In the backstory of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe is an event called the Butlerian Jihad, a human revolt against “thinking machines.” Herbert himself provided few details of the Jihad in his books but the idea of a future without computers is foundational to many of the themes in his stories. The underlying philosophical justification for the Jihad, as later recorded in one of the Dune universe’s core religious texts, the Orange Catholic Bible, reads as follows: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” Though Herbert provided little other information in the six original Dune novels, it is clear that, in the universe of his stories, artificial intelligence had become a catastrophic problem for humanity. Now at the edge of advances in technology which have made artificial intelligence a reality, we have some questions to ask about what that means for us as humans.
Category: philosophy
Science, Religion, and the Reality of the Unseen
Cajete’s Native science has as much to tell us about religion as it does about modern Western science. For Cajete and for many of the indigenous peoples of the world, the entire universe is in process. Everything is in constant flux: the material world, our lives within it, and even the divine itself are all shifting, changing, evolving.
Science and Religion
The Nye-Ham debate is emblematic of the broader relationship between science and religion. These two fields of discourse are generally perceived as being both fully disjunct and largely in conflict with one another. Certainly, science and religion do come into conflict—the Young Earth creationist claim and the scientific consensus claim about the age of the Earth cannot both be correct—but the relationship between the two fields of discourse is generally more complex than that and, while conflicts do arise, I don’t see them as being necessary or intrinsic to either science or religion.
Quantum Mechanics and the Problems of Scientific Explanation
I’ll open by summarizing my opinions on science: It’s good that science be trusted by the general public because science warrants that trust. As I said earlier, that’s a trust that I intend to defend over the course of these essays. That said, popular beliefs in the nature of science, scientific progress, scientific knowledge, scientific method, and the like, are generally very dogmatic, inaccurate, and at times approach an unwarranted degree of near-religious reverence.
An Answer to the Pathologies of Ideology
Photo by Stillness InMotion on Unsplash This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm In the first two parts of this month’s series, I’ve explored what I’ve referred to as the pathologies of human ideology, those aspects of human ideology with a strong potential to turn their ideologies toxic. With an emphasis on their manifestation in religion,…
Nihilism
I’ve never pinned down what exactly I mean by nihilism in anything more than a cursory way. This episode will remedy that deficiency and explore why nihilism, such as I construe it, is a pathological ideology.
Dogma and Hegemony
This month’s series will largely be a continuation of the November series, which was originally planned to be an exposition of some of the problematic aspects of religion.
Against Antireligious Atheism
Let’s start, as usual, by defining our terms. I think, first of all, that many different kinds of people who hold to many different kinds of belief systems can potentially be atheists, so I try not to posit anything beyond the minimum I can get away with. So typically I understand atheist to mean nonbelief in any gods. The many potential meanings of the word “god” complicate the issue considerably, but ultimately the atheist will claim that they don’t believe that anything that could be called “God” or “a god” or “a goddess” or anything like that exists. This does not necessarily equate to an affirmative belief that such things do not exist, but is rather, at the minimum, the absence of an affirmative belief that they do exist.
What Is Religion?
Do American Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same god? Nominally, at least, the answer seems to be an obvious yes: I think Americans whose religion falls into the Abrahamic tradition in general identify their god as being the same god worshipped by other such Americans. But in practical terms, that may not be the case; even American Christians may functionally believe in a different god than other American Christians.
Contemporary Magic Practices
I’ve generated five stipulative definitions for magic: stage magic is a performative art in which neither performer nor audience truly believes that magic is taking place; magic proper is what we find in fictional accounts such as Harry Potter; type N pseudomagic describes real phenomena outside of present scientific models which could be studied, explained, and understood, but which have not been; type K pseudomagic describes real phenomena which are magic-like in character and which are explained by present scientific models; and type P pseudomagic is magic performed for the purpose of creating some personal psychological effect. Type K pseudomagic does indeed exist, with electromagnetism being an example. The potential existence and nature of pseudomagics type N and P will be explored in this essay.