Is free will a scientific problem?

By Neil Levy, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

An American neuroscientist claims to have solved the problem of free will. Peter Tse, who works at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, says that the key to free will lies in how neurons can rewire each other. But I would argue the problem of free will is a conceptual problem, not a scientific one.

In an article he recently published in New Scientist, and at much greater length in his book The Neural Basis of Free Will, Tse sets out his theory according to which neurons rewire each other. They can form temporary circuits, and alter the criteria to which they respond in the future.

Complementary vs western medicine – both have a role in universities

Universities should be protected as sites where unpopular ideas and theories can be examined. uonottingham

By Paul Komesaroff, Monash University

Medicine has long been the subject of vigorous debate about the control of social resources. The formation of modern medicine in the mid-19th century was itself the result of a century long fight for legitimacy among many contending groups. At that time, those who won out – the physicians, the surgeons and those who prepared and sold medicines – had no more evidence to support them than those they defeated. They succeeded on the basis of politics, not of evidence.

Why is Telstra Next G serving your data to Netsweeper in America?

By Mark Gregory, RMIT University

Telstra representatives have this week admitted to collecting data for a new internet filtering product and sending this data to the USA office of Netsweeper Inc.

Netsweeper Inc, based near Toronto, Canada, provides web content filtering and web threat management solutions. Web threat management solutions are designed to reduce email and web based threats such as phishing, viruses, malware and include the capability to do content filtering.

The Transit of Venus

A transit of Venus occurs when Venus is observed to move across the face of the Sun. The first transit since 1882 occurred on 8 June 2004. The next transit will occur on 6 June 2012, and be visible in Sydney from beginning to end, starting at 8.16am (1st contact) and ending at 2.44pm (last contact). The following transit of Venus won’t occur until 2117.

The Nature of Time

The Persistence of Time, Salvador Dali (1931)

When we normally talk about time, we can mean different things. There is, of course, the conventional time measured by physical clocks. When we ask someone “what time is it?” it is this physical time we typically mean. But there is also a more psychological kind of time, as when we say “time flew by” or “that seemed like forever”. Such expressions show us that the subjective passage of time is sometimes faster or slower than the objective passage of time that clocks measure. It seems, then, that these two types of time are distinct, at least as far as the rate of passage of time is concerned. Our inquiry into time does not presuppose that objective time is more real than subjective time, or vice versa. Rather, our approach is to acknowledge both these aspects of time, and then to see what inquiry reveals about them.

Scientism - Is science folly?

Most of us were raised with the idea that reality is the material cosmos. We were all taught that there is a real external world "out there" containing rocks, atoms, cells, animals, plants, etc., and that this material world is all there is. As Carl Sagan tells us in his opening lines of the popular Cosmos television series, "The cosmos is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be."