Do you support unions, a minimum wage, dislike business and hate child labor and then tell all of your friends on your iPhone?

People rationalize moral standards when it comes to their own lives, say economists writing in Science. It's easy to lament child labor and exploitation of the work force but if you are not willing to pay $2,000 for a phone, you are part of the problem and Tweeting about social issues on that phone helps precisely no one but corporate shareholders.

Intelligent Design is often presented as a view that runs counter to evolutionary theory.  Whether it be the concept of natural selection or ideas about speciation, Intelligent Design (ID) purports to reconcile the observed environment from the perspective of an intelligent ordering system.

Concepts like "irreducible complexity" to examples of finding a watch or a tornado spontaneously assembling a 747 in a junkyard.  All these images are invoked by Intelligent Design as an argument against evolution.

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Readers of this blog know very well by now that, despite (or is it because of?) being both a scientist and a philosopher, I have often defended the idea that science and philosophy are distinct disciplines, and I am critical in particular of those who I think display a scientistic (i.e., intellectually imperialistic) attitude in wanting to expand the scope of science to pretty much everything that is worth knowing, usually at the expense of humanistic disciplines, philosophy in particular.

The Groningen Protocol, introduced in Holland in 2005, was devised to create a standard for doctors who had families that wanted to end the suffering of sick newborns for humanitarian reasons. It outlined parameters to help identify situations in which euthanasia is warranted and wouldn't land anyone in jail. 

In America, science is as polarized as politics. Corporate scientists, like at pharmaceutical companies, are criticized for working at unethical companies while academic scientists are criticized for 'chasing funding' rather than helping people.

Like many stereotypes, those images started with a kernel of truth.  So if you ask most people if the pharmaceutical industry can self-police its advertising policies, they will reply it is not possible, an outside force must do it.  But then if you ask people who are skeptical of medicine, they will say the FDA is also controlled by pharmaceutical companies. 
Most countries have an established system for self-regulation of pharmaceuticals advertising.

As a researcher in the fields of exact science and philosophy, I am obsessed with “truth”, which is a label of approval we assign to concepts that we judge to be consistent in a certain sense (Example 1 below). How we do that is thus important for the progress of these disciplines.

In watching a recent discussion about "free will", I was surprised as to how quickly the discussion got confused by conflating "free choice" with "free will".
[Day 2, Afternoon, First Session:  Free Will/Consciousness]

In this article, I will attempt to better define some of these concepts to illustrate why "free will" is an illusion.

To begin, let's define "choice" as an event that occurs in which a decision point is reached.  Regardless of how many apparent choices one has, they always reduce to one decision.  In addition, we may recognize that certain choices may eliminate other choices from further consideration or selection.

Those who know the meaning of ‘third culture’, know that since the days when it was lamented that the members of the intellectual elite would not even know the second law of thermodynamics, the land grab of science has been astounding and is indeed an ongoing coming to power by science. 

Philosopher Aaron Sloman claims that symbol grounding is impossible. I say it is possible, indeed necessary, for strong AI. Yet my own approach may be compatible with Sloman's.

Sloman equates "symbol grounding" with concept empiricism, thus rendering it impossible. However, I don't see the need to equate all symbol grounding to concept empiricism. And what Sloman calls "symbol tethering" may be what I call "symbol grounding," or at least a type of symbol grounding.

Firstly, as Sloman says about concept empiricism [1]:

Kant refuted this in 1781, roughly by arguing that experience without prior concepts (e.g. of space, time, ordering, causation) is impossible.

If 41 percent of the human genome is covered by longer DNA patents that often cover whole genes, and so many genes share similar sequences within their genetic structure that if all of the "short sequence" patents were allowed in aggregate they could account for 100 percent of the genome, then you don't own your genes.