A few years ago, philosopher Owen Flanagan appeared on the Partially Examined Life podcast to discuss his 2011 book, The Bodhisattva's Brain. In this work, he argues that the Buddhist theory of human flourishing, when rendered in naturalistic terms, should be of interest to many in the West. For Flanagan, implicit in Buddhism is the promise that one can achieve “a stable sense Continue Reading …
Saints and Simulators 17: #PascalReloaded
Seventeenth in an ongoing series about the interface between religion and technology. The previous episode is here. Last week we discussed Newcomb's Paradox, a thought experiment about the rational response to an omniscient being, and also Roko's Basilisk, the frightening digital boogeyman the paradox spawned in the minds of those who pursued the train of thought too far. It Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 16: #ScaryAI (Roko’s Basilisk)
Sixteenth in an ongoing series about the interface between religion and technology. The previous episode is here; the next episode is here. In 1969, philosopher Robert Nozick first popularized what would go on to be quite a famous thought experiment. Soon known as "Newcomb’s Paradox," after its inventor, physicist William Newcomb, it asks us to imagine two boxes, one of Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 15: #WiseAI
Fifteenth in an ongoing series about the interface between religion and technology. The previous episode is here. Another possible strategy for fending off the robot apocalypse is to ask if there are characteristically human traits or characteristics that are humanity-preserving, and if so, can those be passed along to our machines? What is it that has given us our identity Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 14: #FriendlyAI
Fourteenth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here; the next episode is here. Given how likely killer robots are, and how clearly the paths we are currently embarked on lead to that eventuality, can this destiny be averted? Can the killer robots be stopped? The most obvious answer is just to commit not to building Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 13: #PushyAI
Thirteenth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. For a more realistic portrait than Kurzweil’s of what a future dominated by technology might look like, one plausible place to start is with our present domination by technology, and how it is already transforming us as human beings. For example, consider the Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 12: #BadAI
Twelfth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here; the next episode is here. In 1989, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the second major iteration of the durable televised Star Trek science fiction franchise, introduced a terrifying new villain called the Borg. An unhallowed melding of a humanlike life form with Continue Reading …
Tidying Up With Socrates
Let me present to you the ultimate life coaching team: Marie Kondo and Socrates. Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant devoted to uncluttering our households. Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher devoted to uncluttering our minds. If we open ourselves to their methods of tidying up, they promise, we will live a happier life. Marie Kondo’s “KonMari” method Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 11: #GoodAI
Eleventh in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. For many of the people who find Bostrom’s logic persuasive, the underlying reason is a concept called the “technological singularity.” Named by mathematician John von Neumann after the physicists’ term “singularity,” meaning the collapse of time and space into a Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 10: #SoulfulMachines
Tenth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. At this point in our journey, let us take a moment to return to Descartes’s infamous concept of mind-body duality. The body, in his view, is one type of thing: physical matter. It is subject to the laws of physics, it gets old and degrades, it is built up of discrete Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 9: #ChaosAndEmergence
Ninth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. The paired opposite to reductionism is called emergentism, and in recent years it has begun to gain an increasing number of advocates. In summary, it means that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Unexpected behaviors and properties can emerge, even from simple Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 8: #ArtificiallyIntelligent
Eighth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. At this point we have delayed the crux of the matter long enough. At root, Bostrom’s argument hinges on a single controversial question: Is it possible to truly create or simulate a person? Is there any point, with any level of technology, no matter how advanced, at Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 7: #GoingBayesian
Seventh in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. We left off last week with the question of how much weight we should give to Nick Bostrom’s argument that we are not only possibly simulated, but likely to be so. This argument, or at least our representation of it, rests on two key claims: first, that our descendants Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 6: #AllYouZombies
Sixth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. The sensory aspect of creating a convincing virtual-reality video game seems like a surmountable technical challenge, and the insertion of the real-world player into the game-world avoids the hard problem of consciousness. But video-game worlds are typically Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 5: #3MinuteUniverse
Fifth in an ongoing series about the places where science and religion meet. The previous episode is here. The technological ability to emulate a convincing world is plausible in the not-so-distant future. We additionally know that the motivation to create one already exists, given the huge popularity of video games, and the amount of money and effort put into making them. Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 4: #AloneInTheCyberverse
Fourth in a series about the intersection between religion and technology. The previous essay is here. Although it may not be immediately obvious, a consequential, load-bearing part of Bostrom’s argument that we are likely to exist within a simulation, is the question of motivation. Solving the why of whether we might be simulated is at least as important as the how. It Continue Reading …
Saints & Simulators 3: #WhatIsSimulation
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 …
To Be Re-Bourne: Breathing New Life into the Prophetic Philosophy of Randolph Bourne
Stricken by the influenza epidemic that had spread across the world in the wake of the First World War—the military conflagration that ironically both ruined his “reputation and elicited prophetic words that have the greatest claim on our imaginations today”[1]—Randolph S. Bourne died on a dreary December day in 1918.[2] Dead at 32, Bourne left behind a legacy of social and Continue Reading …
A Philosophical Horror Story: Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”
Perhaps what is most horrifying is being unable to turn away from one’s own destruction. This theme, particularly as it applies to greed, is explored in the Pardoner’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories from fourteenth-century England by Geoffrey Chaucer, who was regarded by his earliest readers as a supremely “philosophical” poet. The frame narrative Continue Reading …
What Does It Mean for a Thing to Be “A Thing”?
Despite its many obvious shortcomings, the human mind is a remarkably productive generator of categories—from the Linnaean system of taxonomy to two drinkers in a bar arguing over India Pale Ales, and indeed the person sitting next to them who complains to the bartender about “hipsters” taking over his favorite bar. This natural proclivity to set out a number of categories and Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXV: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part C
In our last two articles, we've explored one book in the exciting new field of cognitive science of religion. And we've seen how one of the findings in this area is that belief in God, or something like God, is natural to us, given the types of minds we have. Of course, this doesn't show that one ought to believe in God—that would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy. After Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXIV: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part B
In our last article, we explored some recent findings in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). We saw how current research suggests that belief in God, or something like God, comes naturally to most human beings, most of the time, in virtue of the types of brains we have. I'd like to explore Justin L. Barrett's arguments on this front in a bit more depth in this Continue Reading …
“Mind Games” and “Word Games”: Practical Philosophers, Give Philosophy a Chance!
In preparation for our episode #201 with Ryan Holiday about Marcus Aurelius, our third bout with Stoicism, I have been listening to many episodes of The Practical Stoic podcast, which features among other things, very good interviews with Ryan, with our previous guest Massimo, and with friend-of-our-podcast Gregory B. Sadler. If you're looking for a quick historical overview of Continue Reading …
Epistemic Tribalism, Epistemic Chaos, and Epistemic Exhaustion
The 2016 US presidential election and the Trump presidency have helped make visible that a variety of epistemically perilous features are far too common in the thought and behavior of Americans. David Roberts, in a 2017 blog post for Vox, aptly labeled one such feature tribal epistemology. Roberts describes a world dominated by tribal epistemology as one in which Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXXIII: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part A
In the last four articles, we explored two sides of the theist/atheist debate. On the atheist side, we explored Antony Flew's argument that we start from a position of atheism, as a default, and that the onus is on the theist to persuade us otherwise. We also heard from William Kingdon Clifford, who contended for a strong evidentialist position—i.e., that we must have Continue Reading …
The Ethics of Heroic Bloodshed
John Woo is synonymous with Hollywood blockbuster action films, or what in Hong Kong was referred to as the Heroic Bloodshed genre: tempestuous plots, explosive action scenes, and shootouts that often end with two empty guns. No one will argue with that. But is John Woo really that simple? Anyone reading this has probably already anticipated the obvious “no” that follows my Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXII: Alvin Plantinga and Reformed Epistemology
In our previous discussions of Antony Flew and William Kingdon Clifford, we've been exploring the evidentialist thesis in the philosophy of religion. Evidentialism is the view that we require evidence to ground our beliefs: belief in the absence of evidence is contrary to reason, perhaps even to morality. Confronted with this challenge, a person of faith can either accept the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXI: William James—The Will to Believe
In our last article, we explored William Kingdon Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief," in which he argued that "it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything on the basis of insufficient evidence." Thus Clifford is not just an evidentialist (i.e., someone who takes the position in epistemology, that all beliefs must be grounded on sufficient evidence), but Continue Reading …
Science, Secularism, and Religion, Part XXX: William Kingdon Clifford—The Ethics of Belief
Imagine a ship owner who sells tickets for transatlantic voyages. He is at the dock one day, bidding his ship farewell, when he remembers a warning he had received from his mechanics the week before, that the integrity of the ship’s hull was questionable and that it might not be seaworthy. But on some plausible grounds or other he forms the sincere, honest conviction that his Continue Reading …
Science, Secularism, and Religion, Part XXIX: Antony Flew—The Presumption of Atheism
In our last articles, we explored Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Although there's much more that could be said about this important and influential book, I have to plead exhaustion. Taylor is not always the easiest author to understand, and we've spent a lot of time on him already. For the rest of the series, I'd like to explore some of the authors and ideas that have Continue Reading …
There Is More to Seeing Than Meets the Eye: Rejecting Scruton’s Conception of Photography
Photographers of a thoughtful demeanor should take a keen interest in what we mean by “seeing.” Are there different types of seeing? Does each visual art have a particular mode of seeing? Is there a difference between “looking” and “seeing”? To what extent is seeing different than thinking? The English philosopher Roger Scruton attempted to answer these questions in one of the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVIII: Charles Taylor—The Dark Abyss of Time
In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of confinement and Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVII: Charles Taylor—The Malaise of Modernity
In our last article, we explored Charles Taylor’s discussion of a new religion that took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Providential Deism. Yet, as we saw, it was not entirely new but in many respects a development and expansion of themes already expounded on by the Protestant Reformation. Where the Protestant Reformers accused Catholicism of being Continue Reading …
What Will Be Most Embarrassing about Contemporary Society in Fifty Years?
Mad Men was brilliant for many reasons: its whip-smart dialogue; its pitch-perfect casting; its meticulous attention to period detail. Creator Matthew Weiner was famously fanatical about historical accuracy, and so the show, in addition to its narrative delights, functioned as something of a time capsule. Ad execs used to drink copious amounts of liquor on the job! Women in the Continue Reading …
Life-Hack Stoicism—Is It Worth It?
Millennials in the West have graduated into or grown up in one of the worst and most prolonged recessions. Granted, this isn’t 1929, and most young people caught up in it are stuck in their parents’ basement and not on the breadline. And, with that, any notion of public sympathy is generally tossed aside and replaced with calls of “toughen up” and “get over Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVI: Charles Taylor — Providential Deism and the Impersonal Order
In the last article, we saw how the Protestant Reformation challenged the premodern conception of reality, and began to put in place some of the elements we can recognize today in modern, Western-style secularism. In particular, there was a “flattening effect” when it came to time, space, and devotion. More and more, secular, ordinary time came to the forefront. The sacred Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXV: Charles Taylor—The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of the Disciplinary Society
In previous articles, we’ve taken some first steps toward answering the underlying question of Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. He asks us to look at Europe around the year 1500, and observe that belief in God had an unproblematic, normative, even a central, character for those societies. But when we look around today, we find a very different climate. While certainly a Continue Reading …
The Diamond-Water Paradox and the Subjective Theory of Value
In his famous work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith articulated a paradox that he could not resolve: water is essential to life; diamonds a mere decoration. Yet for all that, we are willing to lavish enormous sums on pretty rocks while taking clean water for granted. What could explain this disconnect? Smith’s confusion stemmed from his understanding of the source of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIV: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part B)
In our previous articles, we began to explore what Charles Taylor calls the “bulwarks of belief.” These are the aspects of psychology and society that made belief nearly irresistible for most Europeans around the year 1500. Taylor postulates these bulwarks thus: that purpose and design were evident in nature and history; that God was implicated in the very existence of society; Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIII: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part A)
In the previous article, we explored the “Bulwarks of Belief”—those features of the premodern, European mindset that, according to Charles Taylor, made belief in transcendent realities nearly inescapable. There were basically three of them: God’s purposes were evident in the design of nature, and in particular incidents (often construed as this-worldly dispensations of divine Continue Reading …
The Epistemological Basis of Economics
Contemporary political discourse is dominated by economic terminology. Candidates run on platforms that emphasize “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and sitting representatives (and presidents) justify their policies through references to GDP growth. There is simply no way to approach politics without grappling with this stuff. Yet even as it takes on an outsized role in the formulation of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXII: Charles Taylor—The Bulwarks of Belief (A Secular Age, Part B)
In our last article, we began to explore the philosophy of secularism, through Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. We saw how Taylor’s three senses of the word describe a progressive development: first, a retreat of religion (itself a problematic term) from the public to the private sphere; then, a decline of religiosity in the private sphere; and finally, the emergence of Continue Reading …
Primitivism and the Counterculture
Why do hippies seek transformation in tepees? From the sandy wastes of Burning Man to the mud-filled pits of music festivals, enthusiastic seekers emulate Native American cultures in an attempt to throw off the “inauthenticity” of the modern world. While the traditions that hippies idealize may be divorced from the particular histories of the tribes within which they Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXI: Charles Taylor: A Secular Age (Part A)
Of the three elements in our series—science, religion, and secularism—science has probably received the most philosophical attention, at least in the contemporary context. Indeed, the constitution of a category, “philosophy of religion,” presumes a sectioning-off of certain topics that have, historically, been integral to philosophy. It presumes, in other words, a growing Continue Reading …
Lessons on Social Justice from an Unexpected Source
What the Left—and Everyone Else—Can Learn from the Public Pedagogy of Jordan Peterson A professor who instructs people to clean their rooms in lieu of protesting emerged in the fall of 2016 as an unlikely hero among many millennials—especially among young adult males who like YouTube. Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, became a Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XX: What is Science? (Part B)
In my last essay, I argued that it was important to distinguish science from non-science, and that a first step toward doing so was to distinguish between nomothetic (law-seeking) sciences like physics and chemistry, and idiographic (particularizing) sciences like biology and geography. I tried to show that science doesn’t have to copy methods characteristic of physics in order Continue Reading …
Kitsch and Camp in the Age of Trump
In this strange era, in which the dominant intellectual pastime has become analyzing the moods and behaviors of the American President (not so different, one imagines, from life at Versailles in the mid-eighteenth century) an interesting question about Donald Trump seems, to me at least, to be whether his style is more Kitsch or Camp? I realize this concern puts me in Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XIX: What Is Science? (Part A)
So far in this series, I’ve been using the word “science” as if its meaning were self-evident. And in a sense, it is: science is the investigation of the natural world. Insomuch as every society acquires knowledge of the natural world, every society has science. It seems to me this is the usual sense of the word “science”; what one might call its naive, or non-philosophical, Continue Reading …