AI and the Dehumanization of Man
Strong Artificial Intelligence is the idea that computers can one day be constructed that have the abilities of the human mind. The contrast is with narrow AI…
Evolution 2.0 by Perry Marshall
Materialism and the mechanistic world-view – the idea that the everything is a machine operating in terms of mindless, mechanical forces – has severe nihilistic implications. An…
Nikolai Berdyaev: the Primacy of Freedom
For the Russian philosopher Berdyaev, freedom is absolutely fundamental. And freedom is connected with subjectivity and Spirit, rather than the objective (measurable) external world. All attempts to…
Berdyaev: Why God and the Person Must be the Highest Ideal
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) is a Russian religious existential philosopher who devoted much of his writing to the topics of spirit and freedom. Berdyaev recognizes that freedom is…
Reconciling Plato and Berdyaev via the Phaedrus
Analytic philosophy is by the far the dominant tradition in the English-speaking world and many countries in Europe at this point, with a handful of “continental” schools,…
Morality and Intuitions of Metaphysical Truths
No matter which class I am teaching, for quite some time the first reading assigned has been an article on Goedel’s Theorem. The reason is to emphasize…
Can Evolutionary Biology and Naturalism Provide a Foundation for Morality?
Naturalism, physicalism, and materialism are synonyms. They are names for a truncated metaphysics that omits any notion of transcendence and divinity. Someone might try to take dualism…
The Gift – Marcel Mauss and René Girard
Gifts are universal. Every culture on Earth has and will always exchange gifts. The effect of gifts is to tie people together; to connect them. This is…
René Girard – Imitation and Life Without God
In preparation for teaching a literature course in the 1950s, René Girard reread some of the classic novels. In the process, he realized that the novelists had…
Is God Omniscient?
The Person shares in the Divine as being made in the image of God. We too are free. We are co-creators with God; He in His macrocosm…
Ex Machina: A Story of Chaste Love Murdered by the Ending
Alan Turing invented the ideational basis of modern computers with his concept of a universal machine. The machine had a write/erase head and a strip of paper…
Consciousness: What is It and Where is it Found?
It is a common-place assumption that brains generate consciousness. The fact that brain damage, drug use, sleep deprivation, etc., impair thinking seems to confirm the brain’s generative…
Mystery and Order; The Right and Left Hemispheres
In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist writes that a creature like a bird needs two types of consciousness simultaneously. It needs to be able to…
The Illogicality of Determinism – Further Considerations
In “The Illogicality of Determinism," I point out the absurdity and contradictions of arguing for determinism.¹ The sheer pointlessness of the exercise is staggering. The “determined” arguer…
The Illogicality of Determinism
Physical determinism is the notion that all events, including thoughts and actions, are the result of cause and effect. Each effect is the result of a prior…