Third in a series about the intersection between religion and technology. The previous essay is here. The word "simulation" means an imitation, something that duplicates aspects of something else; from the Latin root similis, to be “like” something. In computer science, it means the re-creation of a physical object or system in the form of computer-generated data. One of the Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 2: The #SimulationArgument
Second in a series on the nexus between religion and technology. The previous essay is here. In the year 1999, just on the cusp of a new millennium, the then Wachowski Brothers released what would become one of the most influential, imitated, and widely discussed movies of its times. The Matrix was a stylishly paranoid thriller about a future world that looked just like Continue Reading …
Saints and Simulators: Did Bostrom Prove the Existence of God?
This post is the introduction to a new series here on the Partially Examined Life blog: "Saints and Simulators," a look at cutting-edge modern technology, and its implications for both religion and philosophy. We'll be both beginning and ending the series with a deliberately provocative question: Did Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford University, provide the first Continue Reading …
Computer Games and the Solipsistic Fantasy
Technology is often thought of as a triumph of material realism (the concept that matter and the things made of matter exist in some fundamental ontological sense, independent of the observer). After all, it was the faith that matter has an objective existence governed by knowable rules that paved the way for the triumph of modern science and the technology that utilizes Continue Reading …
Grossman vs Lewis: A Trip to an Atheist Narnia
The curse of the accomplished critic is often to love and respect art with an overwhelming passion, but to be unable to enter that world as a creator of new material. The problem on the one hand is to be so immersed in the work of others that it can be hard to find your own voice, and on the other hand, to have a critical voice so highly developed that you can find it hard to Continue Reading …
The Aesthetics of Football
I was a painfully unathletic child, more likely to be found in a ballet class than on a baseball diamond. I could neither dribble nor shoot a basketball, an especially excruciating deficiency for a black kid growing up in the inner city. Football (the American version) was my particular nemesis. Not was the game itself frightening and dangerous, but the rules and scoring were Continue Reading …
Plato and the God of the Gaps
"God of the gaps" is a general name for any theological argument that argues for the necessary existence of God as an explanation for some particular phenomenon that challenges the limits of human understanding. In modern times, it has the distinction of being an approach to apologetics more favored by atheists than theists. An early critic of this form of argument was Henry Continue Reading …
Murakami Solves His Mental Problems
One of the oldest and most central debates in the field of aesthetics is whether great art plays a functional role in human life, or if it should rather be considered as an end unto itself. Plato and Aristotle both assigned aesthetics a pedagogical role, with Plato demanding that art teach morality, and Aristotle crediting theatrical tragedy with teaching us how to deal with Continue Reading …