https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-philosopher-atheist-darwinist/   Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher, who has died aged 82, was, with Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of Darwinism and one of the most virulent controversialists on the academic circuit. Dennett argued that everything has to be understood in terms of natural processes, and that terms such as “intelligence”, “free will”, “consciousness” “justice”, the “soul” or the “self” describe phenomena which can be explained in terms of physical processes and not the exercise of some disembodied ..read more

What are the pros and cons of this reproductive set up?  I ask because my mother once remarked that this world would be a better place without male and female.  She said this in response to my remark that male and female is a beautiful thing of nature.  As times progress onward, the differences between male and female seem to becoming more and more confused. There are certain societal and political biases that seem to put one or the other sex at a disadvantage. Men are often given harsher sentences for the same types of crimes because judges view men as naturally more menacing t ..read more

 The brain is nothing more than an electronic device. So, every electronic device with a lot of interconnected wires should be conscious too while switched on. We can use a bunch of steel wool and run electricity through it and we should have recreated a small artificial brain.  The question is: how do you ask questions to it ..read more

  What follows is what I believe to be a simple logical mathematical reasoning that explains why time cannot exist in the 'outside world', but that the experience of time is a property of a consciousness interacting with this 'timeless' outside world. The assumption is that if duration actually existed 'out there', you would have to go back infinitely to get to the beginning. Possibly involving multiverses and so on. You would have an infinite past. Because even if there was nothing in the universe, there would still be a duration. That is my assumption. When you do x "minus infinity", y ..read more

My students still reckon Lande’s 2 motivations for ‘unless’ = ‘if not’ (below) too abstract, formalistic! Thus I need a 3rd simpler, motivation with merely etymology. But I never studied linguistics! How do I 1. use these etymology quotations, to motivate ‘unless’ = ‘if not’? 2. teach why “less than” means 'if not'? We turn now to unless. The construction developed toward the end of the Middle English period, in the early fifteenth century. At this stage it is a comparative, lesse than, or in/on/of lesse than. Traugott E.C. (1987) “UNLESS and BUT conditionals: a historical perspective.” In ..read more

Are we better off having invented the printing press? I don't want to block the rabbit hole, so I'll leave it there for know and flesh thing's out as and when ..read more

Hello, I am introducing a work of philosophy in which we propose (and I realize, these might sound absurd claims at first): Susanne Langer and Immanuel Kant philosophies can be linked together, to give us a complete philosophical model for the Human Brain. By applying this model to Darwin’s evolution, we are able to logically prove the Brain has to based on the model we know as Turing machines; By considering how the Brain perceives our reality, and by applying the Turing machine model to empirical physical evidence, we are able to demonstrate the Brain is a solution to link together general ..read more

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68221243 "Three students have won a $700,000 prize after using AI to read a 2,000-year-old scroll burnt during the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79AD." This is a great story .A few years back there was talk as to whether these (or similar scrolls) would be legible and now there seems a lot of optimism because of new technology available .   ..read more

Let's say there was a way to make a duplicate of yourself. Assume it's a perfect copy that is identical to you in every way, except that the copy is legally your slave/servant. It's easy enough to go through the process knowing you would have someone who always does your bidding, but it might be easy to forget that your copy is also you, with the same experiences and memories. The other you had expected to get a servant, only to realize that you had become the servant.    A truly narcissistic personality would react very badly to this situation. To properly plan for the event you hav ..read more

Humanity has been puzzled by gravity for millennia. It is the strangest and the most significant of all the known forces in the universe. Gravity is still a mystery and the exact mechanism and nature are still unknown. I will be examining the mysteries of gravity, antimatter, black hole, and gravitational lensing today by reflecting on Nikola Tesla's quote, "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration".   Space, Energy, and Matter Everything in the cosmos is composed of no more than energy.  Energy is just a term to describ ..read more