Category: Personal thoughts
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I've now watched five of the six episodes of season 1 of Catastrophe, an Amazon TV series available via streaming (free to Prime members). It's an intelligent single-camera sitcom about two strangers who hook up for a six-day fling, which results in an unplanned pregnancy – the catastrophe of the title. I like the show…
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Quite often on this blog we've talked about the transmission hypothesis, which can be expressed in various forms, but which always boils down to the idea that the brain is a medium by which consciousness interacts with the physical world. When the brain dies, consciousness continues, though it is no longer physically embodied. This is…
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I've been thinking more about what C.S. Lewis called The Problem of Pain – the fact that life on earth is so often painful and unpleasant. As Lewis himself pointed out, pain is a philosophical problem only if we approach the issue from a non-materialist standpoint. Materialism sees no intellectual conundrum in the existence – and…
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Yesterday I read The Monster of Florence: A True Story, by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. When I say I read it yesterday, I mean I consumed the entire 328 page book in one day, staying up well into the night to finish it. It's a real page turner that recounts a series of baffling…
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Somewhere in his lectures, William James discourses on the topic of live options. As I recall, he told his classroom of British university students that for many of them, whether or not they were religious, the resurrection of Jesus was a live option – meaning that they would at least take the idea seriously and…
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The mysteries of quantum physics have proved baffling to many people. I don't presume to have solved them, of course. But I do find there's a particular way of looking at them that can be helpful. It involves seeing quantum phenomena as directly analogous to the process of thought. It's pretty well known that a…
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I've been reading God's Undertaker, by John C. Lennox, a book arguing for "intelligent causation" – the idea that the universe and life are too irreducibly complex to have arisen by chance. Lennox, a professor of mathematics at Oxford who has debated Richard Dawkins, makes a powerful case that information lies at the heart of…
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In John C. Lennox's excellent book God's Undertaker (a philosophical and scientific critique of naturalism, which was recommended to me by Chris Carter), I encountered this quote from Robert Pirsig: When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion. I think I…
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Today I’m happy to present a guest post by Matt Rouge, a frequent commenter at this site. ==== Thank you, Michael, for having me guest-write for your blog. Considering the caliber of the host and commenters here, it is an honor. What inspired the invitation was this very interesting post back in July: Overthinking it.…
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Okay, so … bubbles. I find that I think of subjective experience (a redundant expression, actually, since all experience is subjective) as a big soap bubble. Each person’s private world is a separate bubble. All the bubbles constituting the subjective lives of different minds are floating together on (or in) a vast and deep sea…