Post 72  01/29/2019

Multiverse vs
First Cause     

Some scientists are like little kids, who imagine there's a monster under the bed, so they refuse to look. But what if it's not a manmade Frankenstein monster, but merely the myster-ious darkness of nescience (ignorance)? The scary monster that spooks those angelic atheists is the tyrannical Yaweh-Jehovah-Allah . . . .

Post 79  04/16/2019

Karma, Fate, or
Freewill     

Karma seems to be a popular concept among the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd. It’s a form of cause & effect Fatalism, but with more of a sense of personal control & ultimate Justice, rather than the arbitrariness & hope-lessness of the belief in pre-destination. The masses of ancient Greeks, among many other cultures, . . . .

Post 76  04/02/2019

Power of
Absence     

There is a glaring gap in modern science, and Terrence Deacon aims to close it – in part by explaining how material things can have “aims”, and how “absence” can serve to fill functional gaps. He is a neuro-scientist whose expertise straddles the borders between Classical & Quantum, Physics & Metaphysics, and between . . .

Post 73  02/25/2019

Magic versus
Heuristic     

Atheists find comfort in the observed fact that evolution is not miraculous, but heuristic : blindly groping in the dark, and serendipitously stumbling upon positive adaptations. As noted in Post 72, this is not how a Genesis-type creator works his magic. Yet the trial & error processes of Nature . . . .

Post 77  04/04/2019

What Matters
To Me?     

 As noted in Post 76, Terrence Deacon’s theory of Absence “offers a naturalistic account for Life, Mind, Soul, Sentience, Con-sciousness, and most other im-material features of the world”. He laments that “Our scientific theories have failed to explain what matters most to us : the place of meaning, purpose, and value in the physical world.” . . .

Post 71  01/29/2019

Deist versus
Buddhist
Enlightenment

David Hume never claimed to be a Deist. However, the Encyclo-pedia of Philosophy surmised : “There remain three positions open to Hume: atheist natura-ism, skeptical agnosticism, or some form of deism.” However, Alison Gopnik discovered that the famous skeptic had been exposed to Buddhist ideas . . .

Post 70  01/22/2019

Why Coin
Tech Terms?     

In the Enformationism thesis, and in the BothAnd Blog, I have coined a lot of new words (neologisms) as short-cuts to complex or unfamiliar concepts. The practice of using words that can't be found in a dictionary makes reading more of a challenge, and may seem pretentious. But, such coining is common  for scientific . . . .

Post 74  03/10/2019

Materialism
versus
Spiritualism     

The Enformationism worldview is a Quantum Era update to classical Spiritualism and Mater-ialism. By “classical”, I mean the period in antiquity of transition from emotional tribal myths to rational philosophical theories; for example, the Hellenic and Hebraic eras recorded in early literature & scripture . . . .

Post 75  03/27/2019

Information
Realism     

 Artificial Intelligence research-er, Kastrup, seems to be finding evidence to support the ancient philosophy of Idealism, which further weakens the equally venerable Atomic & Materialistic paradigms of modern science. He is the author of a book, The Idea of The World, which argues for the mental nature of  . . . .

Post 78  04/11/2019

Is Reality a
Simulation?     

 I recently came across a YouTube video of a presentation by space scientist Richard Terrile of his theory that our world is a computer simulation similar to that in the movie The Matrix. This is an idea that dates back at least to the Hindu concept of Maya, and Plato’s parable of The Cave. In the nineteenth century, . . . .

Post 80  04/20/2019

Information :
What is it?     

Originally, the word “inform-ation” referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural nets. . . .

Post 81  04/22/2019

Wall of Alienation
Religion v Science  The BothAnd philosophy is one of tolerance toward human diversity, including worldviews and religious beliefs. Global uniformity of belief on political & religious topics is a utopian dream, but probably not realizable in the foreseeable future. Some of my beliefs may be wrong, and some of yours too. . . .

Post 82  04/30/2019

Deism as a
Non-religion     

Deism is misunderstood as a non-theist alternative to trad-itional religions. It is based on belief in a transcendent power, similar in some ways to the imagined invisible gods of ancient theologies. But, being based on scientific facts1 and philosophical reasoning, rather than mythical fantasies, it is agnostic about the specific . . . .

Post 83  05/11/2019

Deism as an
Alternative to Atheism    

In a Quora forum exchange on the topic of Deism, one poster replied with a pertinent question : “But anyway what is the difference between Deism and Atheism. In effect the end product is exactly the same. So why be a Deist?” . . . Theists might classify Deists as Atheists who are hedging their bets. . . .

Post 84  05/16/2019

Disintegrating Democracy    

A Philosophy Now magazine fiction piece raised several issues regarding modern demo-cratic societies that seem relevant to the BothAnd philo-sophy. The short story pre-sented an encounter between a time-traveling (or dreaming) Sociology student and an early 20th century English Suffragette,