Lifeboat Foundation

Few Christians realize the extent to which the evolutionary world view conflicts with the Biblical world view. While many attempt to keep a foot in each camp, acknowledging Christ as Savior yet holding evolution to be a fact of history, Christianity and evolution cannot both be true. Evolution is, at its very essence, an atheistic explanation of the world around us. Not all adherents of evolution are atheists, but certainly the leading proponents of evolution recognize that the concept leaves no room for the workings of God in nature.

Consider the following oft-repeated quote from Sir Julian Huxley, who, until his recent death, was perhaps the world’s leading spokesperson for evolution and who, from his position as head of UNESCO at the United Nations, did much to unite the world under an evolutionary, humanistic banner.

Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed; since natural selection could account for any known form of life, there was no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution … we can dismiss entirely all ideas of a supernatural overriding mind being responsible for the evolutionary process.[1].

Evolution might have played a trick on women’s immune systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field of computer programming that is already changing the way we interact online and in real life, but the term ‘intelligence’ has been poorly defined. Rather than focusing on smarts, researchers should be looking at the implications and viability of artificial consciousness as that’s the real driver behind intelligent decisions.

Consciousness rather than intelligence should be the true measure of AI. At the moment, despite all our efforts, there’s none.

Significant advances have been made in the field of AI over the past decade, in particular with machine learning, but artificial intelligence itself remains elusive. Instead, what we have is artificial serfs—computers with the ability to trawl through billions of interactions and arrive at conclusions, exposing trends and providing recommendations, but they’re blind to any real intelligence. What’s needed is artificial awareness.

Elon Musk has called AI the “biggest existential threat” facing humanity and likened it to “summoning a demon,”^[1] while Stephen Hawking thought it would be the “worst event” in the history of civilization and could “end with humans being replaced.”^[2] Although this sounds alarmist, like something from a science fiction movie, both concerns are founded on a well-established scientific premise found in biology—the principle of competitive exclusion.^[3]

Continue reading “Is artificial consciousness the solution to AI?” »

The assembly of the gorilla genome was announced today, March 7, by a multi-national group of researchers. The gorilla is the last genus of the living great apes to have its genome decoded. While confirming that our closest relative is the chimpanzee, the team showed that much of the human genome more closely resembles the gorilla than it does the chimpanzee genome.

This is the first time scientists have been able to compare the genomes of all four living great apes: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. This study provides a new perspective on human origins and is an important resource for research into human evolution and biology, as well as for gorilla biology and conservation.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom lead the study, with contributions from several other institutions, including the University of Washington.

Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.

Centromeres sit in the middle of chromosomes, the pinched-in “waist” in the image of a chromosome from a biology textbook. The centromere anchors the fibers that pull chromosomes apart when cells divide, which means they are really important for understanding what happens when cell division goes wrong, leading to cancer or genetic defects.

But the DNA of centromeres contains lots of repeating sequences, and scientists have been unable to properly map this region.

Mechanics study boosts our understanding tumour evolution.

Russia’s beleaguered space science program is hoping for a rare triumph this month. Spektr-RG, an x-ray satellite to be launched on 21 June from Kazakhstan, aims to map all of the estimated 100,000 galaxy clusters that can be seen across the universe. Containing as many as 1000 galaxies and the mass of 1 million billion suns, the clusters are the largest structures bound by gravity in the universe. Surveying them should shed light on the evolution of the universe and the nature of the dark energy that is accelerating its expansion.

Spektr-RG x-ray mission will be nation’s only space observatory.

Sea squirts use stem cells to regenerate their bodies from nothing but fragments of blood vessel, a finding that could help uncover the evolution of regeneration.

Objective reality is merely a pattern that a mind constructs because it provides a useful simplified explanatory scaffolding of the long series of subjectively perceived moments stored in its memory. Think about it when the next time you come across these overloaded terms ‘objective reality’ and ‘objectivity’ – to be precise, they mean ‘intersubjectivity’ instead: Termites would never comprehend chess, for example, this human abstraction lies beyond their species-specific intersubjective mind-network. Apart from inter-species levels of abstractions we should consider psychological, cultural and linguistic differences between individuals of the same species that makes objectivity simply non-existent. We can still use ‘objective reality’, ‘objectivity’ or ‘objectively’ colloquially but we should bear in mind that in a deeper sense these terms are no more than colorful misnomers. https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/what-we-call-objectiv…ally-exist #ObjectivityMyth

We can’t help but anthropomorphize the notion of objective reality. As I make my case in the new 2019 book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution , objective reality does not exist, what exists instead is subjectivity, intersubjectivity (or “consensus” reality) and supersubjectivity (overmind, The Omega Hypermind in the book). This extraordinary claim apparently demands an explanation, so let’s get to it.