Stanley Fish takes on the
similarities and differences between scientific and religious evidence and gets a barrage of responses,
to which he replies.
Michael K. declares that “the equivalence between the methodological premises of scientific inquiry and those of religious doctrine is simply false.” I agree, but I do not assert it. Neither do I assert that because there are no “impersonal standards and impartial procedures … all standards and procedures are equivalent” (E.). What I do assert is that with respect to a single demand — the demand that the methodological procedures of an enterprise be tethered to the world of fact in a manner unmediated by assumptions — science and religion are in the same condition of not being able to meet it (as are history, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and all the rest).
posted by shivohum
on Apr 10, 2012 -
259 comments
Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion:
Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson's repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions.
[ . . . ]
But Ehrsson's unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.
[ . . . ]
Ehrsson's work also intrigues neuroscientists and philosophers because it turns a slippery, metaphysical construct — the self — into something that scientists can dissect.
posted by troll
on Jan 3, 2012 -
23 comments
Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up of "
soul dust": "a kind of theatre... an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads." But just as that theatre is directed by the relationship between language and matter,
it is also undermined by it. It all depends how you think it.
posted by 0bvious
on Feb 4, 2011 -
17 comments
"You turned into a cat! A SMALL
cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED!
A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology?
How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?" McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. "Magic."
Eliezer Yudkowsky —
rationalist,
AI pontificator and
singularitarian — writes
Harry Potter fan fiction.
(previously)
posted by teraflop
on Apr 6, 2010 -
67 comments
First Person Plural. "An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?"
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Oct 25, 2008 -
27 comments
Correlative Analytics -- or as O'Reilly might term the
Social Graph -- sort of mirrors the debate on 'brute force'
algorithmic proofs (that are "
true for no reason,"
cf.) in which "computers can extract patterns in this ocean of data that no human could ever possibly detect. These patterns are correlations. They may or may not be
causative, but we can learn new things. Therefore they accomplish what science does, although not in the traditional manner... In this part of science, we may get answers that work, but which we don't understand. Is this partial understanding? Or
a different kind of
understanding?" Of course, say some in the scientific community:
hogwash; it's just a fabrication of scientifically/statistically illiterate pundits, like whilst new techniques in
data analysis are being developed to help keep ahead of the deluge...
posted by kliuless
on Jul 21, 2008 -
40 comments
Fate, Absolute Life and Death, the Aleph, the Zeitgeist, the sinking of the Atlantis, the
World Trade Center, the formation of the universe...what more could you want from art? There's probably already been a been a post on this guy, Paul Laffoley, but I should hope more people could get a glance at some of
this man's work. Crazy or brilliant, you make your decision. A
video from his website.
posted by moonbizcut
on Aug 31, 2007 -
24 comments
Prof. Daniel Dennett's (New York University, Philosophy) new book
Breaking the Spell appears to have frightened its
NYT book reviewer,
Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic, Literary Editor). Wieselter claims "The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question", and promptly proceeds to demonstrate that he himself knows nothing about philosophy.
Dennett responds.
Prof. Brian Leiter (University of Texas, Philosophy)
responds that "'The view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical' is not a 'superstition' but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual expanding success of the sciences . . . during the last hundred years."
b l o g
s s and
serious reviews.
posted by jeffburdges
on Mar 7, 2006 -
142 comments
3quarksdaily. Just another blog, sure, but a good one. 3quarksdaily is a filter blog much like our very own, but with only 15 users (and an editor). As they say on their about page
"On this website, my guest authors and editors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating." The do an admirable job.
posted by panoptican
on Dec 6, 2005 -
26 comments
"Almost half the children committed one or more of these mistakes. They attempted with apparent seriousness to perform the same actions with the miniature items that they had with the large ones. Some sat down on the little chair: they walked up to it, turned around, bent their knees and lowered themselves onto it. Some simply perched on top, others sat down so hard that the chair skittered out from under them. Some children sat on the miniature slide and tried to ride down it, usually falling off in the process; others attempted to climb the steps, causing the slide to tip over. (With the chair and slide made of sturdy plastic and only about five inches tall, the toddlers faced no danger of hurting themselves.)"
posted by Tlogmer
on Aug 18, 2005 -
34 comments
Did the discovery of evolution lead to Darwin's agnosticism, as
claimed? Carl Zimmer
wonders. More importantly, can evolution be
reconciled with Christianity?
posted by daksya
on Aug 11, 2005 -
90 comments
