Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagWilliam Dembski

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Thinker man 3D illustration. The Thinker Statue by the French Sculptor Rodin.
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post
Author
William A. Dembski
Date
May 30, 2023
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence
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Moving On to Breaking Google’s Bard

These AI systems lack the uniquely human capacity of self-transcendence
William A. Dembski
May 30, 2023
4
Artificial Intelligence

I’ve finally started playing around with Google Bard. With self-referential sentences, it seems even more at sea than ChatGPT. Here is an exchange from May 18: Me: Consider the following six sentences: This is the first sentence. Ignore this sentence. Why are these sentences being written down? The second sentence has exactly three words. The fifth sentence has at least twenty words. This, along with the preceding five sentences, have fewer than twenty times twenty words. Which of these last six sentences has a truth value and which are true? Bard: The last six sentences have the following truth values: The second sentence is false because it has 5 words, not 3. The fifth sentence is true because it has Read More ›

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News
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December 15, 2022
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Artificial Intelligence
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Non-Computable You: Bradley Center Celebrates Human Creativity in 2022

Humans are unique and will never be replaced by the machines they invent.
News
December 15, 2022
4
Artificial Intelligence

Note: Mind Matters News is made possible by support from the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, a project of the non-profit Discovery Institute. Here is a report of our activities for 2022. If you benefit from the work of Mind Matters News, could you donate to support our work in 2023? Humans are unique and will never be replaced by the machines they invent. That was the powerful takeaway from this year’s new book by Walter Bradley Center Director Robert J. Marks, Non-Computable You: What You Do that Artificial Intelligence Never Will. The release of Marks’ book was one of many ways that the Bradley Center advanced its mission in 2022 to defend human dignity and creativity Read More ›

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post
Author
News
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November 16, 2022
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Cryptocurrency
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Could Crypto Be a Safe National Currency?

At COSM a panel of experts debated the future of crypto
News
November 16, 2022
5
Cryptocurrency

A panel moderated by blockchain expert Sam Yilmaz COO of Bloccelerate last week at COSM debated whether cryptocurrency could be a national currency. It’s a risk but then many current currencies are. From Wyatt Robinson — Principal Corporate Counsel, Microsoft: The whole premise behind blockchain as I understand it from my view as a former financial services attorney, is really to promote efficiency free up capital allow more money to be out there for end users to have in their pockets. And so when we think about what should we put on chain, what activities should be going on chain at the end of the day, think about the stakeholders, the users who are involved in that transaction or are Read More ›

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Asian businesswoman in formal suit working with computer laptop for Polygonal brain shape of an artificial intelligence with various icon of smart city Internet of Things, AI and business IOT concept
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post
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News
Date
March 10, 2022
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Artificial Intelligence, Creativity
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Robert J. Marks: Zeroing In on What AI Can and Can’t Do

Walter Bradley Center director Marks discusses what’s hot and what’s not in AI with fellow computer maven Gretchen Huizinga
News
March 10, 2022
11
Artificial Intelligence, Creativity

What makes mankind special? And what does it mean to flourish on the frontier of a technological future? In a recent podcast, “What Does It Mean to Be Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence?”, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks discusses what artificial intelligence can and can’t do and its ethical implications with veteran podcaster Gretchen Huizinga This interview was originally published by Christian think tank, the Beatrice Institute (March 3, 2022) and is repeated here with their kind permission: https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Mind-Matters-Episode-176-Beatrice-Institute-Rebroadcast-rev1.mp3 Here’s a partial transcript of the first segment, with notes and links: Gretchen Huizinga: Well, Bob, you’re not just a senior fellow and director of the Walter Bradley Center, but you’re also a co-founder and were instrumental Read More ›

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Monarch Butterfly Congregation 2
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Author
News
Date
January 31, 2022
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Information Theory, Natural Intelligence
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Can Animal Behavior Simply Be Transferred Into the Genome?

For example, how do Monarch butterflies from Canada get to the same trees in Mexico as their great-grandparents landed in?
News
January 31, 2022
13
Information Theory, Natural Intelligence

Recently, geologist Casey Luskin interviewed Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021) on one of the central mysteries of biology: How do animals “know” things that they can’t have figured out on their own? Here’s the first part, with transcript and notes. Below is the second part, which looks at some “how” questions. Eric Cassell is an expert in navigation systems, including GPS whose experience includes more than four decades of experience in systems engineering related to aircraft, navigation and safety. He has long had an interest in animal navigation. His model for animal navigation is the natural algorithm: The animal’s brain is “programmed” to enable navigation. Here’s Part II of our Read More ›

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NFT | Non-Fungible Token
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Author
News
Date
December 3, 2021
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Business and Finance, Economics
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NFTs: Can They Help You Sell Digital Memorabilia Online?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) like Jack Dorsey’s first tweet or Michael Cohen’s prison badge are creating a new market with a need for new rules
News
December 3, 2021
5
Business and Finance, Economics

At COSM 2021,William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher who studies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), offered some thoughts on whether NFTs (non-fungible tokens) can help artists and other creators make a living selling their work on the internet. Are NFTs just “rat poison squared,” as Warren Buffett calls cryptocurrencies? Well, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for a reported $2.9 million. It’s complex but navigable. According to Dembski, it might be a way forward. But there are pitfalls. The non-tech part is easy to understand. Just as internet-based subscription services like Substack offer a way for talented writers to make a good living free from censorious mediocrities, so NFTs might help artists market their work in Read More ›

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podcast
Author
Robert J. Marks
Date
November 25, 2021
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Walter Bradley: For a Greater Purpose

Robert J. Marks
November 25, 2021
2

Mind Matters is published by the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, but who is Walter Bradley, and why does the Center bear his name? Listen in as Robert J. Marks and William A. Dembski discuss Bradley’s involvement in the Intelligent Design movement, share stories about his boldness of faith in academia, and talk about why they published Read More ›

Glücksspiel
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post
Author
News
Date
November 16, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence, Science
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Can Wholly Random Processes Produce Information?

Can information result, without intention, from a series of accidents? Some have tried it with computers…
News
November 16, 2021
13
Artificial Intelligence, Science

In Define information before you talk about it, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed engineering prof Robert J. Marks on the way information, not matter, shapes our world (October 28, 2021). In the first portion, Egnor and Marks discussed questions like: Why do two identical snowflakes seem more meaningful than one snowflake. Then they turned to the relationship between information and creativity. Is creativity a function of more information? Or is there more to it? And human intervention make any difference? Does Mount Rushmore have no more information than Mount Fuji? Does human intervention make a measurable difference? That’s specified complexity. Putting the idea of specified complexity to work, how do we measure meaningful information? How do we know Lincoln contained more Read More ›

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Smart cars with automatic sensor driving on metropolis with wireless connection
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post
Author
Jonathan Bartlett
Date
October 4, 2021
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence
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Nissan Develops Autonomous Taxi Service in Japan

Nissan recently chose to advance their pursuit of an autonomous vehicle by developing a taxi service to work in limited locations
Jonathan Bartlett
October 4, 2021
4
Artificial Intelligence

One of the quieter players in the development of autonomous technology over the last decade has been Nissan. They originally announced the development of their autonomous technology in 2013, claiming that it would be fully ready to bring to market by 2020.  While Nissan had a more realistic timeline than other companies touting autonomous development, it fell prey to the same failure to realize the actual complications that are inherent in truly autonomous scenarios. A graphic developed by Nissan in 2017 (shown below) shows the naïveté that was rampant during that time period. Nissan imagined that there were four stages to the development of autonomous vehicles— (1) single-lane highway, (2) multi-lane highway, (3) city driving, and then (4) full autonomy. The problem, as we have noted Read More ›

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ビジネスプラン
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Author
News
Date
July 26, 2021
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Information Theory, Philosophy, Science
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How Informational Realism Subverts Materialism

Within informational realism, what defines things is their capacity for communicating or exchanging information with other things
News
July 26, 2021
3
Information Theory, Philosophy, Science

Here are some brief excerpts from design theorist William Dembski’s chapter in a forthcoming book on informational realism: To see how informational realism dissolves the mind-body problem, we need first to be clear on what informational realism is and why it is credible. Informational realism is not simply the view that information is real. We live in an information age, so who doesn’t think that information is real? Rather, informational realism asserts that the ability to exchange information is the defining feature of reality, of what it means, at the most fundamental level, for any entity to be real. William A. Dembski, “Informational Realism Dissolves the Mind–Body Problem,” a chapter of the forthcoming Mind and Matter: Modern Dualism, Idealism and Read More ›

Coronavirus 2019-nCov novel coronavirus concept resposible for asian flu outbreak and coronaviruses influenza as dangerous flu strain cases as a pandemic. Microscope virus close up. 3d rendering.
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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
July 2, 2021
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Medicine and Health, Science
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COVID-19’s Origins: Uses and Misuses of the Explanatory Filter

How a critic of intelligent design theory misunderstands the application of design inference
Eric Holloway
July 2, 2021
8
Medicine and Health, Science

Last year in July a prominent critic of intelligent design theory, Dr. Adam Shapiro, took the Discovery Institute to task for not debunking the lab origin theory. He says, Behe seems to miss an opportunity to demonstrate that intelligent design theory shows how those pathways are not irreducible complex. Adam Shapiro, “Did Intelligent Design Just Miss Its Corona Moment?” at American Scientist and, How better to demonstrate its own apolitical nature than to apply its scientific process to debunk the Chinese lab myth? Adam Shapiro, “Did Intelligent Design Just Miss Its Corona Moment?” at American Scientist First of all, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of ID. ID theory is only resilient against false positives, not false negatives, as Dr. Ewert Read More ›

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Information technology background. Network business infographics. it computer technology concept.
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post
Author
News
Date
May 20, 2021
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Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Science
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It From Bit: What Did John Archibald Wheeler Get Right—and Wrong?

In a chapter in a forthcoming book, William Dembski explores the strengths and weaknesses of Wheeler’s perspective that the universe is, at bottom, information
News
May 20, 2021
7
Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Science

In his chapter in a forthcoming book, Mind and Matter: Modern Dualism, Idealism and the Empirical Sciences (Discovery Institute Press), information theorist William Dembski looks at the ways physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008, pictured) changed our understanding of reality. What did Wheeler, an early atomic bomb theorist who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” get right? What did he get wrong? Wheeler is probably best known for a catchphrase, “it from bit,” introduced in a 1989 paper where he explains, It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the Read More ›

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Futuristic heads up display blue green abstract interface
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post
Author
Eric Holloway
Date
April 26, 2021
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Philosophy, Science
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How the Explanatory Filter Can Help Quash Conspiracy Theories

I found Dembski’s explanatory filter quite helpful in investigating voter fraud claims
Eric Holloway
April 26, 2021
10
Philosophy, Science

William Dembski’s explanatory filter is a decision strategy for identifying events that are unlikely to have happened purely by chance. The filter proceeds in three main steps, which can be illustrated via the plot device in Contact, a novel (1985) by Carl Sagan, followed by a film (1997): Eliminate events of large probability (necessity): A radio telescope receives a pattern of beeps and pauses. Perhaps the pattern seems strange to us but we could just be overinterpreting inevitable space noise. Eliminate events of medium probability (chance): The pattern turns out to be a sequence of prime numbers. However, large randomly generated numbers sometimes feature apparent patterns (five 5s in a row, for example) that don’t signify anything. Specify the event Read More ›

White robot using floating digital network connections with dots and lines 3D rendering
White robot using floating digital network connections with dots and lines 3D rendering
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post
Author
News
Date
April 15, 2021
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind
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No AI Overlords?: What Is Larson Arguing and Why Does It Matter?

Information theorist William Dembski explains, computers can’t do some things by their very nature
News
April 15, 2021
7
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

Yesterday, we were looking at the significance of AI researcher Erik J. Larson’s new book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do, contrasting it with claims that AI will merge with or replace us. Some such claims are made by industry insiders like Ray Kurzweil. But more often we hear them from science celebs like the late Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, who, on these topics, are more known than knowledgeable. So why does Larson think they are wrong? He offers two arguments. First, as information theorist William Dembski explains, is that there are some kinds of thinking that, by their nature, computers don’t do: With regard to inference, he shows that a form Read More ›

Intelligent robot machine pointing finger 3D rendering
Intelligent robot machine pointing finger 3D rendering
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post
Author
News
Date
April 14, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence, Media
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New Book Massively Debunks Our “AI Overlords”: Ain’t Gonna Happen

AI researcher and tech entrepreneur Erik J. Larson expertly dissects the AI doomsday scenarios
News
April 14, 2021
5
Artificial Intelligence, Media
AI researcher and tech entrepreneur Eric J. Larson has just published a book debunking the claims that AI is taking over. Read More ›
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Author
News
Date
February 21, 2021
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Religion, Science
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How Walter Bradley Broke Down Campus Anti-Christian Prejudice

Bradley has been a very successful mechanical engineering researcher but he has never lost sight of larger goals, such as religious freedom at universities
News
February 21, 2021
7
Religion, Science

In Thursday’s podcast, “The Life of Walter Bradley With William Dembski (Part II),” Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and design theorist William Dembski reflect on the biography they have written about a remarkable engineer, Walter Bradley, For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley. In Part I, they discussed Bradley’s work in helping develop appropriate industries using sustainable technologies in the developing world. Here in Part II, they look at the way Bradley politely but effectively insisted on respect for the rights of religious students and faculty, as well as others. And got it. Robert J. Marks: When Walter Bradley was a professor, one of the things that he wanted to do was to talk Read More ›

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hedef başarısı ve birlik beraberlik ruhu
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post
Author
News
Date
February 14, 2021
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Philosophy of Mind, Religion, Science
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Walter Bradley: Finding a Life of Greater Purpose

Bradley has been a pioneer in the development of appropriate technologies for developing regions of the world
News
February 14, 2021
11
Philosophy of Mind, Religion, Science

In last week’s podcast, “The Life of Walter Bradley With William Dembski (Part I),” Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and design theorist William Dembski discuss the biography they have written about a remarkable engineer, Walter Bradley, For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley. It also helps explain why we call ourselves the Walter Bradley Center, as we seek to extend Dr. Bradley’s work. https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-121-William-Dembski.mp3 A partial transcript follows. This transcript begins at 02:55. Show notes and links follow. Before getting down to the main business, design theorist William Dembski, possibly the best known theorist of design in nature, told Robert Marks that he plans a second edition of his Cambridge University Press book, The Read More ›

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GMO Farming
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post
Author
Eric Holloway
Date
February 4, 2021
Categorized
Information Theory
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Is GMO Detection an Application of Dembski’s Explanatory Filter?

If so, it would be an instance of the use of the filter in biology
Eric Holloway
February 4, 2021
7
Information Theory

Have you ever heard people say that intelligent design (ID) theory has never been applied to biology? They are wrong! In fact, it is applied frequently in the very important field of detecting genetically modified organisms (GMOs). “A genetically modified organism contains DNA that has been altered using genetic engineering.” (National Geographic) Detection can trace the use of GMOs, now frequent in our food supply, so that products can be recalled if there is a problem or if people just don’t want to use GMO products. GMOs are intelligently designed biological organisms, and scientists use design theorist William Dembski’s explanatory filter to detect GMOs. My claim is a bit daring, perhaps alarming for some people. Maybe I’m stretching the definition Read More ›

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News
Date
December 21, 2020
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Events
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Walter Bradley Center: Year in Review 2020

Despite COVID-19, we had a very productive year
News
December 21, 2020
5
Events

Mind Matters News is sponsored by the non-profit Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute. Will you help Mind Matters News continue by supporting the work of the Bradley Center with an end-of-year donation? In a world awash with over-hyped claims (both pro and con) about artificial intelligence, the work of the Bradley Center couldn’t be more timely and important. People know at a fundamental level that they are not machines. But faulty thinking can cause people to adopt views that in their heart of hearts they know to be untrue. The Bradley Center seeks to help individuals—and our society at large—to realize that we are not machines, while at the same time helping to put Read More ›

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nautilus shell
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post
Author
Robert J. Marks
Date
December 20, 2020
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Events
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We’re the Walter Bradley Center. But Who Is Walter Bradley?

A new biography, For a Greater Purpose, discusses Bradley’s life and legacy
Robert J. Marks
December 20, 2020
2
Events

Mind Matters News is published by the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence. And a natural question is, who is this guy, Walter Bradley? Find out in a new biography authored by design theorist William Dembski and myself, For a Greater Purpose. The Foreword is written by the extraordinary philosopher J. P. Moreland. From the book, here’s what others are saying about Walter Bradley: ● “Walter Bradley is one of the most extraordinary men I have ever known. I am in awe of him.” —William Lane Craig, PhD, DTh, ReasonableFaith.org ● “One of the great blessings God has granted me in my life is the opportunity to have co-ministered with [Walter Bradley] among faculty and students on university Read More ›