Futurism, Absurdism, Classical Liberalism
Among the Abrahamic religions, multiple arguments have been put forward by philosophers and theologians to prove the existence of God. I’m an atheist and don’t think any of these arguments are convincing. In this post – the first in a series I will do concerning the existence of God – I will demonstrate why I personally don’t think these philosophical arguments are very convincing.
Continue reading “God Does Not Exist: Philosophical Arguments”
Cartesian dualism has been a point of contention in philosophy since at least, well, Descartes. The dispute is whether the mind is a separate, immaterial entity from the physical body. Problems have plagued the dualist view since the time of Descartes, primarily how it is that the immaterial mind and material body interact.
Can propositional beliefs (belief about the truth or falsehood of a that P statement) be held without it influencing behavior? It’s difficult to say whether a belief is really a belief if it doesn’t change behavior, or if beliefs, by their very nature, necessarily change behavior. I think one can argue that a belief is more justified if it changes behavior in a particular way. That is what I’ll discuss here.
Understanding how consciousness and the mind is generated is best done using the bottom-up approach of neuroscience, but if the consciousness/mind is performing recursive, downwardly causal actions on the Lockean Ideas – the content of thinking/cognition – then what are the mental mechanisms being utilized? Here I present some nascent ideas for your consideration.
Continue reading “Categories of Understanding, Qualia, and the Operations of Intuition”
I’ve been reading a bit of Scholastic and Islamic Golden Age philosophy – namely Thomas Aquinas and Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (Avicenna). In those times, people were obsessed with two things: the Greek philosophers (Plato, the neoplatonists, and Aristotle) and being able to reconcile the Grecian ontology with their monotheistic, Abrahamic religion. It’s interesting to read their philosophy, but I was wondering if it had any relevance to modern philosophy.
Voltaire once said that “if God didn’t exist we would have to invent him.” Our imaginations are, of course, limited by our evolutionary past. To us, God has to be human-like. God must be benevolent, meaning it’s actions must seek to benefit humans. Why wouldn’t we invent a God like that? We are human-centered by our very nature. We feel that we deserve our self-designated special place in the universe.
Consciousness and qualia are problems that are still unsolved by philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. My way of viewing consciousness and qualia is that consciousness is the process by which our brains organize the world into working models and qualia is the ‘stuff’ that consciousness uses to generate those models. For better or worse, both of these exist due to evolutionary forces. That means they’re fine tuned to a very specific sort of survival, not for any pure understanding of the world or ourselves. In order to understand the limitations of our own minds, we need to know the inner workings of how the world is organized in our minds on a fundamental level. That requires knowing the structure of our minds.
In this post, I am going to write a response/review of Jordan Peteron’s 2017 lecture titled Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God, which is available to watch on Youtube.
Continue reading “Jordan Peterson and God: Truth, Myth, and the Bible”
Video trailer for the sequel to Incarnate: Existence
Following the events in Incarnate: Existence, the handful of desperate freedom fighters known as the forty-eights, led by an immortal being who is reincarnated every time they die, are indelibly transformed by what happened. Beset by violent insurgents, mounting corporate influences, frantic ideological governments, and a group of zealous hackers known as the Anonymous Knights, our protagonist attempts to hold the forty-eights together, even as their own mind seems to be coming apart. Propelled into an unfamiliar future where advanced technology can alter the very genetics of a human being, where the scourge of a new drug called Shift threatens to become an epidemic, and where global conspiracies endeavor to steer the tides of destiny, our protagonist will continue seeking answers to their own puzzling existence as a possible way to ensure a better future for humanity. In this second installment of the five part Incarnate series, old and new allies join our protagonist, no matter what body they come to inhabit. In Incarnate: Essence, success is grim, but failure is not an option.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @AuthorTomHarper
Liberalism, defined here in the classical sense of the enlightenment values of civil liberty and economic freedom, not a narrow left-leaning ideology, holds individual freedom above all else. In the U.S. both the left and right, except on the extremes of both, fall into the classical liberalism philosophy. Ideas that could be considered pre-cursors to liberalism began developing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. But it was the American Revolution and French Revolution that put liberalism into practice. That means the experiment has been running for a little over two hundred years. Can we draw any conclusions from the results?
Continue reading “The Liberal Experiment: Are the Results In?”
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted into other forms of energy – for example, if you slap the wall, the mechanical energy that goes into the slap is converted into the energy needed to produce sound. With Einstein’s famous equation E=mc^2 it is easy to see that conservation of energy translates into conservation of matter.
This dictum applies to the physical reality that we inhabit. But what about the individual that experiences this physical reality? What is the mind?
Continue reading “Quiet Contemplations Questioning Consciousness”
