and the importance of philosophical inquiry in grappling with this fundamental aspect of human experience.
But webs aside, consider the other strange, sometimes ingenious, tiny creatures/organisms, like a colony of termites, that produce astonishing land structures.
Today on Mind Matters News, hosts Robert J. Marks and Brian Krouse conclude their four-part conversation with Dr. Joseph Green on the limitations of modern neuroscience. Green is author of a chapter in the volume Minding the Brain called “On the Limitations of Cutting-Edge Neuroscience.” In today’s final segment, the discussion centers on comparing different models of consciousness, including panpsychism and Read More ›
Today on Mind Matters News, hosts Robert J. Marks and Brian Krouse continues their conversation with Dr. Joseph Green on how we can bridge the gap between cutting-edge neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Green is author of a chapter in the volume Minding the Brain called “On the Limitations of Cutting-Edge Neuroscience.” In today’s installment, the discussion first touches on the concept Read More ›
AI is a tool with certain potentials and limits across various fields, but basic anthropological confusion can do a lot of damage. What happens when AI programs cease to be seen as mere tools, meant to used in limited ways and used wisely, and are considered “persons?” It sounds silly to pose the question, but that’s where we are. Futurism writer Frank Landymore reports on an Ohio legislative measure to ban human-AI marital unions. The bill must be intended to be preventative, since AI bots and programs aren’t recognized as legal persons (yet), but it speaks to a cultural trend that, if undealt with, could blow out of proportion. Landymore writes, Popular chatbots are capable of being eerily lifelike, effortlessly Read More ›
Michael Egnor sees the failure to find a “material center of consciousness” in the brain as a science success, not failure. It points to an important truth about us
As prominent neuroscientist Christof Koch’s recent difficulties with Cancel Culture show, the cracks in materialist neuroscience are getting harder to paper over.
Today, Dr. Selmer Bringsjord joins guest host Pat Flynn to discuss a compelling argument for the immateriality of mathematical objects and the human person. It’s an argument Bringsjord develops in his chapter “Mathematical Objects Are Non-Physical, So We Are Too” in the book Minding the Brain. Building on the work of philosophers like James Ross and John Searle, the argument suggests Read More ›
