Posts Tagged ‘ Reality ’

In my last post on natural law, I focused on how changing minor “precepts” might make tremendous impacts on our theological understandings. I used cosmological models from general relativity to illustrate the point. Today, I want to look at things a little less, well, cosmically,  and review how changing scientific “precepts” over the last few [...]

Mormonism comes with its own science. So does any brand of mainstream Christianity, but many such Christians are unaware of how their creeds embed the assumptions of the “scientists” and mathematicians of antiquity. They can consequently perform a mental jujitsu of preserving the religious idea as metaphor for modern times while ignoring the fact that [...]

Community of Christ does not follow its LDS cousins in having secret temple rituals. So I read last week’s post by Bored in Vernal, on the “Sacred Embrace As Five Points of Fellowship” with the curiosity of one who has never even been inside an LDS Temple. Much of the terminology was unfamiliar to me [...]

In my last post I gave some definitions of Autonomy, Intelligence, and Consciousness and discussed some possible implications with the intent of further discussing artificial intelligence. In this post, we’re going to dive a bit deeper into consciousness, and set the stage for a discussion of how conscious robots might emerge. Consciousness in Philosophy In [...]

Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground in past posts. The problem with this ‘Reason as a Guide to Reality’ series of posts is that they build on concepts from past posts. It’s easy to get lost in all the concepts. So let’s do a quick review of past ideas and build up the principles [...]

In my last post, I declared victory for Scientific Realism over Positivism on the grounds that even if Positivism is right, it’s first “prediction” must always be that we ignore it as “truth” – at least to some degree – and be committed to our theories a “the truth” or else we can’t make scientific [...]

In my last post I quoted Stephen Hawking’s defense of Positivism. He even goes so far as to suggest that there is no all encompassing view of reality but instead only “a family of interconnected theories, each describing its own version of reality…” (p. 70) But accepting Positivism as the true nature of reality has [...]

In my last post I finished comparing Popper and Kuhn and again concluded that there really isn’t much difference between the two other than on the issue of Scientific Realism vs. Positivism. That is to say, Popper believes that science actually discovers theories close and closer to the truth whereas Kuhn believes it becomes more [...]

.            ”…Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Matt. 7:14 KJV Well, that’s the way it works at the macroscopic level, anyway.  When you get down among the weeds, things are a lot more complicated. However [...]

In my last post I reviewed Kuhn’s ideas on how the growth of scientific knowledge takes place. I found that, contrary to popular belief, Kuhn and Popper have more in common than they have different. Both deny all the popular notions of science as being based primarily around use of observation to refute the current [...]

In my last post on Wheat and Tares, I wrote somewhat glowingly of Popper’s epistemology based on Conjecture and Refutation. In a post on Millennial Star I even went so far as to explain why I felt there were some touch points between conjecture and refutation and the Gospel. To summarize, Popper believes all knowledge [...]

As discussed in my last post, if science can’t be justified by inductive reasoning, how do we justify it? Popper’s own epistemology (i.e. theory of how we gain knowledge) is based around conjecture and refutation. All knowledge is gained by starting with conjecture. Interestingly, inductive reason does seem to play a role in this. As [...]

In my last post I argued that, contrary to popular belief, science is not actually about observation. Here I wish to taken an aside and discuss two of the main competing schools of epistemology (i.e. the theory of how we gain knowledge). The traditional view of science was founded by Francis Bacon. This school of [...]

In previous posts I responded (or gave other people’s responses anyhow) to the ideas that science is primarily about prediction, Reductionism, or Holism. In those ideas we found some truth, but not the whole truth. Another common point of view is that science is really about observation. Related to this is the idea that science [...]

…the chameleonic nature of numbers [is] so rich and complex that numerical patterns have the flexibility to mirror any other kind of pattern. (Douglas Hoftsadter in I am a Strange Loop, p. 159) In my last post, I discussed the point of view known as ‘reductionism’ and the problems with that point of view. In [...]

Science is the process of how we use reason to find patterns in reality and then to explain them in finite explanations of reality that allow us to represent reality via processes that are computable. In my last post, I introduced David Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality. Deutsch’s main interest is in understanding – [...]

In my last post I considered Physicist John Barrow’s view of what science is: So we find that Barrow’s view of science is that it is the process of how we use reason to find patterns in reality and then to algorithmically compress them into finite steps and formula that allow us to represent reality [...]

In a previous post I showed how to calculate PI and made the point that purely mental concepts, like PI, actually do exist. Also, don’t miss this post on M* where I considered how to use math to measure the earth and the moon – a power once associated with Divinity. Now I want you [...]

Did you ever hear the one about the dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac? He stayed up all night wondering if there really was a dog. Like many people, I’m curious about the nature of reality and really do sometimes stay up all night wondering about… well, just about anything. A while back I wrote this post about [...]