We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge [...]
I’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff [...]
God has shaped a thing-like world out of more basic stuff. I’ve discussed this in various ways, especially in the category: Christian in the Universe of Einstein. We human beings form our minds by responding actively to that world and by penetrating to understandings of that more basic stuff. A particular thing is a manifestation [...]
Ten years ago, I’d read a book about the modern understanding of human color vision: A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki, a prominent neuroscientist. This book also provides a summary of the history of theories of color vision. Recently, I realized this subject provides a good example of why there is no knowledge [...]
Americans who claim to be traditionalist Catholics are fighting on two sides holding irreconcilable views on the most fundamental of questions, such as “What is man?” and “What is truth?”. Most seem oblivious to the battle though they stand in the middle, one sword in their right hands to slash at their own left sides [...]
Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we [...]
In the January, 2009 issue of Brain in the news ( The Dana Foundation), there’s an interesting article, In Search of the God Neuron, by Steven Rose which reviews some recent books on the alleged problem of mind and brain. The reviewed books include several that take a materialistic position and one that takes a [...]
There’s little or no reason to believe there is any ‘mind-stuff’, material or supernatural, unless you simply wish to dogmatically assert that matter isn’t adequate as the foundation of our thoughts and feelings. Brain-scientists, geneticists, and evolutionary theorists are researching the workings of the human mind (and human nature more generally) and are producing remarkable [...]
I really don’t know much about neural networks which are organized in space and certainly can’t make much comment upon the discovery that they can be organized through “multiple timescales” as well, yet, I’m hardly surprised. See this article, Robots Show That Brain Activity Is Linked To Time As Well As Space, for a summary [...]
Nearly ten years ago, I wrote the first version of a dark comedy (sample chapters can be downloaded from A Man for Every Purpose) in which the protagonist, a formerly respectable professor of philosophy, seems to be in a rather confused state of mind. I’ll ruin part of the surprise, assuming it’s ever published in [...]