Post 102 11/02/2019

Soul Out of
Body    

We don’t normally see or imagine our bodies from a top-down bird’s-eye perspective. Which is why Susan Blackmore entitled her book on out-of-body experiences with a reference to a common feature of such anomalous awareness. At the age of nineteen, while a student at Oxford University, she had a life-transforming occurrence . . .

Post 109 08/23/2020
Theory of
Enformed Systems  
In my own 2008 thesis of Enformationism, I coined the term “Enformy” from scratch, as a reference to the creative power of generic Information. Then, I recently found this paper on Hilgartner's Enformy webpage after I came across that rare word in a Google search.  I was not completely surprised though, to find that someone else had . . .

Post 106  02/16/2020

The Lucifer
Principle  

The Problem of Evil has plagued philosophers & theologians for centuries. In the Judeo-Christ-ian-Islamic traditions, God is often described as “good”, “merciful”, “loving”, “compas-sionate”, etc. And the creation story in Genesis de-scribes a perfect paradise that the creator himself described as perfect . . .

Post 103  9/14/2019

What Is
Information?   

The Enformationism thesis and the BothAnd Blog are based on a multi-level understanding of the phenomenon known as “Information”. Unfortunately, most people have only a vague or general concept of what the term means scientifically and philosophically. So, in answer to a request for a general defin-ition, as it “pertains to . . . .

Post 107  03/08/2020

The God Problem     

For Howard Bloom, the “problem of God” is that there is no God. So, how can we explain what he calls “cosmic creativ-ity”? By that, he means the on-going emergence of novelties in a supposedly mindless mech-anical system.  . . . led him to speculate on “how a universe designs itself”.

Post 101 10/22/2019

The True

Religion

For early humans, religion was simply a set of myths and traditions that were passed-along orally within the tribe. In any particular area of the world, their beliefs were as similar as their local conditions (ecology) were alike. Most traditions told simple stories of origins, history, and transmitted practical information (science) about . . .

Post 100 09/22/2019

Body, Soul, & Information     

Paul Davies picks-up where Quantum theorist Erwin Schrodinger left-off 77 years ago in his lecture series on the perennial question : What Is Life? As indicated by the subtitle, his answer is based on Claude Shannon’s technological Inform-ation Theory, developed around the same time as those physical & biological lectures on Life. . .

Post 104  10/28/2019

The Feeling of
Consciousness   

Like most neuroscientists, Christof Koch studied the Mind/Body Problem — the “hard problem” — by looking for the “neural correlates of conscious-ness”. But unlike most others, he has concluded that simple correlation between entities is not proof of causation. So he has looked for a more direct causal connection, . . . .

Post 105  12/15/2019

Interface :
Window to Reality     

In his doctrine of Transcend-ental Idealism, 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant argued that our perception of reality is limited to constructs created in our own minds to represent the invisible and intangible ultimate reality that he mysteriously labeled “ding an sich” (things-in-essence),  . . . .

Post 108  07/26/2020

The Evolution
of God   

Robert Wright has written best-selling books on philosophical, psychological, and theological topics — Non-Zero : The Logic of Human Destiny; The Moral Animal : Evolutionary Psych-ology and Everyday Life; and Three Scientists and Their Gods : Looking for Meaning in the Age of Information. So this 2010 publication seems to be  . . . .

Post 110  09/06/2020

Why Buddhism
is Enlightening    

In his previous book, The Evolution of God, Robert Wright made a surprising assertion for a self-described materialist : “The story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity” That term usually refers to supernatural beings, such as gods & angels. . . .

Post 111  10/12/2020

Probability of God

Invigorated by this emotion-grounded belief system, he decided to apply his rational mathematical methods to decide the god-question once and for all. “We can then incorporate the probability of God into everyday decisions with the comfort of knowing that we are behaving rationally, as the numbers dictate”. . . .

Post 112  12/01/2020

Consciousness an Illusion?

In his New York Review of Books article on Daniel Den-nett’s 2017 opus, From Bacteria to Bach and Back : The Evolu-tion of Minds, fellow philosopher Thomas Nagel sums up Den-nett’s “grand project of disen-chantment of the human world” as merely the latest in a series, . . . . of his attempts to free humanity from its “illusions”. . .

Post 113  01/08/2021

Aristotle and
Einstein

 Edward Feser is a secular Philosopher, not a Theologian. But his worldview seems to be focused through the lens of Catholic theology, and in particular Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics. He is secular in the sense that he accepts modern theories of Natural Evolution and Quantum Mechanics . . . .

Post 114  02/16/2021

Introduction to
Enformationism

The Enformationism hypothesis is proposed as a possible update for the fruitful, but aging, para-digm of Materialism. However, since some form of matter-first physicalism is still the default model for the empirical sciences, this philosophical thesis is merely a personal worldview. . . . .