Math is not, of course, created by humans but only recognized by humans—a critical distinction. 2 + 2 = 4, even if the Woke burn down research labs under the banner of “2 + 2 = 5!” The biggest losers will, of course, be those with the fewest private resources when public ones are destroyed.
Naturalism
At MMN: Children use reason, not gut, for moral problems
Naturalists keep trying to harpoon the reality of the human soul but never quite succeed.
Some thoughts from American Conservative on SciAm’s foray into politics
It will be meaningless to harp on the claim that the public doesn’t “trust science” when “science” is a set of political positions.
Mathematicians debate the war on math
Carlo Rovelli stops short of saying that 2+2=5 but the article gives every sense that many would love to go there if only they could get some kind of a nudge. It is far to say that the war on Platonism is just the war on math, PhD version.
Michael Egnor: Darwinism as Hegel’s philosophy applied to biology
He sees that as a framework for much of the change around us: Nineteenth-century Darwinism was much more than a revolutionary scientific theory. It was hardly a scientific theory in any meaningful sense. Natural selection, as atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor has pointed out, isn’t a meaningful level of scientific explanation. It’s barely more than a Read More…
Scientific American doubles down on all politics, all the time
Mme Justice Ginsberg was eighty-seven years of age and suffered with pancreatic cancer. It is remarkable and commendable that she lived as long as she did; not at all a surprise that she died. Why is her death a “terrible blow” as opposed to a foreseen near-term event?
Does a cosmopsychist believe in life after death?
Bernardo Kastrup: I certainly believe in consciousness after death. I believe that our core subjectivity, that implicit, innate sense of “I”-ness, remains undifferentiated. That’s the reason you still think you are the same person you were when you were five years old even though everything about you has changed.
At New Scientist: Fuzzy law threatens mathematics
New Scientist — as a culture — would probably always been happier joining the war on math, and this sounds like a way of testing the waters. But we shall see.
A classic Darwinian fairy tale: How the human mind jumpstarted itself into existence
Earlier, Frankish explained that Dennett accounts for consciousness as “a temporary level of organisation—a ‘virtual system’—that we create for ourselves through certain learned habits of self-stimulation.” But what are the concepts “we,” “ourselves,” and “self-” even doing in this discussion? If consciousness is an illusion, these concepts are illusions that cannot create anything.
John West: Science and scientism in the Age of COVID
David Klinghoffer: As Dr. West explains, for all the blessings of science, there are problems with saying, as some literally have done, “In Fauci we trust.”
Bruce Gordon on the Argument for God from the Incompleteness of Nature
Based on Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project Edited by Jerry L. Walls and Trent Dougherty.
Raging Woke pull down dinosaur statue
A Canadian blogger peeped up: “I’m so glad people are finally realizing that dinosaurs were racist.”
New podcast offers blatant heresy: Two plus two make four
James Lindsay, one of Peter Boghossian’s fellow hoaxers of the Woke folk, discusses the war on math in this podcast.
Ed Feser on theoretical physicist’s new book: “the particle collection that fancied itself a physicist”
Feser: Alfred Korzybski once said, “the map is not the territory.” If only more physicists were capable of seeing what a crackpot linguist could!
A Universal Mind is a reasonable idea, says Bernardo Kastrup
One reason that science media are respectful of cosmopsychism may be growing awareness of the problems with strict materialism, naturalism, or physicalism: As Michael Egnor has noted, “How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? That means propositions don’t exist and that means that you don’t have a proposition.”