Robert J. Marks II

Director, Senior Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence
Robert J. Marks Ph.D. is Senior Fellow and Director of the Bradley Center and is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. Marks is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). He was the former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and is the current Editor-in-Chief of BIO-Complexity. Marks is author of the books Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will Never Do and The Case For Killer Robots. He is co-author of the books For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley, Neural Smithing: Supervised Learning in Feedforward Artificial Neural Networks and Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. For more information, see Dr. Marks’s expanded bio.

Archives

Micro Softy 27: Diamond in the Rough  

Why did the mathematician want all the diamond rings — hundreds of fake ones, plus a real one — divided into two bags?
Robert J. Marks
May 19, 2025
The solution to Micro Softy 26 lies in recognizing that there are different ways of measuring distance.

Settled Science Is a Contradiction in Terms

The consensus of science has often turned out to be incorrect and we often get closer to truth when it is challenged
Robert J. Marks
May 19, 2025
Limiting debate and censoring minority scientific viewpoints can keep “settled science” spinning wheels, stuck in the mud, on the open road to science progress.

AI Ascends — But Not Above Its Teachers

LLMs are tools, able to augment human accomplishment in extraordinary ways. But to call them intelligent in the same way we describe human minds is a mistake
Robert J. Marks
May 18, 2025
The uniquely human capacity to transform knowledge into something new lives above the shoulders of giants where the creative mind takes flight.

Why Our Minds Are More Than “Meat Computers”

Pat Flynn, Robert J. Marks and Eric Holloway
May 15, 2025
Some scientists and philosophers hold the view that our brains are basically brains made of meat. Today, Dr. Eric Holloway and Dr. Robert J. Marks explain what’s wrong with this idea in the concluding segment of their conversation with guest host Patrick Flynn. For starters, the computational theory of mind may be incompatible with materialism or physicalism, as formal, abstract thought appears to transcend the physical realm. Then there’s the argument that the human mind cannot be reduced to a computational system as suggested by mathematical ideas such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Computationalism also fails to adequately account for human creativity and the generation of genuinely novel ideas, which appear to be beyond the capabilities of any computer …

Monday Micro Softy 26: Arguing with Pythagoras

Will the diagonal of a triangle with sides of 3 and 4 feet be 5 feet or, as a visiting mathematician suggests, 7 feet?
Robert J. Marks
May 12, 2025
The answer to last week’s puzzle lies in remembering what happens when you put a rod on a diagonal inside a square box.

AI Language Models: Real Intelligence Or Creative Thievery?

Pat Flynn, Robert J. Marks and Eric Holloway
May 8, 2025
Are AI language models like ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity actually intelligent? Or are they getting away with a creative kind of thievery? Welcome to the Mind Matters News podcast, your source for discussions on all things philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. Today, guest host Patrick Flynn continues his conversation with Dr. Eric Holloway and Dr. Robert J. Marks. The trio talk about AI, plagiarism, and the illusion of intelligence, and, specifically, why AI-generated language is not truly creative and depends on a kind of artistic thievery to get the job done. Dr. Holloway and Marks explain how these models are essentially advanced language prediction engines, not thinking entities. The discussion covers Searle’s Chinese room experiment, the problem of “model …

Monday Micro Softy 25:  The Fishing Rod Blues

The Memphis bus driver was sympathetic but he couldn't let Johnny ride with his overlong fishing pole. Johnny solved the problem—but how?
Robert J. Marks
May 5, 2025
About last week's Micro Softy: You CAN have a tie in 3D Tic Tac Toe. We illustrate it. And we show what the 4D game is like.

Can Evolutionary Processes Take Credit for Human Creativity?

Pat Flynn, Eric Holloway and Robert J. Marks
May 1, 2025
On today’s episode, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. Eric Holloway and Professor Robert J. Marks to the podcast to discuss the information cost of creativity. Today’s conversation is based on a chapter in the book Minding the Brain authored by Dr. Holloway and Marks. Essentially, they are addressing the following question: Can the marvels of human creativity, like novels, speeches, and ideas, really be explained by random processes and brain chemistry alone? As Holloway and Marks explain, even allowing for the computational capacity of the entire universe (and a hypothetical multiverse!), the probability of randomly generating a short, meaningful phrase is astronomically low. This suggests that human creativity cannot be fully explained by natural, random processes, and …

Micro Softy Monday 24: Have You Ever Tried 3D Tic Tac Toe?

To liven up a predictable game, try doing it in three — or even four — dimensions! You won't be bored
Robert J. Marks
April 28, 2025
To solve the Barnum's Circus ticket receipts puzzle, recall that X, Y and Z must all be whole numbers. Algebra then enables us to work out the solution.

Is There a Mind Behind the Math Behind the Material World?

Douglas Axe, Brian Krouse and Robert J. Marks
April 24, 2025
What does it mean for something to exist? Today, we’re joined by Doug Axe to talk about idealism and what it means for understanding the world around us. Idealism is the belief that reality exists exclusively of minds and their ideas, rather than a physical, material world. This contrasts with physicalism/materialism which views the physical world as the only true reality. Dr. Axe explains how idealism resolves several problems with physicalism and dualism, such as how physical processes can represent abstract concepts like numbers, and how the immaterial mind can interact with the physical brain. In an idealist view, the physical world is not an independent reality, but rather a mathematical structure upheld by the designer of the universe that provides a coherent environment …

Monday Micro Softy 23: Barnum’s Circus Receipts

Circus master Barnum's ticket seller had not kept proper track of the tickets sold. Can the limited information — and some algebra — help Barnum figure it out?
Robert J. Marks
April 21, 2025
The solution to Micro Softy 22, given here, depends on the assumptions we make about Timmy's surgeon.

The Unique Properties of the Human Mind

Wesley J. Smith, Brian Krouse and Robert J. Marks
April 17, 2025
Today’s episode is a special rebroadcast of an episode of Humanize, a Discovery Institute podcast that discusses the issues that impact human personhood and to defend the unique and intrinsic moral worth of human life. Here, Humanize host Wesley J. Smith speaks to three contributors of the recent volume Minding the Brain to explore from both philosophical and scientific viewpoints why the mind and brain are distinct things. You’ll hear from software engineer Brian R. Krouse, philosopher and author Angus J. Menuge, and Mind Matters News host Robert J. Marks. The trio discuss evidence that suggests the mind has properties not reducible to physical brain activity alone, such as intentionality, abstract reasoning, and free will. They discuss different non-materialist models …

The Ship of Theseus and the Philosophy of Identity

Walter Meyers III and Robert J. Marks
April 10, 2025
Host Robert J. Marks welcomes back Walter Myers to discuss the philosophical concept of the Ship of Theseus, a paradox about whether an object remains the same after all of its original components have been gradually replaced. Myers explains the history and origins of the paradox and explores how it relates to questions of personal identity, the mind-body problem, and the relationship between the soul and the physical body. The conversation also touches on topics like transhumanism, the nature of consciousness, and the significance of the original creator or ‘author’ in assessing the identity of an object or work of art. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation.  Additional Resources Listen to part 1 of this conversation: Piloting the Cloud: A Technical Tour with …

Monday Micro Softy 21: Finding More of the Deadly Fentanyl Pills

The solution to last week's deadly pills puzzle can be found, as we'll see, by numbering the bottles. But this week we make the challenge tougher…
Robert J. Marks
April 7, 2025
In this week’s challenge, you don’t know how many pill bottles, if any, have been laced with fentanyl. Can you still discover the truth with a single weighing?

Piloting the Cloud: A Technical Tour with Walter Myers III

Robert J. Marks and Walter Meyers III
April 3, 2025
Like many, you may be storing important files and photos in the cloud. But just where is this magical cloud? How is it powered? Is it safe? To answer these questions and more, host Robert J. Marks is joined by Walter Myers III, a principal engineering manager for Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute. Their conversation provides an overview of cloud computing infrastructure, including an explanation of where the cloud is physically located, the different service models (infrastructure, platform, and software as a service), and the technical details of how data is stored and protected in the cloud. The cloud actually refers to globally distributed data centers that provide computing resources and storage over the internet, rather than on local devices. …

Transforming Industries with AI: Insights from Entrepreneur David Copps

Robert J. Marks
March 20, 2025
On this episode, host Robert J. Marks concludes a three-part conversation with entrepreneur, technologist, and thought leader David Copps. Copps has over two decades of experience pioneering advancements in artificial intelligence and other technologies. In this final segment, Copps discusses how his companies have harnessed emerging AI technologies. He discusses Brainspace, a company Copps founded that created one of the world’s first semantic search engines using AI and latent semantic analysis to connect concepts and ideas across large document sets. Under Copps’s guidance, the company became a leader in the e-discovery industry. Copps also talks about his current company, Worlds, which is building an AI platform to connect directly to cameras and sensors in physical …