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emergence

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Happy businessman, walking and city to work for travel on street or pedestrian crossing outdoors. Black man on cross road, walk or traveling to business with suit and smile on asphalt in urban town
Image Credit: Sivu G/peopleimages.com - Adobe Stock

Living in 3-D: Not a Big Deal? New Video Explains Why It’s a VERY Big Deal

Living in three dimensions is crucial not only for athletes, who excel at exploiting the body’s abilities, but for any one of us walking down the street. Read More ›
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Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

Emergence and Irreducible Complexity: A Unified Theory

We are all familiar with the duality — structure and function — from both technology and biology. Read More ›
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woman vaccinated and with a band-aid on her arm, giving a sign that all is well.
Image Credit: Manolo Ramos - Adobe Stock

Materialism’s Band-Aid, “Emergence” Is Bad Science

The idea is that some properties of systems emerge only after a certain level of complexity is reached. Read More ›
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Photo: A planarian, by Pavel Kirillov from St.Petersburg, Russia, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

Biologist Michael Levin: A Farewell to Physicalism

Levin proposes a “radical Platonist view in which some of the causal input into mind and life originates outside the physical world.” Read More ›
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Photo credit: Johannes Plenio on Unsplash.

Will Evolution’s New Synthesis Be Hard or Soft Magic? 

Let's try holding some new scientific theories to the standards of the fantasy genre. Read More ›
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Photo credit: Braxton Apana via Unsplash.

Understanding the Limits of Scientism

The great impasse in empirical science was reached early in the 20th century when quantum mechanics was first being developed.  Read More ›
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embryonic development
Photo: Chicken embryo, by Ben Skála (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Life Without Purpose — The Fundamental Flaw

The fundamental flaw in the conventional approach to understanding life is that we think we can fully understand the whole by looking at the individual parts. Read More ›
aardvark
Photo: An aardvark, by Louise Joubert, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

Emergence by Design

The originators of the concept were two 19th-century British philosopher-scientists, John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes. Read More ›
Spathiphyllum cochlearispathum
Photo: Spathiphyllum cochlearispathum, a peace lily, by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Some Science Contexts, “Emergence” Really Means “We Don’t Know How”

The word often permits the improbable to be considered probable for the purposes of sounding like science without providing any. Read More ›
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Photo credit: Greenvalley Pictures, via Unsplash.

No Pony in the Manure, No Consciousness in the Code

These AI champions are appealing to the Software of the Gaps, a secular cousin of the God of the Gaps. Read More ›

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