He is suffering from fundamentalist physicalism, a common thing among US atheists. They do away with God and then throw out all other things going vaguely in that direction, when there is zero need to. Hence these people fall for exactly the thing they think they are opposing: The use physical reality as their only true god and deny that anything besides it can exist. They claim Science tells us so, when it does no such thing.

As an atheist and a dualist, I have zero problems with the concept of a "soul" or similar non-physical part of any sentient being. I just find the idea of a "God" to be a rather infantile human construct not supported by any observable fact. And the reasons for assuming the existence of such a thing as a "soul" are not "pre-scientific" at all. They are all still valid, and some are stronger than ever: Consciousness (and with it the personal experience of existence) is completely unexplained. Intelligence is completely unexplained, despite long-term intensive research into it in several fields. Yet both clearly exist and both are observable only together. These are strong scientific facts that point out to anybody able to listen that the current models of reality are rather incomplete.

Of course, fundamentalist physicalist fall for a very religious thing here: They assume their base conviction is fundamental truth (without any scientific basis for that assumption) and can then derive from that a number of things that support their base conviction. That approach is called "delusion", not "Science".

On the scientific side, Intelligence is an "interface observation", and so is everything known about consciousness. It does not tell us what creates this interface behavior and what is in the box or whether this is actually happening in the box at all. Only if you mistakenly assume Science tells us that everything is Physics can you assume intelligence and consciousness are created by matter. But if you start with an unproven assumption taken as absolute truth, you have already failed and are not a scientist. If you do that then you are no better that some random preacher.

And there you fail. Is consciousness also a primitive, superstitious concept? Because Physics gives us absolutely nothing on it.

You are just a fundamentalist physicalist, which is a quasi-religion. As all religious fundamentalists, you cannot actually grasp available evidence wherever it does collide with your fundamentalist beliefs. And hence your inane "explanations" (which really explain nothing) result.

There is also consciousness whis is apparently intricately linked with intelligence. From Physics, there is rather strong indication that consciousness is not part of the physical universe. There is just no mechanism for it. At all. With intelligence, it gets more murky, but half a century of failed AI research seems to indicate that matter and energy as known are actually not suitable to implement intelligence. The only known computing mechanisms that could approach some of the things that (smart) human intelligence can do do not scale to what humans can do in this universe.

We do not even know whether it is doing that. Just that most people are capable of doing it to some degree. That is different.

That is not an explanation. No engineer or real scientist would ever accept that non-explanation as one. This just says "we see activity in these areas related to it", without any understanding of the nature of that activity. Imagine people would try to find out how a computer works by looking at heat distribution during different activities. Sure, you could find where the graphics card was and and where the storage, but that is about it. It would be completely without any understanding of what is actually going on. And that is where these neuro-people are currently at.

It is accurate. It also describes what is going on in a lot of the less honest part of the AI community. These people usually know they have absolutely nothing approaching "understanding", but keep using animist language to make their highly result-less research easier to swallow for those that decide funding.

As to the relevant "research" from neuro-"sciences", the people that make these inane and utterly baseless grand claims should be stripped of their PhDs (if they even have them) and barred from ever doing research again. Usually I cannot even tell whether they are just completely delusional or are lying through their teeth.

Yes, for varying degrees of difficulties to get stuff published. As a long-term reviewer, the sheer amount of incompetent nonsense that many people are trying to publish is staggering. That you "publish in the field" means exactly nothing other than you are pandering to the mainstream delusions in your field, because otherwise whatever you publish has to be really, really good. From your claims, it is not. With high probability, you are working on some detail. You certainly do not see the bigger picture and you have no clue how computing machinery (biological or otherwise) works and to what rather fundamental limitations it is subject to.

Right on the mark. I have been following AI research closely for about 25 years now, an there is nothing that could explain intelligence. Not even a theoretical model that could work withing the constraints of this physical universe.

At the same time, we can observe intelligence. An here is a little thing conveniently glossed over by some AI researchers and almost all neuro-"scientists": We can only observe Intelligence in connection with consciousness. Any actual researcher would conclude that the two are at the very least related, and may actually be aspects of the same thing. Of course, neuro-"sciences" says that consciousness is an illusion (if so, who has that illusion?), because they cannot explain it. At all. That is a rather pathetic cop-out.

"Cargo cult" phase indeed. Describing something from the outside does not explain its nature on the inside. A box with a person in there can talk just as intelligently as one with a phone in it, yet is fundamentally different.

Indeed. But we have great opportunities for research funding, if the "researchers" just keep lying about the great insights they are going to have about human nature. The only insight to be had to far is that some researchers are greedy, lying scum. The actual fact is that we still have zero clue how intelligence works or how it is generated. No clue at all. Not even a theoretical model that could work in this physical universe. We can describe what it can do, but that is vastly different from understanding how it works.

The only thing known (automated deduction) does not scale to anything a smart human can do, even if you throw all available matter and energy at it.

The poster is right on the mark. Neurosciences keeps lying to people about their great discoveries to reap funding. In actual fact, they have no clue how anything intelligent the brain can do works. They have so little clue at this time, that they can still not even be sure it is the brain that does these things. Physics and Mathematics and AI research seem to indicate that the brain cannot actually be intelligent, far too small and slow.

Yes, it matters very much. If you can teach it, it can learn anything. If you have to program it, then it can only learn things that can be coded and that is a rather small set.

Given that especially IT jobs get an incredible number of applications from utterly non-qualified people (see http://blog.codinghorror.com/t...), these statistics would not tell us much. Also remember that those with the worst qualifications write the most job applications, skewing the numbers further.

These numbers tell us that both Whites and Blacks have a serious education and qualification problem.

It rather about the most stupid thing you can do, because it may obscure problems, making them _harder_ to see and solve. That is if there actually is a problem. Fixing the statistic may well cause problems where there were none before.

This is an instance of the classical cause-end-effect reversal mistake that stupid people are so likely to do. It requires intelligence low enough to not understand the difference between an implication and an equivalence. Correlation is not causation, and it is _never_ causation if it is correlation with a statistic, because a statistic is _always_ derived and the correlation is a pure result of that. Fixing the statistic fixes nothing.

Points in case:

- Obviously supercooled.
- We do not get to see how much it dips with passenger. Hence it very likely only carries its own weight, which may be almost nothing.

This thing is no hover-board, it just looks like one. Levitating superconductors are nothing new. The only thing cool or noteworthy is the clever misdirection by Lexus.