George Carlin on Religion

“Futurisms”: Anti-Transhumanist Intellectuals
Futurisms, the anti-transhumanist blog over at The New Atlantis, has been posting regularly with decent content. They posted Roger Holzberg’s “Saying no to aging will require a bold gesture from each of us” image under a post of the title “transhumanist resentment watch”, seemingly expressing confusion over who Roger was flipping off, when it is clearly the aging process that he is directing his anger towards. Here’s a quote: Beyond the strangeness of that sel

Henry Markram of EPFL’s Blue Brain Project: IBM’s Cat Brain Claim is a “HOAX”
Over at Next Big Future, BoingBoing, and many other venues, Henry Markram of the EPFL’s Blue Brain Project has a comment up on the recent IBM cat brain simulation announcement. IBM’s claim is a HOAX. This is a mega public relations stunt - a clear case of scientific deception of the public. These simulations do not even come close to the complexity of an ant, let alone that of a cat. IBM allows Mohda to mislead the public into believing that they have simulated a brain with the complexity of a cat - sheer nonsense.

Joe Forgas: “When Sad is Better than Happy: Negative Affect Can Improve the Quality and Effectiven
When popular science writers actually reference scientific literature, good things can happen, like this article by Mark Peters: “A Happy Writer Is a Lousy Writer?” Transhumanists tremendously shocked and dissatisfied with the current state of the world relative to other possibilities can tap into this to improve their writing. Twinkly-eyed techno-utopian transhumanists can continue to produce poor writing.

Greg Fish: Against Causal Functionalism
Greg Fish, science writer with a popular blog who contributes to places like Business Week and Discover.com, has lately been advancing a Searleian criticism of causal functionalism. For instance, here and here. Here is an excerpt from the latter: A Computer Brain is Still Just Code In the future, if we model an entire brain in real time on the level of every neuron, every signal, and every burst of the neurotransmitter, we’ll just end up with a very complex