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 …
The Limits of Philosophical Ethics
From Stephen Scher and Kasia Kozlowska, Rethinking Health Care Ethics (Singapore: Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), published open access/free download, which you can find here. Conflicts with other persons typically demand that we make explicit our reasons or feelings in an effort to work through any differences. Possible outcomes range from the non-negotiable 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 …
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 …