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Our Brain is a Car
I’m going to try to lay out what my personal ‘Philosophy of Mind ‘ is. Most of this has been hacked together from a mix of Psychology and Philosophy classes, years of reading articles, and my own subjective experience. As such, it’s going to be fairly light on links and references. On the other hand,…
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Your Food Is Killing You!!!
Sometimes terrible things (for a certain value of ‘terrible’) make their way onto your Facebook feed, and sometimes it’s important to dissect them, to display their entirely non-functional innards to the world. To proclaim “Really? I mean, really? You believed this?” In a transparent attempt to latch on to the general list-mania that Buzzfeed and others use…
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On Epistemology
This is my position on epistemology. Actually not just my position, but the position held by many people. While the route taken to this judgement is uniquely mine, the judgement itself (if not this exact expression of that judgement) is shared by many others the world over. I’m going to deal with a few notions,…
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Implications of Intelligent Design
I’ve gotten involved in a fairly lengthy discussion of Intelligent Design on reddit as a result of posting my review of Darwin’s Doubt there. Most of the discussion has centred around a couple of key points, that my interlocutors seem to insist on repeating, ad nauseum. The first point is the inherent implausibility of Evolutionary Theory…
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Review: Darwin’s Doubt
An acquaintance suggested I do a review of Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen C. Meyer. My approach here will seem odd to folk who are opposed to creationism Intelligent Design being taught in high schools, as their approach is usually to attack the biology-related claims in the book. And it’s fair to say that there’s a lot…
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What’s Up With Methodological Naturalism?
If you listen to creationists like Stephen C Meyer, and other members of the Discovery Institute, you’ll eventually hear them go on at great length about “methodological naturalism”, and that it’s a cornerstone dogma of science, and that it’s bad and wrong and an unfair arbitrary standard that even scientific theories aren’t held to. This…
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Data Underdetermines Our Hypotheses.
One of the big ideas to come out of Philosophy of Science is that of Underdetermination. The folk-science view of things is that if you have a collection of facts, then those facts (all neatly tied together) will point at a conclusion. It may be objected that this is an extremely viewpoint, and that’s also…
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Two philosophers walk into a bar…
This is primarily a response to commenters asking for my own opinion on the origin of the universe. If this is not your bag, I beg your patience, and suggest you skip on to Crommunist’s and Edwin’s most excellent discussions. This is written in two parts. First, I’m going to outline the general philosophical discussion…
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Science vs Philosophy
Recently, a number of people have opened their mouth to deride Philosophy. Notably, they tend to be people who are well-placed academics such as Krauss and Dawkins. Likewise, Atheistlogic has stuck their oar in too, though much more articulately. Atheistlogic spells out the general objection quite well, I think, so I’m going to focus on…
