Naturalism

Toiling too long in a clean lab, micromanaging the lives of mice, can really put stress on a person. Something like that might have happened to the poor sot who wrote us the following, outlining a Drinking Game, to help get through March for Science coverage on the lunchroom TV: The “March for Science” Drinking Game Drinking Games can help you get through watching things that are excruciatingly tedious. It might be the best way – perhaps the only way – to get through the entire “March for Science” festivities. There are a few locations where you can watch the Washington Mall event online: four hours and five and a half hours, depending on how the beer holds out, or Read More ›

From Karla Lant at Futurism: The revelation that observing and measuring quantum effects changes their behavior is troubling, but it also suggests to many people that consciousness itself is part of quantum theory. Moreover, as humans creating AI that, for all its achievements still can’t master some of the things that come so easily to our own minds (at least not yet), we are bound to see a blurry reflection of ourselves in quantum computers, which promise to achieve so much more than ordinary computers ever could. However, it was the British physicist Roger Penrose who pointed out that, observer effect aside, quantum mechanics may be involved in consciousness. More specifically, he thought it might be possible that quantum events Read More ›

Novelist Cormac McCarthy at Nautilus: There are influential persons among us—of whom a bit more a bit later—who claim to believe that language is a totally evolutionary process. That it has somehow appeared in the brain in a primitive form and then grown to usefulness. Somewhat like vision, perhaps. But vision we now know is traceable to perhaps as many as a dozen quite independent evolutionary histories. Tempting material for the teleologists. These stories apparently begin with a crude organ capable of perceiving light where any occlusion could well suggest a predator. Which actually makes it an excellent scenario for Darwinian selection. It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know. Read More ›

Physicalism is the point of vew that everything is material, including information, presumably adopted out of despair, as an alternative to saying even dumber things. From philosopher Daniel N. Robinson at the New Atlantis: In attempts to account for distinctly human endeavors, explanations have a narrative quality. Thus, Jane’s aspiration to be a concert violinist accounts for — that is, explains — the many hours of practice expended over a course of years. Henry wishes to understand the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The story — the explanation — runs along these lines: Wellington, after the battle of Quatre Bras, moved his forces to Waterloo. The allied Prussians moved to positions drawing a large portion of the French forces away Read More ›

From Tracy Staedler at LiveScience: Renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson urges Americans to become more scientifically literate in a short video he posted yesterday (April 19) on his Facebook page. In the video he titled “Science in America,” Tyson comments on 21st-century attitudes toward science, explaining the importance of the scientific method and making the case that science denial could erode democracy. “Dear Facebook Universe,” he wrote. “I offer this four-minute video on ‘Science in America’ containing what may be the most important words I have ever spoken. As always, but especially these days, keep looking up.” Poseur. Democracy gets dismantled mainly when not believing the government of the day becomes a crime. In about 30 seconds, Tyson explains how Read More ›

According to Mark Titus at Nautilus: The Greek philosopher Democritus might have said something like that 2,500 years ago. Although his books are lost, we know from the fragments that remain and what others said about him, that he believed everything in the universe was made of atoms in perpetual motion, whirling in space. Large, small, smooth, and slippery, or jagged and hooked, they combine to form the universe—its stars and planets, and the earth and all it contains, including our bodies and our minds. All that is required to understand this is “just a little imagination and thinking”—what physics, chemistry, and biology have provided since the 17th century. In spite of this success, science (as we now call the Read More ›

From Ari N. Schulman at New Atlantis: The question then is how mere mechanisms could be in the business of interpreting anything. To say that concepts can reside in physical things in the way we encounter them is only to raise more urgently the question of how concepts can reside in physical things as they actually are — of how matter can be such that certain bits of it come to know about each other. To say that experience inherently bears meaning, that perception already interprets the world to us before we ever reflect on it, is not to find a curious circumstance in which nature and reason are reconciled but to challenge how we find them set apart to Read More ›

Well, consider: Our physics colour commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on the problem of theoretical physics starting to seem like a fly repeatedly hitting the window pane (Sabine Hossenfelder’s term): Peter Woit sees the same thing and blames it on data-free speculation. Another physics blogger (and graduate of my alma mater), Chad Orzel blames it on underemployed theorists. Sabine Hossenfelder thinks the social aspects of the scientific method have deeply infected the matter. Let me toss my hat in the ring and blame it on the Enlightenment. It was Christianity that birthed science and the scientific method, and atheism that killed it. If you permit me to be politically incorrect, Stanley Jaki argued that neither Hinduism nor Islam could Read More ›

A reader writes to recommend Chapter 3 of C.S. Lewis’s Miracles: Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question. … Nothing can seem extraordinary until Read More ›

For our own good. Or anyway, seriously consider that option, in the age of marchin’, marchin’. From Sara Mojtehedzadeh at Toronto Star: It was a human experiment on an unprecedented scale. Its target: 10,000 Ontario miners. Its tool: a mysterious black powder they were forced to inhale in a sealed room before plunging underground to work. From 1943 to roughly 1980, an aluminum-based prophylaxis called McIntyre Powder was sold as an apparent miracle antidote to lung disease. It was designed, historical documents suggest, by industry-sponsored Canadian scientists bent on slashing compensation costs in gold and uranium mines across the north. The problem: experts say aluminum is now known to be neurotoxic if significant doses get into the blood. And victims’ families Read More ›

I (O’Leary for News) happened to be looking up a concept connected with Easter: On Holy Saturday, many hold that  Jesus ushered the just people from former ages into Heaven. I came across this page: The Resurrection Icon and the World Without Charles Darwin It offers information for the “objective” student of Russian, Greek, and Balkan icons. Where we learn, unpacking the meaning of the icon: At the bottom is an elaborated version of the “old” image, with Christ standing on the gates of Hades and grasping Adam by the hand, as Eve and other Old Testament women kneel before him. John the Forerunner and King David are already in the crowd that is moving up toward Paradise in a Read More ›

Wilder Penfield was a pioneering neurosurgeon in Montreal. A friend writes to draw our attention to his approach to the mind, in The Mystery of the Mind: “The challenge that comes to every neurophysiologist is to explain in terms of brain mechanisms all that men have come to consider the work of the mind, if he can. And this he must undertake freely, without philosophical or religious bias. If he does not succeed in his explanation, using proven facts and reasonable hypotheses, the time should come, as it has to me, to consider other possible explanations. He must consider how the evidence can be made to fit the hypothesis of two elements as well as that of one only.” – Wilder Read More ›

At Jonathan McLatchie’s Apologetics Academy at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST here. David Snoke is president of the Christian Scientific Society. See also: As if the multiverse wasn’t bizarre enough …meet Many Worlds and Webinar: Paul Nelson on evolution as theory of transformation Follow UD News at Twitter!

Astrophysicist and neuroscientist Casper Hesp wrote a piece at BioLogos, reviewing physicist Peter Bussey’s Signposts to God. Hesp thinks that fine-tuning of the universe is not a good argument for theism. After all, despite massive evidence and the utter improbability of other approaches, we could find out some day that we are wrong. From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz: Last week I posted on what I see as a growing (and concerning) trend among BioLogians: the gravitation towards full-on naturalism (even beyond cosmology). I also speculated that Bussey’s arguments had been badly misrepresented. I decide to ask Dr. Bussey directly about some of the Hesp’s claims. In a really splendid way Bussey has offered a response. I am cut-pasting Read More ›

The neurosurgeon is Michael Egnor. From David Snoke at Christian Scientific Society: Mike Egnor gave a talk full of brain science data in support of his position of Aristotelean dualism [at the Annual Meeting last weekend]. He contrasted his position with Cartesian dualism, which has two distinct substances, one which is fully material and deterministic, and another which is spiritual and in another realm, which somehow interfaces with the brain. He argued Cartesian dualism actually just leads to materialism, as the spiritual substance gets ignored. By contrast, his view of Aristotelean dualism posits eternal “forms” associated with every material thing. For humans, the essence of this form is what we would call the spirit. I don’t fully understand this view, Read More ›