Tag: materialism
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Final Draft: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism
I finished the essay on the philosophy and anthropology of religion, called “Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism,” that I posted last week in rough draft form. Here is the conclusion: A naturalist panentheism builds its case for the existence and importance of God not upon logical or sensori-empirical proofs. Rather, the…
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Belief in a Personal God
The following is my response to the theologian Jason Michael McCann’s blog post about the personal nature of God in the Christian tradition. Yesterday, he posted a critical response to one of my short essays on materialism and imagination that I will also respond to soon. JMM, The distinction between truth and fact (which I understand…
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Idealism, Materialism, Non-dualism
A response to Owlmirror on Pharyngula, You suggest that idealism is incoherent because 1) it doesn’t explain “things acting under purely physical rules, rather than mental states.” -What is a physical rule, exactly? How are these rules or laws determined, and why, as in the case of our particular universe, are they so organized as…
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Consciousness: Problem, Paradox, or Practice?
A quick contextualizing note for those who are just joining the tangled thread of my recent blogalogue concerning the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the nervous system and surrounding cosmos: Last month, Steve Ramirez, a PhD candidate at MIT, posted an entry on his blog (http://okaysteve.wordpress.com/) concerning neuroscience’s supposed successes explaining the “problem” of consciousness purely…
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Consciousness: The Holy Grail of Neuroscience
The following is a video response I posted on YouTube to a blog post by Steve Ramirez about consciousness and neuroscience. He writes the following: Matthew Segall, known popularly as “0ThouArtThat0″ on youtube, is as eloquent as any up and coming philosopher – an eloquence rivaled in magnitude only by his deep misunderstanding of how science…
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A personal correspondence about the universe.
The following is an email exchanged with a good friend of mine doing doctoral work on complexity theory as it applies to neuroscience at Florida Atlantic University. My email is in response to this Science Daily article about a measured variance in a specific physical constant: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100909004112.htm Perhaps I’ll post his response when it comes…
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The Spirit of Philosophy
I am passionate about philosophy not because I desire answers to arbitrary questions or explanations of abstract problems. My passion arises because life, as given–as it at first appears to my everyday consciousness–is incomplete and unaccounted for. The reason for my existence has never been self-evident, and yet discovering this reason is the prerequisite of…
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Pushing back against Positivism
I felt like giving my two cents over at Pharyngula again. My response is copied below. I fear I repeat myself too much, but I just can’t help offering philosophical resistance whenever I come across scientism. Humanity has no future if meaning continues to be reduced to the measurable and culture to the technologically useful.…
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Materialism and Imagination
Art is now the last safe harbor for the expression of spiritual longing in our increasingly materialistic civilization. The supposedly self-evident discoveries of scientific investigation into the nature of the physical universe have convinced most who know of them that everything which exists is a giant machine governed by measurable, generally deterministic laws. Even our…
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Response to PZ Myers on Science and Philosophy
A link to PZ Myers‘ post that I’m responding to: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/criticism_deferred_but_buildin.php A link to my first comment (also pasted below): http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/criticism_deferred_but_buildin.php#comment-2256674 You’ll have to refer to the link above if you want to see the other comments I am responding to below, though I do repeat them in brief in my own responses. ——————————————————————————— #…
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Mechanism and Meaning: Making Room for Consciousness
The following is an exchange I had on YouTube with cosmanthony21 about the nature of “awareness.” —————————————————–cosmanthony21’s original message: Ok, lemme give it a shot. This is an interesting topic for discussion, so if you’ll humor me, Id like to write some thoughts coming to mind on the topic of awareness you had brought up.…
Footnotes2Plato 