I think a thread on this topic will be interesting. My own position is that AI is intelligent, and that’s for a very simple reason: it can do things that require intelligence. That sounds circular, and in one sense it is. In another sense it isn’t. It’s a way of saying that we don’t have to examine the internal workings of a system to decide that it’s intelligent. Behavior alone is sufficient to make that determination. Intelligence is as intelligence does.
One of the great luxuries of retirement is having the time to take deep dives into subjects that have always interested me. Artificial intelligence is one of those subjects. As part of my AI education, I’m experimenting with various AIs on my home PC. All it takes is a graphics card of sufficient compute power and video RAM capacity, and I already have a powerful graphics card that I use for flight simulation.
A few days ago I was playing with an AI called Deepseek-r1:8b and I somehow pushed it over the cliff into psychosis. I asked a fairly simple question: “What is the value of the second derivative at points of inflection?” The major web-based AIs can answer that question in less than ten seconds. Deepseek “thought” about it for a full six minutes, and as it worked on the problem, I could see its thought process displayed in a scrolling window (it’s a nice feature that many AIs are starting to implement these days).
George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his work, Metaphors We Live By, which he co-authored with Mark Johnson. In this six-minute interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he makes a powerful case against the very coherence of the notion that we have an afterlife.
For my part, I think Lakoff’s case against personal immortality is the strongest one I’ve ever seen, and I’d be interested to see how readers respond to it. I have a few brief thoughts, which I’d like to share.
Reality consists of 3 spatial dimensions with time adding a fourth dimension. But what reason could we possibly have for putting such limits on reality? Do higher dimensions have any reality apart from their construction within a mathematical framework?
Humans know about what surrounds them by virtue of their sensory perception. It is impossible otherwise to know about the world outside our head. It is necessary but is it sufficient? No. To develop our full intellect we need to develop our cognitive skills and, crucially, learn a language. Luckily, humans are a social species and language together with the physical adaptations necessary to speak, hear and understand develops in childhood seemingly without much effort, just by being immersed in the family group.
Continue readingThis past Friday, I bumped into Dr. Michael Behe, and again on Saturday, along with Drs. Brian Miller (DI), Research Coordinator CSC, and Robert Larmer (UNB), currently President of the Canadian Society of (Evangelical) Christian Philosophers. Venue: local apologetics conference (https://www.diganddelve.ca/). The topic of the event “Science vs. Atheism: Is Modern Science Making Atheism Improbable?” makes it relevant here at TSZ, where there are more atheists & agnostics among ‘skeptics’ than average.
On the positive side, I would encourage folks who visit this site to go to such events for learning/teaching purposes. Whether for the ID speakers or not; good conversations are available among people honestly wrestling with and questioning the relationship between science, philosophy and theology/worldview, including on issues related to evolution, creation, and intelligence in the universe or on Earth. Don’t go to such events expecting miracles for your personal worldview in conversation with others, credibility in scientific publications or in the classroom, if you are using ‘science’ as a worldview weapon against ‘religion’ or ‘theology’. That argument just won’t fly anymore and the Discovery Institute, to their credit, has played a role, of whatever size may still be difficult to tell, in making this shift happen.
A question arises: what would be the first question you would ask or thing you would say to Michael Behe if you bumped into him on the street?
Continue readingThe scientific evidence for immaterial mind defeats materialism – claims Dr. Egnor, a neurosurgeon affiliated with the Discovery Institute… Not so quickly – says Dr. Faizal Ali, a psychiatrist affiliated with CAMH and University of Toronto, who describes himself as an anti-creationist and a militant atheist. He believes that neural networks can be responsible for the emergence of the human mind, naturally…
Let’s look at their evidence…
Continue readingDr. Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in physics from the University of Frankfurt. Since 2006 she has written the popular weblog Backreaction as well a the book “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”. She has a very interesting OP on cognitive biases that apparently explains what influences our the decision making…
The OP is also linked to a presentation on How to Reduce Biases in Decision-Making.
I found Dr. Hossenfelder blog and the OP really intriguing because I could never understand why so many people would support ideologies that were pure nonsense or against scientific facts or logic…
Now I find it easier to understand those biases, although I still have a very hard time understanding why someone would deceive himself into believing something because of his or her preconceived ideas…
But, that’s a theme for another OP… 😉
Neil Rickert was at it again attempting to ‘explain consciousness’ over at PS at the imperative-phrased invitation of Joshua Swamidass to: “Tell me how you think consciousness evolved.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/
Neil had written this: “What it really boils down to, is that there is no such thing as metaphysical truth. There is only conventional truth. And different social groups will disagree over their social conventions.”
Continue readingBack in 2016, William Dembski officially ‘retired’ from ‘Intelligent Design’ theory & the IDM. He wrote that “the camaraderie I once experienced with colleagues and friends in the movement has largely dwindled.” https://billdembski.com/personal/official-retirement-from-intelligent-design/ This might have come rather late after Dembski’s star had already started to fade. Indeed, it was more than 10 years after the Dover trial debacle and already long after I personally heard another of the leaders of the IDM at the DI in 2003 say he no longer reads Dembski’s books. Yet no doubt Dr. Dembski was one of, if not the leading voice of the IDM for almost 2 decades. Here’s one UK IDist lamenting Dembski’s statement: https://designdisquisitions.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/william-dembski-moves-on-from-id-some-reflections/ Yet when a new paycheck from the Discovery Institute was offered in the Bradley Center, Dembski seems to have gotten right back on the ideological bandwagon in Seattle & reversed his dwindling of IDist camaraderie.
As people like to post crackpot theories that are congenial to them, I thought I’d plop this down here.
I was thinking about how dreams can seem (from the point of view of the dreamer) to go on for very long periods of time, even if the dream, from the point of view of an external observer, might only last a couple of minutes. And I noted that it might be the case that as we lose executive function in geezerhood and become more and more a batch of autonomous, unconscious functions, our dream experiences get phenomenologically longer and longer. [If I knew something more about relativity theory maybe I could analogize this with the difference between falling into a black hole from the vantage of an outside observer and the vantage of the falling person, but alas….] Continue reading
This is a follow up to my previous OP Is Cosmic Consciousness responsible for reality?
There seems to be some confusion regarding the causes of collapse of wave function(which seems to creates reality) whether a conscious observer can collapse the wave function ONLY or can a designed robot/computer perform the same role. Instead of pointing out the facts, I’d like “the seekers of truth” to do it for themselves. Since apparently ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’, I attach 2 videos that cover 2 breakthrough experiments in the understanding of well known double-slit experiment and the implications of collapse of wave function by an observer on the nature of reality…
According to the most successful theory of physics – quantum mechanics – nothing really happens in the physical world unless a conscious mind observes it.
A reality independent of observation doesn’t exist.
Particles don’t exist (they are waves) unless someone conscious looks at them or takes a measurement of them.
If Cosmic Consciousness is responsible for the nature of reality then all the materialistic theories, like the origins of life, mindless evolution etc. should be scrapped, shouldn’t they? Unless materialistic, unfounded belief system supersedes scientific facts…
At Evolution News and other, Dr. Michael Egnor has been writing extensively on the subject of mind, thought, consciousness and soul: here, here, here , here , here and here.
It seems that all his efforts have been concentrated on the critic of the materialistic views of the origins the mind, thoughts and consciousness. To make the long story short, Dr. Egnor is convinced that with the exception of one type of thoughts, where some thought patterns have been detected in human brain by MRI, EEG etc., other types of thoughts, such as abstract thoughts, can’t be explained in materialistic terms and therefore they are directly or indirectly a solid proof of the existence of an immaterial soul or the Thomistic Dualism dogma propagated Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century…
While there maybe a third explanation for this phenomenon, such as quantum consciousness/mind/thoughts, which I had already covered here , in this OP however, I would like to focus on another aspect of this issue:
Where did the idea of the immortal soul come from in the first place? Continue reading
As there is occasional interest in the relation between science and metaphysics here, I thought I’d share this article: “Metaphysics of Metamorphosis“, by the philosopher of science John Dupre. Dupre argues that metaphysics that takes science seriously — what he calls “naturalistic metaphysics” — will give us a very different picture of reality than what we get from traditional a priori metaphysics:
This project of science-based metaphysics, sometimes referred to as ‘naturalistic metaphysics’, has been surprisingly controversial. The philosophers James Ladyman at the University of Bristol and Don Ross at the University of Cape Town offered a forceful defence in their book Every Thing Must Go (2007). As that book illustrates, the debate can be technical and vitriolic. Consequently, I won’t defend naturalistic metaphysics from its critics so much as show you how it helps us inch towards an answer to one of the oldest chestnuts in the history of philosophy: is reality made up of things that somehow change over time, or are things just temporary shapes that our perception plucks out from a flux of unruly, unfolding processes?
Bumping around for millions of years without sight is not a problems for Richard Dawkins…Why would it be for evolution?
Question: Do not ALL (systems involved in seeing and processing image) have to be working (fully functional) for the eye to receive and process vision? (or something like that)
Answer Richard Dawkins: It is a bit a fallacy because 1/4 of an eye or a100th of an eye is better than nothing…
Please watch the video as my keyboard can’t handle the rest of this Dawkins’ nonsense…
!8 mysteries to go…
Various creationists and ID proponents, myself included, have raved about the work of elite scholar and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson who connected the rise of Christianity with concepts in evolutionary theory. His recent 2.5-hour interview was profound on many levels. I provide a link to the interview below.
Even though Peterson is an die-hard evolutionist, many ID proponents and creationists have said they were blessed to hear what he had to say. I know I was. Since I know VJ studied the topic of animal intelligence, I thought Peterson’s work might be of interest to him since Peterson ties the rise of Christianity to behavioral and neurological traits he sees deeply conserved in the mammalian kingdom.
Continue reading
I wanted to bring to your attention a lovely profile piece on Dan Dennett, “Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul“. It’s nice to see a philosopher as respected and well-known as Dennett come alive as a human being.
I’d also like to remind those of you interested in this sort of thing that Dennett has a new book out, From Bacteria to Bach And Back: The Evolution of Minds. The central project is to do what creationists are always saying can’t be done: use the explanatory resources of evolutionary theory to understand why we have the kinds of minds that we do. There are decent reviews here and here, as well as one by Thomas Nagel in New York Review of Books that I regard as deliberately misleading (“Is Consciousness an Illusion?“).
[Note: The profile and/or the Nagel review may be behind paywalls.]