The Universe Doesn’t Do Charity: Bad News for Cosmic Bargain Hunters
If I could go back in time and rename conservation of information with a single word, I’d go with “offload” (verb form) or “offloading” (noun form).
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TikTok is on the Verge of a Ban. Now Users Are Flocking to Another Chinese App.
National security and the mental health of a generation are at stakeA federal ban of the wildly popular social media app TikTok is set to take effect on Sunday, unless a last-minute intervention occurs, or an American-owned business buys the company. The FBI, as well as several state authorities around the country, have said the app represents a national security threat, as it allows a foreign adversary to access the data of the 170 million Americans who use it. Apart from the issue of national security, plenty of people, particularly sociologist Jonathan Haidt, have pointed out TikTok’s profound negative impact on kids and users in general. TikTok uses an advanced algorithm system to hook its users. Haidt and his research assistant, Zach Rausch, list out the multiple harms: Executives within the Read More ›
Dembski: Information is the Basic Stuff of Reality
It's information all the way down, says mathematician and philosopher William DembskiIf information, not matter, is the basic stuff of reality, how would this change the way we look at the world? On a classic episode of ID the Future, Center for Science and Culture Managing Director John West sits down with mathematician and philosopher William Dembski to discuss his 2014 book Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information. Building on his previous books making a case for intelligent design, Being as Communion presents a metaphysical framework for an informational world that can accommodate intelligent design. One of Dembski’s key arguments is that matter isn’t the fundamental unit of reality. “Everything that we call matter reveals itself through patterns, through information,” says Dr. Dembski. To get to the heart of the matter, we must look Read More ›
What’s the Relation Between Intelligence and Information?
The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches up neatly with the concept of intelligenceThe key intuition behind the concept of information is the narrowing of possibilities. The more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. If I tell you I’m on planet Earth, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information. Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more Read More ›
Wrestling with AI: Making More and Better Disciples
AI may have "knowledge," but it lacks wisdom.Even if it were possible that AI reaches consciousness — it will never have the mind of Christ.
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Could Our Minds Be Bigger Than Even a Multiverse?
The relationship between information, entropy, and probability suggests startling possibilities. If you find the math hard, a face-in-the-clouds illustration works tooThis article has equal entropy to gibberish letters of the same length, yet it contains information and gibberish does not. Much follows from that fact.
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Ancient Greek Philosophy and Modern Blockbuster Graphics
The amazing computer-generated effects you see in almost every blockbuster today are only possible thanks to ideas proposed over 2300 years ago.Ancient philosophy can be extremely useful, and entertaining, even when contrary to modern science! See it in the movies!
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Just in Case You Were Wondering, Aliens Exist (Allegedly)
The whistleblower report is out: aliens are real! At least, that's the rumor.The whistleblower report is out: aliens are real! At least, that’s the rumor. And the government has been hiding it for decades, apparently. If you needed another bizarre headline in your feed, we’ve got you covered. Although to be fair, the extraterrestrials have been in the news pretty often over the last couple of years. In 2021, the Pentagon confirmed that images of an unidentified flying object were taken by Navy personnel. Even earlier photos of similar “UFO” looking aircraft surfaced, going against strong winds and having all the appearance of highly advanced technology. Now, the whistleblower, Air Force veteran David Grusch, says that the US government recovered an alien spacecraft and has been hiding the fact for years, even Read More ›
Tackling the Big Questions with Carver Mead
Mead said that COSM attendees argued in good faith in order to reach the truthDr. Carver Mead, Professor Emeritus and California Institute of Technology and recipient of the prestigious 2022 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology, gave the closing remarks for last year’s COSM conference. “We’ve tackled the big questions,” Mead said. Mead noted that in a system where free information is bountiful, our adversaries will try to set us at odds against each other. “That’s the one thing that can cripple us,” he said. “Is when we get at odds with each other. This COSM has been a wonderful example of us arguing over things not because we have a fixed idea and we don’t want to change because of some preconceived notion, but because we want to get to the truth.” You can Read More ›
AI is Closer Than You Think
Most of us carry powerful AI in our pockets every single daySometimes AI seems a bit of a niche idea, relegated to dystopian prophecies or sentient robots. But AI is much more pervasive and influential in our present world in more ways than we might assume. Oxford mathematician John Lennox reminds us in this recent podcast episode that our society teems with AI. Lennox commented, Now, the final example I would give you is the fact that we’re all involved in AI. That is any of us who own a smartphone, it’s tracking us all the time. What many of us don’t realize is that, for example, we make a purchase at Amazon. A few days later, we’ll get a pop-up saying, people that bought this book were interested in that Read More ›
A Graph Can Tell a Story—Sometimes It’s an Illusion
Mistakes, chicanery, and "chartjunk" can undermine the usefulness of graphsA picture is said to be worth a thousand words. A graph can be worth a thousand numbers. Graphs are, as Edward Tufte titled his wonderful book, the “visual display of quantitative information.” Graphs should assist our understanding of the data we are using. Graphs can help us identify tendencies, patterns, trends, and relationships. They should display data accurately and encourage viewers to think about the data rather than admire the artwork. Unfortunately, graphs are sometimes marred (intentionally or unintentionally) by a variety of misleading techniques or by what Tufte calls “chartjunk” that obscures rather than illuminates. I have described elsewhere many ways in which mistakes, chicanery, and chartjunk can undermine the usefulness of graphs. I recently saw a novel Read More ›
Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google
With Google, the algorithm eventually leads you to content made by real people. With ChatGPT, you never leave the algorithmTo some extent, ChatGPT is a newer, easier-to-use interface than Google. Unlike Google, it doesn’t make you waste time by visiting those pesky websites. It not only looks into its database for content, but it also summarizes it for you as paragraphs. There is a problem lurking in there, however. Being computers, neither Google nor ChatGPT cares about the truth. They are algorithms, and they merely do as they are told. Additionally, you can’t code the human mind into algorithms. However, there is a fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what Google does that will prevent content generators like ChatGPT from displacing search engines like Google: Google eventually lets you out of its system. Ultimately, the goal of search Read More ›
Astrobiologist Cautions Against Jumping the Gun in Spotting ET
Scientists he says, are cautious with good reason. There are many weird natural phenomena like Oumuamua out there.At Nautilus, astrophysicist (and astrobiologist) Caleb A. Scharf offers some sobering reflections on the diligent search for extraterrestrial intelligences (ET) in recent decades: Despite this effort, there has been no evidence to date of extraterrestrial life. But that lack of evidence is not because the scientific enterprise is uniformly conservative, rigid, and close-minded, as implied by [astronomer Avi] Loeb and uncritically echoed by some columnists. It’s because no discovery or event has risen to the level where it is inexplicable in any other way. Could greater funding and support change that story? Perhaps, but the same could be said for almost any other ambitious scientific enterprise, and the answer cannot be known beforehand. Caleb Scharf, “The Alien-Haunted World” at Nautilus Read More ›
Robert J. Marks On AI Evolutionary Computing (Part III)
Can artificial intelligence algorithms prove Darwinian evolution? Why won’t some scientists admit the design inherent in evolutionary computing? Do random processes disprove intelligent design? Dr. Michael Egnor discusses evolutionary computing, the no free lunch theorem, and the role of purpose in chance with Dr. Robert J. Marks. Show Notes Additional Resources
Can We Find Purpose in a Universe With No Underlying Purpose?
That’s the ambitious goal of a prominent science writerBritish science writer Philip Ball offers us a guide to a very interesting project: an attempt to “naturalize” the idea of agency, that is, make the desire to do things—the mouse’s desire to escape the cat— explainable from a fully materialist perspective. That’s much harder than it seems. Rocks don’t desire anything. So we can’t just start from the bottom. It’s also not enough to say that the mouse wants to avoid getting killed. That’s true but it doesn’t really explain anything. For example, a person looks both ways before crossing the street to avoid getting run over. But, by itself, that doesn’t explain why she tries to avoid getting run over. One must factor in her memory, background knowledge, Read More ›
AI Development in Russia — Part 2
What is happening in Russia right now with regards to military development of artificial intelligence? Samuel Bendett and Robert J. Marks discuss Russian military development of AI, academia, and autonomous weapons. Show Notes Additional Resources
They Say This Is An Information Economy. So What Is Information?
How, exactly, is an article in the news different from a random string of letters and punctuation marks?We know information when we see it. An article contains information. A photograph contains information. The thoughts in our mind contain information. So does a computer program and so do our genomes. Yet other things we see around us clearly do not contain information. A handful of toothpicks dropped on the ground does not. Nor do the swirling tea leaves in a cup. Neither does a pair of tossed dice nor a sequence of 100 coin flips. But mere disorder is not the clue. An intricate snowflake does not contain information either. Can we state the difference between the article and the scattered toothpicks precisely? That’s tricky. Both Claude Shannon and Andrey Kolmogorov came up with information metrics. But the Read More ›
COVID-19: How 900 Bytes Changed the World
Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world. Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón discuss COVID-19, DNA, and information. Show Notes 01:09 | Introducing Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón, Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Miami and Senior Researcher at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab Read More ›
Beyond the Google Search
Today's search technology may provide us with an "answer" we did not work for and won't rememberWhile a search engine or online encyclopedia may be a convenient first resort, you should see it as merely a starting point. From there, you can turn to other resources, either online or in person.
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Research Showing That Fake News Easily Fools Us Collapses
A recent paper claiming that low-quality news (“fake news”) spreads as quickly on social media as accurate news has been retracted by its authors.A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy.”
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