No More Secrets

Posted on February 2, 2013 by James Cross

The position of materialistic science is that mind is in the brain. The simplest form of this belief is that mind and consciousness are a trick or illusion of the brain and that, in fact, we are much like zombies. We are just sensory apparatus and neurons firing. A slightly more complicated view is the mind has a physical basis in the brain but manifests emergent properties that cannot be explained by the component parts. Mind is still dependent upon brain and does not exist outside it. Both approaches lead directly to the idea that we could create an artificial mind if we could assemble parts that could simulate the component parts of the brain.

I think, however, the relationship between mind and brain is more complicated. It may turn out that mind, while closely related to the brain, might operate on an informational network that spans individual brains and perhaps even different forms of life.

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Posted in Consciousness, Electromagnetism, Origin of Life | 5 Comments

Patterns

Posted on January 24, 2013 by James Cross
universe

The Network of the Universe

In the movie Signs, a former Episcopal priest played by Mel Gibson discovers crop circles in the fields on his farm. The crop circles are the first signs of an impending alien invasion. As the movie plays out, however, the real signs of the movie are events and misfortunes which seem to have no meaning at the time they occur. A driver falls asleep at exactly the right moment to run off the road and strike Mel Gibson’s wife. The wife’s last words as she dies pinned between the vehicle and a tree. The daughter’s obsession with filling glasses with water and leaving them around the house. The brother’s failed baseball career and a bat hung on the wall to celebrate a long home run. The son’s asthma which causes him to unable to breath as the alien tries to poison him with gas.

Although Signs is only a good (not great) movie, it is a movie I enjoy watching and re watching. The movie speaks to the great mystery of patterns in our lives and in the world – how things unfold and seemed to reveal their meaning over time.

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Posted in Consciousness, Origin of Life, Time | 5 Comments

Predictions Are Very Hard

Posted on January 19, 2013 by James Cross

Predictions are very hard, especially about the future – Niels Bohr but often attributed to Yogi Berra

The latest paper to predict the inevitable collapse of civilization comes from Paul Ehrlich: “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?”

Ehrlich has a history of making dire predictions and fortunately he has been mostly wrong about almost all of them. In The Population Bomb, he predicted massive famines in the 1970’s. Ehrlich’s prediction then were remarkably like those of Thomas Malthus over a hundred years earlier. The inevitable growth of population would outstrip food production and eventually epidemic, famine, or war would intervene to correct the imbalance. Given the spectacular failure of his predictions, we might expect Ehrlich to be more cautious. Yet his latest predictions are mostly along the same lines as his previous predictions with the added nuance of climate change thrown into the mix.

Should we take these predictions at all seriously?

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Posted in Climate change, End Times, Futurism | 12 Comments