Underdetermination

The Principle of Underdetermination

I’m literally exhausted by the number of people who claim that the mind is the brain, based on the neuroscientific experiments, in which injecting electrical signals into the brain results in novel experiences. These claims arise due to the stark mind-body duality created by Descartes that was readily embraced by Christianity as the soul-matter duality. Literally everyone, since that time, believes...

Why AI is Deficient and Yet It Seems Very Powerful

In the last post, I discussed the implementation of AI and its use for controlling markets, governments, and people. In this post, I will do the opposite: Talk about why AI is deficient. To reconcile these two seemingly contradictory positions, we will then discuss how AI becomes powerful if society becomes homogeneous. The fact is that society has been progressively homogenizing...

What is Fixed and What is Free?

If the universe was not determined in some sense, then we could not make any scientific predictions. If, however, we did not have free will to choose among alternatives, there could be no moral judgments. This contentious issue confuses many of us, as we tend to either capitulate to free will and lose scientific predictions (which is often what religions do)...

What is Free Will, Really?

The previous post examined the materialist critique of free will and showed why the reduction of free will to rationality (and then to the mechanization of rationality) is flawed because rationality itself involves choices of axioms that themselves cannot be rationalized―i.e. reduced to more fundamental axioms. The only way to solve the problem of free will is to postulate that it...