Neuroscientist Vows: We’ll Nail Consciousness Yet!

Anil Seth, beast machine theory, Being You, body, brain, British Festival of Neuroscience, Christof Koch, consciousness, consciousness spot, David Chalmers, hallucinations, human brain, James Pang, Life Sciences, Monash University, Nature (journal), Nautilus, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, University of Sussex
Anil Seth, proponent of the “hallucination” theory of consciousness, vows that researchers will find that consciousness spot or circuit in the brain. Source
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Appreciating Bird Mimicry and the Other Exceptional, Designed Talents

Arctic terns, bird mimicry, birds, brain, budgerigars, camera rotation, Clover, cockatiels, combat aircraft, Current Biology, drones, Duke University, Evolution, flight recordings, hummingbird, Intelligent Design, keas, Live Science, lovebirds, lyrebird, Medical Xpress, migration, mimicry, mockingbird, Neuroscience & Mind, newlyweds, odor map, odors, parakeets, parrots, phytoplankton, PLOS ONE, salmon, smells, stabilization, starlings, vocabulary, vocal apparatus, wind directions, zoologists
Let the reader enjoy the 350+ word vocabulary of Clover, alleged to be the best talking parrot in the world.  Source
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Blind Ambition — Revisiting Searle’s Chinese Room

analytic philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Chinese, Chinese characters, Chinese Room, Clearasil, computers, English, intelligence, Intelligent Design, intentionality, Irish Sweepstakes, John Searle, judo, MacArthur Fellowship, Neuroscience & Mind, observer, Pepsi, psychology, Roger Schank, script, Sophia Loren, The Cognitive Computer, Yale University
For the most part, computer scientists have tended to ignore Searle’s argument and the point of view that it represents. Source
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Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented?

Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Applied Optics, Athanasios Papoulis, calculus, Carl Friedrich Gauss, error backpropagation, Euclid, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Intelligent Design, Isaac Newton, John F. Walkup, J´anos Bolyai, Karhunen–Loève Theorem, Kari Karhunen, mathematics, Michel Loève, Neuroscience & Mind, non-Euclidean geometry, Oberlin College, Papoulis-Gerchberg Algorithm, Peter Biles, plagiarism, space-variant processing, telegraph, telephone
Some think that math is invented. Evidence, though, points towards its discovery. Source
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Researchers: Neanderthals Invented Process to Produce Birch Tar

23andMe, antiseptic, birch tar, birch wood, Clive Finlayson, Germany, Gibraltar Museum, glue, Homo sapiens, Human Origins, insect repellent, intelligence, Michael Shermer, Middle Palaeolithic, missing link, Neanderthals, Neuroscience & Mind, paleontology, Patrick Schmidt, ScienceAlert, University of Tübingen
The tar can be used for glue, bug repellent, and killing germs. This finding tracks growing recognition of Neanderthals as intelligent. Source
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All We Need to Do to Give a Robot a Soul Is… (Error 404)

autonomous weapons, Buying God, Capitalism’s Toxic Assumptions, China, consciousness, David J. Gunkel, emotions, Eve Poole, hard problem of consciousness, human beings, ineffability, Intelligent Design, junk code, Leadersmithing, machines, Neuroscience & Mind, Northern Illinois University, personhood, Robot Souls, robots, Russia, Ryota Kanai, sixth sense, soul, Taylor & Francis, TechXplore, The Economist
In reality, programmers don’t leave souls out of robots because they don’t find them useful; they simply and obviously have no idea how to insert them. Source
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For AI, Human Hands Are Exceptional…For Now

Artificial Intelligence, Becca Rothfeld, ChatGPT, computers, copyright, critical thinking, DALL-E, digital art, Gary Smith, human exceptionalism, human form, human hands, images, intelligence, Intelligent Design, Jean Paul, job infringement, Kyle Chayka, Midjourney, Neuroscience & Mind, novels, The Point, visual arts, writing
In many artificially contrived images, the hands come up gnarled, disfigured, or otherwise anatomically incorrect. Source
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Sean Carroll: “How Could an Immaterial Mind Affect the Body?”

amino acids, analgesic, Aristotle, arthritis, biology, body, causation, chirality, Darvon, documentary, efficient cause, enantiomer, final cause, formal cause, Francis Bacon, free will, individuation, Johns Hopkins University, libertarian free will, material cause, matter, mind, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, penicillamine, philosophy, physics, Physics, Earth & Space, quantum mechanics, sculptor, sculpture, Sean Carroll, statue, trailer
Aristotle noted that when we think carefully about natural causes we see that there are four distinct ways that causes can lead to effects in nature. Source
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