by Mark English Attempts to express a comprehensive personal view of the world are doomed to failure. Each of us has a view of the world; some such views are more developed and plausible than others. But language (even supplemented with other modes of expression) is simply not equipped to articulate the complex and shifting set of values and beliefs […]
by Mark English Maybe I have read just one too many articles promoting the so-called simulation hypothesis. Maybe I have seen just one too many populist videos purportedly dealing with scientific topics but which, in order to maximize audience numbers, manage to leave all the hard and interesting stuff out and focus instead on presentational style (including colorful and virtually […]
by Mark English I have been engaged in some private and public discussions recently about the extent to which a scientific worldview relates to our ordinary non-scientific view of the world, and I want to pull together some provisional thoughts on the matter, especially as it relates to language. Science and ordinary thinking As I see it, there is no […]
by Mark English Writer’s block it is not. The problem – if it is a problem – is more along the lines that the sorts of topics and themes I know best are not (for various reasons) all that interesting to me, or only in a negative way. And most of the topics that I am interested in exploring I […]
by Mark English Areas of the brain used in mathematics have been identified. These areas, which are associated with our sense of number and with spacial reasoning, are used not only for basic arithmetic and to process our ordinary perceptions and intuitions about shape and form and space but also, it now appears, for advanced math. (1) High levels of […]
by Mark English I once watched a nature documentary about a group of lions in the wild. At one stage a lioness and her cubs found themselves separated from the group. After a period of time during which she almost starved and her cubs were killed, she finally managed to rejoin the group. The other lions certainly recognized her and […]
by Mark English At the age of seven, I went with my mother, brother and baby sister on a long plane journey. We flew for many hours, landing once for refueling (late at night). It was a rough journey, and I recall a certain amount of nausea and vomiting, but the positives certainly outweighed the negatives as far as I […]
by David Ottlinger “The problem of evil, in the sense in which I am using this phrase, is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds. It is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further discoveries…” [1] -JL Mackie, The Miracle of […]
By Michael Boyle http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf In 1956, Charles Percy Snow, physicist, novelist, and civil servant, published an article in the New Statesman, which, three years later, he would turn into a Rede Lecture and then publish as a book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The lecture and the book had a significant impact on the intellectual life of Britain […]
By Daniel A. Kaufman http://fitelson.org/woodward/fodor.pdf On tap this week is one of the most influential essays in the philosophy of science, since the Second World War: Jerry Fodor’s “Special Sciences,” which appeared in the journal Synthese, in 1974. The paper did two very important things. First, it struck a crippling blow against a certain kind of positivist view of the […]
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