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Naturalism

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. Read More ›

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 tautology. Natural selection is an “empty” theory — “survivors survive” has no genuine explanatory power. As ID pioneer Phillip Johnson observed, Darwinism was really a new philosophical theory. It was the view that there is no teleology — no purpose — inherent to nature. Purpose in biology, Darwin insisted, is an illusion. Differential survival alone can explain “purpose” in nature. Darwin proposed that all of 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? Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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.” Read More ›

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! Read More ›

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.” Read More ›

Arithmetic as racism: A teacher’s reflections on the progressive war on math

Mahlberg: English philosopher G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) saw the early signs of the West’s abandonment of objective truth, and in a cheeky tone, he warned: We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green… Read More ›

Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins on free will

They think it’s an illusion, of course. Dawkins recommends Richard Dennett on the subject but Dennett also thinks that consciousness is an illusion. Michael Egnor would say, if your proposition is that consciousness is an illusion, then you don’t have a proposition. Read More ›