TagSteven Pinker
Why the Artificial Intelligence Bubble May Be About To Burst
For one thing, Space Odyssey’s HAL and Prometheus’s David aren’t really happening, for good reasons
The Free Will Debate Really Heated Up This Year
Many commentators are weighing in; surprisingly, perhaps, well-known materialists are disputing the claim that there is no free will
How Human Language Is, and Isn’t, Like a Computer Program
A key difference is that a language cannot be downloaded into the brain, like a program. It must be painstakingly acquiredGiosuè Baggio, professor of psycholinguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has mixed feeling about comparing the brain’s management of human language to computation. In some ways, it is a useful analogy: If we look at what the brain does while people perform a language task, we find some of the signatures of a computational system at work. If we record electric or magnetic fields produced by the brain, for example, we find signals that are only sensitive to the identity of the sound one is hearing — say, that it is a b, instead of a d — and not to the pitch, volume, or any other concrete and contingent features of the speech sound. At some Read More ›
COVID-19: Atheism Went Viral As Well
Atheists are uniquely unsuited to accuse others of devaluing human lifeProfessor Steven Pinker’s quickly deleted tweet provides a window into anti-religious hate. In health and medicine, he is entirely mistaken.
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