The Mind Friday’s (11/22/10) Wall Street Journal article by Robert Lee Holtz: Music’s Universal Pull Studied by Algorithm. Turns out there are some “universal patterns” in music, even correcting for biases of culture, perception, and the findings appearing in Western scholarship. Music apparently has “bedeviled” Darwinian biologists. Luke Glowacki of Pennsylvania State University […]
Read more...Category: Consciousness
Uploaded Mind?
What do you think of this? In an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, Princeton Neuroscience professor Michael S.A. Graziano asserts “the day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer . . . .” The title of the piece asks rhetorically “will […]
Read more...AI and Consciousness
Advances in artificial intelligence are of interest because of what they may say about consciousness. If a machine can acquire human-like sentience, does that mean consciousness is entirely an emergent property of brain functioning? If so, it would arguably eliminate human consciousness as a phenomenon that proves God’s existence. All the more reason, then, that we […]
Read more...Funny Computer
Some follow-up on “Artificial Intelligence,” plus some odds and ends. I wrote about “Artificial Intelligence” a couple of weeks ago, putting the phrase in quotes so I could say we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what these machines do, does not include actual “intelligence” in the way human beings have intelligence. We shouldn’t assume […]
Read more...“Artificial Intelligence”
What the words mean It seems like there’s a new article or book almost weekly on the coming impact of Artificial Intelligence. The phrase, “artificial intelligence,” has always been puzzling to me, however, and I think we should stop and consider it, the more so if the phenomenon it denotes is actually introducing a disruptive […]
Read more...All-Seeing Eye
I wrote about Jordan Peterson in Psychological Avatar, in particular his understanding of God. Or “God,” as he might say. The question is whether there is a “God Who is There,” in Francis Schaeffer’s phrasing, or whether “God” is only a representation of ultimate human aspiration, an avatar for the ground-up Darwinian psychological development to […]
Read more...Mind = Brain?
A review of I Am Not a Brain, by Markus Gabriel Freedom I begin this review where Gabriel ends his book: on the subject of freedom. Quoting Friedrich Schelling, Gabriel observes that “the alpha and omega of all philosophy is freedom.” By “freedom,” Gabriel does not refer merely to unbridled subjective autonomy, nor political freedom […]
Read more...Another Dangerous Idea
The Conflict of Ideas This post is a review of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, by Victor Reppert, and a discussion of the ideas in it. Victor Reppert wrote this book in 2003. My impression is that the title is primarily a marketing decision. It is intended to call to mind the title of Daniel Dennett’s […]
Read more...Advantageous
This 2015 movie is on Netflix. Watch it. Don’t be put off by the rating. Some of the people who rate evidently count the number of car crashes or sex scenes, instead of the number of brain cells engaged. This movie is artistic and has depth. At its heart, it is a philosophical inquiry into […]
Read more...Tides of Mind
The fact of human consciousness is one of several proofs of the necessity of God. It cannot be explained by biology alone. And so, it is exciting whenever we have a new advance in understanding of that elusive phenomenon. Such an advance is found in David Gelernter’s The Tides of Mind. Gelernter is a brilliant […]
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