I stumbled on an excellent article nominally about Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe but really about the Enlightenment debates about the supernatural; how we reconcile the two ways of knowing. Crusoe at the Crossroads/On Robinson Crusoe, Lost, and why we keep returning to mysterious islands where science blurs with the supernatural. It’s at […]
Read more...Author: Albert
The Judge
Here are a few themes of Blood Meridian, subtitled The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy. The character Holden, called “the judge” is Mephistophelean, and at the end is revealed as the devil himself. His chief attribute is that he is the accuser, as with the preacher at the beginning, the expriest Tobin […]
Read more...Uploaded Mind?
What do you think of this? In an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, Princeton Neuroscience professor Michael S.A. Graziano asserts “the day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer . . . .” The title of the piece asks rhetorically “will […]
Read more...More Than Machines
I recommend The New Story of Science by Robert Augros and George Stanciu. It was first published in 1984, and that makes it prescient, given the more recent debates between theism and atheism. The central premise is that there is an Old Story of science, and a New Story. The Old Story is tied […]
Read more...Power Struggle
I sit up and pay attention when Roger Scruton speaks. He recently considered the significance of the worldview evinced in books by Uval Noah Harari, who is a biological determinist in the same vein as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Harari acknowledges the philosophical consequences of the humanist rejection of transcendent truth. He goes a step […]
Read more...The Dismal Tide
“Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” This line is spoken in the early scenes of No Country for Old Men, a Coen Brothers movie that’s been out for 10-plus years now. I saw […]
Read more...The Back Row
I read a bunch of reviews of Chris Arnade’s recent book Dignity before picking it up myself and they often remark upon the objective and nonjudgmental approach Arnade takes. He’s purposely encountering people we might think of as down and out, to try to understand them. One of his conclusions is that a major […]
Read more...Normal Man
Here is some imagery suggested by Roberto Calasso in his book The Unnamable Present. He speaks of secularists, modern people who oppose religion in public but more importantly feel for themselves no religious orientation. The type of person is not new, Calasso says, but has always existed as a “perpetual shadow” to another type of […]
Read more...Etiolated Language II
In Etiolated Language I suggested that writers and speakers sometimes confusingly use words for Christian concepts in non-Christian or even explicitly materialist contexts. Use of the words analogously then blends into a new, replacement meaning, leaving us with no word for the original meaning. My point was that this can interfere with understanding of what Christianity […]
Read more...AI and Consciousness
Advances in artificial intelligence are of interest because of what they may say about consciousness. If a machine can acquire human-like sentience, does that mean consciousness is entirely an emergent property of brain functioning? If so, it would arguably eliminate human consciousness as a phenomenon that proves God’s existence. All the more reason, then, that we […]
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