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James Fodor — The Shaky Foundations of Science: An Overview of the Big Issues

Many people think about science in a fairly simplistic way: collect evidence, formulate a theory, test the theory. By this method, it is claimed, science can achieve objective, rational knowledge about the workings of reality. In this presentation I will question the validity of this understanding of science. I will consider some of the key controversies in philosophy of science, including the problem of induction, the theory-ladenness of observation, the nature of scientific explanation, theory choice, and scientific realism, giving an overview of some of the main questions and arguments from major thinkers like Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Hempel, and Feyerabend. I will argue that philosophy of science paints a much richer and messier picture of the relationship between science and truth than many people commonly imagine, and that a familiarity with the key issues in the philosophy of science is vital for a proper understanding of the power and limits of scientific thinking.

Slides to the presentation available here: http://www.slideshare.net/adam_ford/the-shaky-foundations-of…ames-fodor.

Video / Slides / Abstract: https://web.archive.org/web/20140806044711/http://2014.scifu…mes-fodor/

Playlist of talks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-7qI6NZpO3sQrI2S8nmhVKYcAFmm2UTh.

Program: https://web.archive.org/web/20160924002311/http://2014.scifuture.org/program/
Recorded at the Philosophy of Science conference in Melbourne 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20160924002311/http://2014.scifuture.org.

Can science crack the mystery of consciousness? | Bernardo Kastrup, Carlo Rovelli, and more

Bernardo Kastrup, Carlo Rovelli and Patricia Churchland lock horns over the New Science of Consciousness.

00:00 Intro.
01:20 Patricia Churchland | On scientific evidence.
02:50 Bernardo Kastrup | On material idealism.
04:47 Carlo Rovelli | There is no hard problem of consciousness.
07:00 Robert Lawrence Kuhn | Will we ever be able to provide data explaining consciousness?

Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/the-new-science-of-consciousness?utm_so…escription.

We are uncovering a new science of consciousness. A theory that is getting closer to solving the problem of the self once and for all. Or at least so claim leading neuroscientists. Some argue the reality we perceive is a controlled hallucination as a best guess to how the world really is. Others that quantum mechanics or multiple levels of brain organisation are responsible for consciousness. But critics maintain these don’t get to the heart of the problem: how the material stuff of the brain is responsible for the immaterial stuff of experience.

Should we see the ‘new science of consciousness’ as marketing hype? Might we alternatively need to give up our very notion of reality? Or could science be about to crack the ancient problem of the self once and for all?

#TheNewScienceOfConsciousness #IsQuantumTheKey #DataConsciousness.

Dr. Seemay Chou, Ph.D. — CEO, Arcadia Science — Tapping Biological Innovation In Nature For Humanity

Tapping Biological Innovation In Nature For Humanity — Dr. Seemay Chou Ph.D., CEO, Arcadia Science


Dr. Seemay Chou, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Board Member of Arcadia Science (https://www.arcadia.science/), a research and development company focusing on under researched areas in biology, with a specific focus on novel model organisms that haven’t been traditionally studied in the lab.

The goals of Arcadia Science are to unlock the knowledge and ingenuity contained within a wide range of diverse species, uncover how evolution has solved limitless problems, and through revealing this untapped biological innovation, generate new technologies and products.

Dr. Chou is also the co-founder of Trove Biolabs (https://www.trovebiolabs.com/), a startup focused on harnessing novel molecules found in tick saliva for skin therapies.

Dr. Chou joined Arcadia from UCSF where she was an Assistant Professor in Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Survey: China is slowly diminishing US dominance over science

China has more than doubled the percentage of ‘highly cited researchers’ over the last five years.

China has a steady increase in the number of “high-impact scientists” than the United States, which is still the leader but has seen a steady drop over the years.

Research fuels the race for knowledge.


Andrea Nicolini/iStock.

The numbers are showing a steady expansion over the last five years, according to a survey published last week by Clarivate Analytics, a U.K.-based analytical research group, which assesses the academic influence of scientists.

Dr Renée Deehan — VP, Science & AI, InsideTracker — Evidence-Based And Actionable Wellness Solutions

Evidence-Based And Actionable Health, Wellness And Longevity Solutions — Dr. Renee DeHaan, Ph.D. — VP, Science & AI, InsideTracker


Dr. Renée Deehan, Ph.D. is the VP of Science & Artificial Intelligence at InsideTracker (https://www.insidetracker.com/), and leads a science team that builds and mines the world’s largest data set of blood, DNA, fitness tracking and phenotypic data from healthy people, creating evidence-based solutions that are simple, clear, and actionable.

Dr. Deehan has spent her career working in the precision medicine and personalized nutrition domains, previously serving as the VP of Computational Biology & Translational Informatics at QuartzBio and as the VP of Biology and Bioinformatics at PatientsLikeMe, the world’s largest integrated community, health management, and real-world data platform.

At PatientsLikeMe, Dr. Deehan was responsible for data and knowledge engineering, AI/machine-learning, and translational biology functions that drove infrastructure and consumer & business product development. She was also the Principal Investigator for the DigitalMe Ignite program, which collected longitudinal blood and patient-generated health data from over 5,000 at-home site visits from over 2,000 participants and was able to generate over 2 Million data points from the DigitalMe program.

Dr. Deehan also designed and cross-functionally implemented the first generation of an “advanced research platform”, capable of integrating survey and omics data for biomarker analysis, including ensemble-based machine-learning pipelines. Additionally, they developed an outsourced pipeline to support their wet-lab omics needs (DNA/RNAseq, proteomics, immune sequencing/antibody repertoire analysis, metabolomics, methylomics).

Meta Trained an AI on 48M Science Papers. It Was Shut Down After 2 Days

Galactica was supposed to help “organize science.” Instead, it spewed misinformation.

In the first year of the pandemic, science happened at light speed. More than 100,000 papers were published on COVID in those first 12 months — an unprecedented human effort that produced an unprecedented deluge of new information.

It would have been impossible to read and comprehend every one of those studies. No human being could (and, perhaps, none would want to).