Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are Read More ›
Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, “If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton Read More ›
In the first study of its kind, Agents Under Fire defends a robust notion of agency and intentionality against eliminative and naturalistic alternatives, showing the interconnections between the philosophy of mind, theology, and Intelligent Design. Menuge argues that Behe’s irreducible complexity is a challenge to reductionism not only in biology, but also in psychology, and shows the inability of the Darwinian psychology Read More ›
In the closing session of the 1998 Telecosm conference, hosted annually by Gilder Publishing and Forbes at Lake Tahoe, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil engaged a number of critics. He advocated “Strong Artificial Intelligence” (AI), the claim that a computational process sufficiently capable of altering or organizing itself can produce “consciousness.” The session had an unexpectedly profound impact, not least Read More ›
In this technical philosophical treatise, Discovery Institute Fellow Robert C. Koons investigates an innovative philosophy of mind. Koons takes on two powerful dogmas in this wide-ranging philosophical work: anti-realism and materialism. In doing so, Koons develops an elegant metaphysical system that accounts for such phenomena as information; mental representation; our knowledge of logic, mathematics and science; the structure of spacetime; Read More ›
For two hundred years materialist philosophers have argued that man is some sort of machine. The claim began with French materialists of the Enlightenment such as Pierre Cabanis, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d’Holbach (La Mettrie even wrote a book titled Man the Machine). Likewise contemporary materialists like Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, and Patricia Churchland claim that the motions and Read More ›
I’ve been asked to respond to criticisms of my paper “Converting Matter into Mind” (PSCS, Dec 90). My reaction to these criticisms is this: “Yes, I could have been more careful in some details and choice of terminology, but the substance of my position is unaffected.” The critics were guilty of two faults. First was a failure to read my Read More ›
Introduction In the Foundations of Cognitive Science Herbert Simon and Craig Kaplan offer the following definition: Cognitive science is the study of intelligence and intelligent systems, with particular reference to intelligent behavior as computation. Since this definition hinges on the dual notions of intelligence and computation, it remains scientifically unobjectionable so long as one declines to prejudge the relation between Read More ›