The COVID lockdowns often introduced people to a different approach to time from what they were used to, with mixed results.
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Viewing the heavens beyond our reach causes us to look up and stretch our imaginations to envision a realm vastly greater than our own.
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I think it’s fair to say that interstellar space travel isn’t even remotely possible with our current understanding of physics and technology.
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If we grasp the psychological role that the belief that we live in a sim universe plays, it’s easier to see why it persists in the absence of evidence.
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It’s useful to know that this sort of fact-free performance is acceptable, given the state of a materialist interpretation of consciousness today.
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Apart from demoting evolution, “consciousness first” is yet another attempt to naturalize consciousness by making it a basic origin of life process.
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Only in the intellectual world are concepts like correct vs. incorrect (or right vs. wrong) meaningful. It’s a different world from the one created by physics.
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In his discussion with Robert Lawrence Kuhn at Closer to Truth, Tufts physicist and cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin addresses the question, “Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?”: If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different human beings wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities. Natural or supernatural, that is the question. Vilenkin — who is also a professor of evolutionary science — concedes the main point: Alexander Vilenkin: [0:40] Well yeah that’s right. It appears that the Universe is fine-tuned in the sense that there are about 30 constants of nature which take some specific value: if you look at these numbers, they look Read More ›
“Penrose consciousness,” in Sheldon’s view, escapes the paradoxes of non-computable problems that plague the trendy Universal Turing Machine model of the brain.
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How a quantum theory of consciousness will work out is anyone’s guess but here’s a prediction: It won’t help the cause of materialism much.
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Olson makes large assumptions as he develops his argument. But the literary licence granted to science fiction is not available to real-universe physics.
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Materialist science has got about as far as it can go and progress will only be made if we are willing to contemplate non-materialist approaches.
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Calling assertions about fine-tuning — whether from theists or panpsychists — “astrotheology” will not help resolve any issues.
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If the multiverse plot device eliminates the finality of events or choices (“it happened only in X universe”), we won’t care so much about the characters.
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If the scientific study of consciousness ever becomes more ideologically rigid — like evolutionary biology — it will also be less honest and less interesting.
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Perhaps the reason no theory of consciousness works is simply that the mind does not arise from molecules so theories of how that happens can’t work.
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Philosopher Antony Flew believed that evidence matters; that is why fine-tuning turned him from atheism to deism. Can science do without an evidence base?
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This past June, we published an article featuring a conversation between physicist Lawrence Krauss and novelist Cormac McCarthy, where they discussed whether mathematics was “discovered or invented.” Robert J. Marks went on to write his own thoughts on the question shortly thereafter. If you’re further interested in mathematics and whether there is an actual correspondence between math and the natural world, consider watching new podcast episode featuring Dr. Melissa Cain Travis. Do humans project mathematical order onto nature? Or was it there all along? On a new episode of ID the Future, I conclude a three-part conversation with Dr. Melissa Cain Travis about her recent book Thinking God’s Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility. In Part 3, we look Read More ›
Science is more likely to be a decade-long fuss over the ninth decimal place of the muon than about Contact! or Boldly Go. But real learning is like that.
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Materialism. What a weird word. It sounds like a ghost, materializing in front of me. And it is sort of like a ghost, one that has mysteriously taken over the minds of many intelligent people. Because they believe in materialism, these smart people don’t believe in ghosts. Especially the ghost in the machine. The problem is there is no way for the ghost to interact with the machine. This is known as the “mind-body interaction problem”. The great thing about materialism is at least that theory doesn’t have an interaction problem. Any material thing can interact with any other material thing. Yet there is a deep irony. Let’s explore the idea of materialism to see why. Materialism is the idea that reality only consists of matter. Read More ›