BCC’s Ronan introduced me to the work of Nick Bostrom, an Oxford Philosopher. He writes and thinks on technology and ethics issues. He has a fascinating line of reasoning. He argues that quite possibly we are living in a simulation, like The Matrix. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: What if you are just a minor character in a computer game
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It is Thought Experiment August! Time to once again put on your thinking caps and ponder the dicey issues of modern thought. I’ve explored the issues related to allowing artificial life into your religious community here and what it might mean to be an artificial life here. But let’s back off and decide when, for the first time, an artificial life might deserve rights. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: Your new Z11 robot So you want to be a conspiracy theorist? It’s simple and easy, and my one-stop, Ten-step Guide will help you get started. It certainly doesn’t matter what you want to be a conspiracy theorist about. I can help. Let’s get started. We need an example, so let’s just say you want to be a ‘Extrasolar Planet‘ denier. You know, those planets orbiting stars not in our solar system? Well, no one is denying the science behind them, yet, so it’s fertile ground in which to start a conspiracy theory. So where to begin? Continue reading So you are interested in becoming a conspiracy theorist? Continuing . . . Below are the points seem to cause some confusion and may need the most work in framing a detailed reconciliation. Here I sketch of where I think these pivot points lie. I’ll start where I feel there is little tension between science and our religion and that the hermeneutics of each seems not to pose any major difficulties in providing narratives that are comfortable lying side by side. Continue reading The implications of evolution for key LDS Doctrines: My SMPT paper part III Arguments about ‘design’ in creation have been around a long time. The earliest one I’ve been able to find that explicitly explores it is from Xenophon, 4th Century BC, (and diligent readers if you know of earlier texts I would love to be directed to them!). Xenophon was a sometimes-student of Socrates and, like the wise teacher’s more famous student Plato, wrote a series of dialogues featuring Socrates and various interlocutors. One of these, from his Memorabilla, sounds like it was lifted right out current intelligent design creationist debates. Continue reading Theological Arguments about ‘Design’ Fall on Hard times Fleck is not a name that jumps to mind when you do a cursory flip through the ‘Philosophers of Science’ channels. Yet, he seems to exemplify the best overview of what science does, more than any of the usual philosopher of science suspects. Ludwik Fleck published a book (in German) called, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in 1935, the same year as Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. However, despite rage reviews, and much more successful initial reception than Popper’s book, it faded into obscurity. The world was still enamored with the hypo-deductive fiction that science had game-faced onto its discourse, and it would not be until Thomas Kuhn wrote his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that Fleck’s work would indirectly enter the mainstream. And indirectly because Kuhn did not acknowledge Fleck’s influence until years later when Fleck was finally published in English (1979). Continue reading Fleck on how science works: beyond H0 testing, Part II What is science? There is no short answer. It is not, as some, even some scientists, claim just this: Continue reading What is Science? Them ol’ hypo-deductive blues: Part I Suppose someone handed you five random playing cards and you wanted to sort them in numerical order. What would you do? Why, you would use the Shell Straight Insertion method of course. Which means you take out the i_th (1st, 2nd, so on) card and place it in order relative to the card next to it. You repeat this until all your cards are in order. It always works. If you follow this procedure, you will have sorted cards in your hand in no time. If you doubt me try it. You’ve probably done it unconsciously if you play cards and you wanted them ordered in your hand. It always works, not because it is a law, but because it’s something even more fundamental. It’s an a priori principle. One can imagine a universe where different laws held, but one cannot imagine a universe where this did not work. This algorithm is based only the properties of integers and what it means to order them. Like sufficient reason, it underlies logic, not the physical facts of the universe. You can imagine a universe where gravity did not exist, but it would be hard to find one in which 2 + 2 did not equal 4. Continue reading Evolution by natural selection: as fundamental as 2 + 2 = 4 August went by too fast! But we still have time for one more thought experiment. It’s a short one, but it has many uses in philosophy of science. Consider the ship of Neurath. It was introduced by a member of the Vienna Circle named Otto Neurath (the Vienna Circle was an early 20th Century group known for . . . → Read More: Thought-experiment August: (6) The Church and the Ship of Neurath JRR Tolkien described hobbits as short, large footed and about a meter high. It is almost like he’d seen one, because apparently they were real and living on the island of Flores in Indonesia. In 2003 archeologists discovered the bones of a hominid that stood about a meter high. It had large feet. They also lived in caves, or holes in the Earth. Not nasty, dirty, wet holes, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet dry, bare, sandy holes with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a Homo floresiensis-hole, and that means comfort. They lived from about 17,000 to 95,000 years ago. They hunted, used stone tools, made fire, but their brains were small, almost 1000 cm smaller than a human brain. Clearly, they overlapped in time with humans (anatomically modern humans show up about 200,000 years ago). And they might have even been humans, a debate still rages. Continue reading When Hobbits Walked the Earth—Science in Action. |
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