A short 9-page paper presents a model of conscious perception as a discrete process:

 

Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?

 

Abstract

We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just like movies appear continuous although they consist of discrete images. To explain how the temporal resolution of human vision can be fast compared to sluggish conscious perception, we propose a novel conceptual framework in which features of objects, such as their color, are quasi-continuously and unconsciously analyzed with high temporal resolution. Like other features, temporal features, such as duration, are coded as quantitative labels. When unconscious processing is “completed,” all features are simultaneously rendered conscious at discrete moments in time, sometimes even hundreds of milliseconds after stimuli were presented.

(H/T J-Mac)

Several years ago, at the beginning of 2016, on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe forums, there was a thread about driverless cars.  All the skeptics were going on about how great it was going to be, how it will be here in two years, five years at the most, how we will overcome all the “small” problems by 2017, maybe 2019 at the latest, blah, blah.  And at the time, I had told them, well, you may want to hold on a while, its not quite as easy as you think.  And how was that met?  By a barrage of insults, of you ridiculous troll, what do you know about anything, if you wouldn’t be so ignorant and just learn, can we just block this guy moderator, on and on it went… (typical skeptic fare).

That thread was viewed 117,000 times.  There was exactly ONE person who was adamant that their time frames were wrong, that we still have a long way to go.  And boy, they sure didn’t like that.  Looking back now at the litany of nonsense the skeptics spewed kind of makes me laugh now.  Its the same nonsense you see here at TSZ every day.  Now, in 2020, some of the most ardent skeptic cheerleaders have reluctantly finally started to admit, ok, yea, you was right, it was a a lot harder than we all said.

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In a short essay, Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness cannot be the product of evolution:

Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved

I disagree, but I’ll leave my objections for the comment thread.

There is a strong suspicion the coronavirus is an escaped specimen from a Chinese lab.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf

An Indian scientist has purportedly discovered HIV inserted into the coronavirus. If true, this is pretty conclusive evidence the virus is humanly engineered, i.e. intelligently designed.

So, herein lies the conundrum. According to popular imagination, ID is both bad science and false (remember, good science is the falsifiable sort ;). If true, then it should not be possible to detect intelligent intervention in the genetic code.

Yet, this recent news item purports to be exactly that: identification of intelligent intervention in the genetic code.

Please explain this to me like I am 5: how can ID be both bad science and false, yet at the same time it is possible to identify intelligent intervention in the genetic code? If we can do so for the recent past, why can’t we do the same for the distant past?

Thanks!

Many people, including the religious, have questions they would like to ask God. Let’s see which ones are the most popular.

[democracy id=”8″]

Do you have a question you’d like to ask God that is not mentioned in the poll? Write it in the comments section.

I say no but why do evolutionists?

This is a sly way to demonstrate how unlikely evolutionism is on a probability curve.when on thinks of the millions (billions?) of segregated populations in biology(species) then it should be a high, or respectable percentage, are evolving as we speak to create new populations with new bodyplans to survive in some niche. By high I mean millions, with a allowance for mere hundreds of thousands. YET I am confident there is none evolving today. further i suspect evolutionists would say there is none evolving today. WHY? If not today what about yesterday or 300 years ago? Why couldn’t creationists say its not happening today because it never happened? Its accurate sampling of todays non evolution for predicting none in the past!

i think the only hope (hope?) is if evolutionism said , under pE influence, that all biology today is in the stasis stage and just waiting for a sudden need to change, qickly done, then stasis again. Yet why would it be that stasis has been reached so perfectly today relative to the enormous claim of the need in the past for evolutionism?

Anyways i think creationists have a good point here but willing to be corrected.

It was just a matter of time before quantum mechanics were to be identified as the driving force behind DNA mutations…

“In the past, we knew DNA polymerases make mistakes during DNA replication but did not know how they do it,” said Zucai Suo, Ph.D., Ohio State professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “Now, our study provides a mechanistic sense for how the mistakes arise.”

The results provide “convincing validation for the chemical origins of mutations proposed by Watson and Crick in 1953,” said Myron Goodman, Ph.D., a professor of molecular biology and chemistry at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study. “It is significant scientifically, and even though it took about 65 years to prove, it also demonstrates the folly of ever betting against Watson and Crick.”

One of the surprising discoveries made by the team was that the frequency at which bases shifted their shapes varied with DNA sequence. In one of their experiments, Ohio State biochemists Zucai Suo and Walter Zahurancik essentially counted the number of times that polymerases incorporated the wrong base into the DNA. They found that mistakes were indeed not uniform: they appeared more frequently in some sequences than others. For example, a region with more Gs and Cs might form more quantum jitters, and subsequently more mutations, than an area that was rich in As and Ts.

But, it doesn’t end there…

50% of peer reviewed articles may be not true…How’s that possible? You pay $ and the articles with the results you would like them to be get cooked for you in the most prestigious science journals in the world.

In the video there is also an interesting bit on the cholesterol lowering statins issue in France…Big Pharma demands to put statins in the water…or people will die…

Are we beginning to see a major paradigm shift, steadily moving away from the prevailing physicalist, materialist.mechanistic mindset?

Integral theory is one attempt to move beyond any narrow,exclusive views of reality proclaimed by representives of science, religion, philosophy, spiritual traditions or whatever. Jennifer Gidley writes about integral thinking and the evolution of consciousness here

There are periods in human and cultural evolution when humanity passes through such fundamental transformations that our reality shifts and new patterns of thought are required to make sense of the unfolding human drama . . . The profound transformation we are now witnessing has been emerging on a global scale over millennia and has matured to a tipping point and rate of acceleration that has radically altered and will continue to alter our human condition in every aspect. We must therefore expand our perspective and call forth unprecedented narrative powers to name, diagnose, and articulate this shift… Integral philosopher Ashok Gangadean in the opening quotation encapsulates what many integral theorists have been voicing over the past decade. It is this integral research on emergent movement(s) of consciousness that I am referring to as the evolution of consciousness discourse This research points to the emergence of a new structure,stage(s) or movement of consciousness that has been referred to by various terms, most notably, post-formal integral and planetary.

Jude Currivan says that instead of big bang we have the big breath. The “outbreath” that gives rise to the physical unverse. Matter and energy are the products of information. The physical universe is in-formed as she puts it.

She discusses her views here in “Restating and reunifying reality: Our in-formed and holographic universe”.

This is part of an annual Mystics and Scientists conference promoted by The Scientific & Medical Network

The metaphor of the big bang conjures up images of a destructive explosion leading to chaos. But we should imagine the universe as a birth of order and organisation and this is more in keeping with a breathing process by which we communicate compositions of song, poetry and prose. Evolution is the creation of order out of chaos.

So are we seeing a movement to a more integrated, holistic understanding of reality where, rather than being a mere by product of a particular arrangement of matter, consciousness plays a primal, central role? The cosmos is breathed into existence, the out-breathing Word, the Logos, creates the living universe. Consciousness is the alpha and omega.

After the flood God said the fear/dread of man would be upon all creatures on earth. birds, insects, animals , fishes. this was needed because, seemingly , for the first time man would be intimate with biology and so in danger. thus man had this innate protection. YET how does this work? Is it in the thoughts of creatures?

In the video Moral Technology Conference 2016: Day 1 Lecture 1, NIcanor Perlas advocates participating in global conversations which break down the barriers of compartmentalization.

I share his belief that whoever has the money and power, their vision will be the de facto world we are living in, Those with the power make the prominent worldview, the only worldview that is allowed to be taken seriously. Whether or not it is in keeping with reality it will eventually become reality.

These days researchers are obsessed with making models as an aid to understanding reality. But there is a danger here in that in concentrating on the models the actual living world around us is lost sight of. And the same can be said regarding the metaphors that are in frequent use. How true to reality is the mind picture evoked by the metaphor.