No. 6 Story of 2023: On Free Will, ChatGPT4 Blows Away Atheist Sam Harris

atheists, Being as Communion, Belief, brain, ChatGPT4, consciousness, Culture & Ethics, decision-making, determinism, free choice, free will, illusion, irony, Judgment, mind, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Persuasion, reality, Reasoning, Sam Harris, The Design Inference, Winston Ewert, YouTube videos
Yes, the irony here is palpable, and I’ve long been critical of Harris’s view of free will as an illusion. Source
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Can Animal Minds Explain Human Minds?

Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, Christof Koch, consciousness, crabs, dualists, Francis Crick, hard problem of consciousness, John Horgan, Kristin Andrews, Life Sciences, materialism, mind, nervous system, neurological capacity, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, panpsychism, philosophers, philosophy, physiology, The Animal Mind, theists, York University
Kristin Andrews thinks consciousness researchers should discard the assumptions of “white, male and WEIRD” philosophy profs and study more crabs. Source
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Why Free Will Denial Is Self-Refuting

action potentials, Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger, atheists, brain states, cellular metabolism, chance, Chemistry, Culture & Ethics, determinism, Evidence, fluid dynamics, free will, government, Jerry Coyne, John Clauser, John Stewart Bell, Justice, logic, Love, marriage, meat robot, molecules, morality, neurochemistry, neuroscience, physics, Physics, Earth & Space, relationships, spilled ink, truth
The only "scientific" basis for the denial of free will is determinism, the theory that every change in nature is determined prior to its occurrence. Source
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Consciousness May Occur Near Time of Birth

abortion, baby, birth, Children, Christof Koch, consciousness, dreaming, fetuses, hard problem of consciousness, Icahn School of Medicine, infant experience, Integrated information theory, Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, newborn, philosophy, pregnancy, prenatal consciousness, Robert Wright, synaptic connections, Thomas Nagel, Trinity College Dublin, unborn humans
Researchers generally stress that the unborn child’s brain is in a rapid, ongoing, and little understood state of development. Source
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Right Brain Vs. Left Brain? It’s Murky

brain, brain correlates, Creativity, Healthline, Iain McGilchrist, language, learning styles, left brain, left-handedness, lobes, Medicine, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Neuroscience News, personality, preferences, right brain, Robert H. Shmerling, Scott Barry Kaufman, The Matter with Things, vertebrates, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Vertebrates generally have brains divided into two lobes, an arrangement that may go back half a billion years. Source
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Clues About Consciousness from Dementia Research

Andrew Peterson, brain, Cait Kearney, Canada, consciousness, deeply forgetful, dementia, Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People, euthanasia, lucidity, Medicine, memory, neurobiology, neurodegenerative diseases, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, paradoxical lucidity, Parnia Lab, Penn Memory Center, Stephen Post, Stony Brook University
The phenomenon is called "paradoxical lucidity" because it is unexpected and we know very little about its causes. Source
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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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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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Is Life After Death Incompatible with Physics?

Adam Frank, Bernardo Kastrup, Big Think, Bruce Greyson, Chronicle of Higher Education, Closer to Truth, consciousness, David Chalmers, death, hard problem of consciousness, life after death, moral choice, near-death experiences, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Neuroscience News, npr, physics, Physics, Earth & Space, reason, science, Scientific American, Sean M. Carroll, Standard Model
In 2011, Sean Carroll wrote an essay on why — from a science perspective — our minds must be extinguished at death Source
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