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, host and neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor welcomes Michael Shermer, historian of science and founder of Skeptic magazine, to discuss Shermer’s new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. The conversation quickly evolves into a deep philosophical debate between Egnor and Shermer over whether truths about morality and the universe are created by humans or discovered as objective features of reality.
Can this teleonomic behavior of evolution simply be a byproduct of non-teleological forms of evolution? Information theory suggests that this is not likely.
Catholic thinkers who reject Darwinism don’t focus so much on its claims about universal common descent as on its utter inability to account coherently for the human mind
n Chapter 10, Scott Ventureyra points out that, paradoxically, our weakness and capacity for sin makes us nobler than the countless life forms that cannot sin.
By David Klinghoffer By now the authority of science has been thoroughly abused. For that, you can thank scientists themselves, their promoters in government bodies and in university PR departments, and the legions of loyal pilot fish in popular and social media. Something really came undone in the Covid era. Today, the phrase “science says” or “doctors say” prompts a smirk from about half the population, and rightly so. To capture this reality, mathematician David Berlinski in his latest book, Science After Babel, evokes the image of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel — a bloated, vain enterprise, in denial of its own failings. The ancients saw science, and the other arts, as embodied by muses — beautiful young women. We may picture something more Read More ›
An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure to perform a specific task. We usually think of algorithms as being performed by computers. Did you know that animals have built-in algorithms of their own? Some of these amazing algorithms allow animals to migrate to new places and navigate back to previous locations. Eric Cassell discusses his new book, Animal Algorithms, with Robert Read More ›
My friend and colleague Casey Luskin has penned a poignant essay in memory of Richard Lewontin, a Harvard evolutionary biologist who passed away at 92 recently. Casey is a gentleman and a scholar, and very much disposed to finding the best in people. Indeed it seems there was much that was very good in Lewontin’s persona, and Casey highlighted it beautifully in his encomium. I am not of the opinion, however, that we should speak only good of the dead. The passing of a public figure is a good time to consider his impact, and Lewontin’s impact on American culture and science is something very much worth considering. By all accounts, Lewontin was a gentleman and a good friend and Read More ›
Bugs look like little robots, don’t they? Living robots, too, defying our best our attempts to recreate something like them. A 2018 science paper “It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: Functional Materials in Insects” goes into just how amazing these little creatures are from a materials sciences perspective. The paper is open access so you can read it for yourself. But let me also illustrate some of the remarkable “technologies” insects use, captured on video: This bionic “dragonfly” really flies, sort of: But so do billions of wild dragonflies who fly very efficiently, in order to hunt: The range of material capabilities is astonishing. Cicadas have a clicking loudspeaker they use to amplify their racket. Tiger moths have a Read More ›
In a recent podcast, “Does the Moon Exist if No One is Looking at It?”, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed philosopher and computer programmer Bernardo Kastrup. Dr. Kastrup has been, in Dr. Egnor’s words, “leading a modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism”—that is, reality is essentially mental rather than physical.
In college, I hated Plato. We read his Republic, and, as a patriot and an idealistic young (small “d”) democrat, I was appalled at the hegemony of the Guardians and at Plato’s disdain for democracy. It seemed to me that his Guardians were the archetypal totalitarians, and that it was a fundamental human right — enshrined in the Constitution — to be ruled only by consent of the governed. In my dotage, I am more sympathetic to Plato — it’s remarkable how much smarter the old philosopher has gotten in the past 40 years! I am still uncomfortable with Guardians, at least of the secular sort. But I think John Adams got it right when he observed that “our Constitution Read More ›
The critical problem that consciousness poses for Darwinian evolution is that there is no survival advantage for subjective first-person existence over objective third-person existence.
When the researchers did not develop the right environment for their digital organisms, nothing evolved. As Bill Dembski predicts, they could move design around but they could not eliminate it.
