The view that the mind is simply what the brain does is not derived from evidence so much as from a prior commitment to materialism. The more we explore, the more we are likely to see that clearly.

This seeming paradox of highly intelligent people marrying people who are not as intelligent is but one of many examples of regression toward the mean that we encounter all the time. Whenever we overlook such confounding factors, we are tempted to invent fanciful explanations when none are needed.

Recently science and science fiction writer Matt Williams has been writing a series at Universe Today on why the extraterrestrial intelligences never show up (the Fermi Paradox or Great Filter). One hypothesis suggests that we haven’t heard from alien civilizations because they’ve been wiped out by their own killer robots.

Solipsism is the belief that you are the only human being who has ever existed; all others are the inventions of your imagination. At Scientific American, columnist John Horgan describes solipsism as a central dilemma of human life.

Whatever the difficulty of creating life in the lab, making individual prototypes is not nearly as problematic as making “the machine that makes the machine,” which all reproducing living cells can do. That is, the ability of an organism to reproduce is at least an order of magnitude harder that the ability of an organism to just live.