TagPromissory materialism
Will Studio’s New “After Death” Be a Hit Like “Sound of Freedom”?
The new 90-minute film interviews researchers and survivors of near-death experiencesAfter Death (Angel Studios 2023), a look at the many recent accounts of near-death experiences, will premiere October 27. Angel is the studio that produced the recent smash hit Sound of Freedom (2023). There’s a story in that: While SoF was trashed by fashionable media, it outgrossed some of the biggest films at the box office. Will After Death, directed by Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke, meet the same fate? Its basic message is that NDEs are becoming an intersection of science/medicine and faith. It will be interesting to see how the same fashionable media react. The principle reason for exploding interest in near-death experiences in recent decades is that high-tech medicine has been bringing back thousands of people from Read More ›
“Emergence”: The College Level Version of “We Don’t Know How”
The word often permits the improbable to be considered probable for the purposes of sounding like science without providing any
Claim: We’ve Shown That Dogs Can Form “Abstract Concepts”
It’s a good idea to be skeptical when any such claim is followed up with the assertion that humans “aren’t that cognitively unique after all.”University of Buffalo researchers reported recently on a study of three pet dogs known to them that they had taught to “ponder their past”: Dogs are capable of learning the instruction “do that again,” and can flexibly access memories of their own recent actions—cognitive abilities they were not known to possess, according to the results of a recent University at Buffalo study. “We found that dogs could be trained to repeat specific actions on cue, and then take what they’d learned and apply it to actions they had never been asked to repeat,” says Allison Scagel, Ph.D., the study’s corresponding author, who was a UB graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the time of the research. “Our findings Read More ›
New Scientist Offers a Sympathetic Account of Panpsychism
A serious, long form article shows that physicalism (“the mind is just what the brain does”) is failing
A Darwinian Biologist Resists Learning To Live With Panpsychism
Jerry Coyne makes two things quite clear: He scorns panpsychism and he doesn’t understand why some scientists accept it
Why So Many Neuroscientists Are Unreflective Materialists
It’s part of a larger commitment to the belief that materialism will one day refute dualism by explaining away all of the apparent immaterial aspects of the mindNeurosurgeon Michael Egnor has contributed a chapter of The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021): “Have science and philosophy refuted free will?” (Ch 18) and “Can materialism explain human consciousness?” (Ch 19). In it, he notes a reality of modern neuroscience: Materialism (the mind is simply what the brain does) is not a discovery so much as a pledge of allegiance: One might think that the logical problems with materialism would insulate 21st-century neuroscience from its influence, but that is not so. Most contemporary neuroscientists work from an implicitly materialist perspective — in part because they’re unreflective, in part because materialism is the metaphysical correlate of the atheistic scientism that Read More ›
Epilepsy: If You Follow the Science, Materialism Is Dead
Continuing a discussion with Arjuna Das at Theology Unleashed, Dr. Egnor talks about how neurosurgery shows that the mind is not the brainNeurosurgeon Michael Egnor did a recent podcast with Arjuna Das at Theology Unleashed, “where Eastern theology meets Western skepticism.” In the previous segment, they discussed the way in which people’s minds sometimes become much clearer near death (terminal lucidity). Dr. Egnor suggested that that may demonstrate that the brain constrains the mind (rather than creating it). In this segment, they look at objections raised to the view that epilepsy provides evidence for the mind as not merely a function of the brain. Dr. Egnor begins by focusing on the work of Wilder Penfield, the founder of epilepsy surgeries, who worked in Montreal in the mid-twentieth century, “a wonderful scientist, one of the best scientists that neurosurgery has produced”: Here is Read More ›