Posted in anthropology, philosophy, science on Nov 30th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve added Three-Toed Sloth to the blogroll. It’s written by Cosma Shalizi, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. His research interests don’t at all dovetail with my own; to whit: “Information theory; nonparametric prediction of time series; learning theory and nonlinear dynamics; stochastic automata, state space and hidden Markov models; causation and prediction; large deviations and […]
Posted in phenomenology, pseudo-science, science on Jun 17th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been trudging through the commentaries on Behe and his new book. This is exhausting. I know how it ends.
In a nutshell, Behe has accepted all but the remarkable causal supposition of modern evolutionary explanation. This rejected supposition in sum is that the natural evolutionary mechanics, especially random mutation, are commensurate with the results of […]
Posted in critical thinking, pseudo-science, science on Jun 1st, 2007 1 Comment »
The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.
It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in […]
Posted in biology, contradictions, science on Feb 13th, 2007 No Comments »
Interesting article about a scientist and creationist. New York Times: Believing Scripture But Playing By Science’s Rules
But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist†— he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 […]
Posted in Arthur Young, anthropology, outsider research, philosophy, resources, science, transformative learning on Aug 17th, 2006 No Comments »
Arthur M. Young wrote two little read albeit influential and (to me) essential books, both published in 1976: The Geometry of Meaning and The Reflexive Universe. Along with the alchemical writings of C.G.Jung, they are the most important contemporary books about quaternity and ‘anthropo’ process. Young/Jung’s research inform SQ1’s model of exploratory learning; this is […]
Posted in anthropology, biology, history, science on Aug 11th, 2006 No Comments »
The essence of Mithen’s cathedral metaphor — that closed-off sectors of mental life became open to integration, cumulative speculation, and enthusiastic discovery — is most compelling. It surely describes a quantum leap in the flexibility and scope of consciousness that does, indeed, make sense of the cultural explosion of the period 40k to 10k, B.P. […]
Posted in Gregory Bateson, coherencies, consciousness, critical culture, modern views, new paradigms, philosophy, science, sociology on Jul 18th, 2006 No Comments »
Yeah, What Bateson said.
From a Batesonian perspective, it is the way we classify, make distinctions, and make sense of things that is fundamental. If it is the distinctions we ourselves make that are causes, then it is how we process information and map the territory that explains. Within this framework, any explanation or scientific activity […]
Posted in charlatanry, consciousness, new paradigms, philosophy, science on Jan 21st, 2006 No Comments »
“Now this is called the “quantum measurement paradox.” It is a paradox because who are we to do this conversion? Because after all, in the materialist paradigm we don’t have any causal efficacy. We are nothing but the brain, which is made up of atoms and elementary particles. So how can a brain which is […]
Posted in cognitive psychology, consciousness, outsider research, psychology, science, spirituality on Nov 22nd, 2005 No Comments »
Dana Gaynor’s The Journal of Psychospiritual Transformation has some fairly ‘hard’ minded articles about its subject matter. For example, on the contents page of vol.1 you’ll find an article by Charles Tart, “An Emergent Interactionist Understanding of Human Consciousness”. It exemplifies this qualification. On Tart’s site is the best itemization of credible parapsychology resources.
Andrew Cohen’s […]
Posted in biology, charlatanry, philosophy, pseudo-science, science on Oct 16th, 2005 2 Comments »
The essential humorous take on the evolution non-controversy has quickly passed into legendary status on the internet. Of course I’m speaking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its infinite creative unraveling as both parody and pastadigm. The Verganza site is worthy of any and all attention the reader with a sense of humor can deploy. […]
Posted in philosophy, science on Jul 15th, 2005 No Comments »
Wendy L. Freeman pops a killer koan at the head of this very good article by Chris Clark.
Not only do we know more about the universe, but our understanding is deeper, and the questions that we are asking are more profound. Still, our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe has not yet […]
Posted in biology, coherencies, science on Apr 10th, 2005 No Comments »
Steve Strogatz’s public lecture Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, is a good introduction to material found in detail in his very fine book of the same title. His work interests me for its possible applications to the study of the organization of learning. It doesn’t match up rigorously, yet, but there is some […]
Posted in biology, philosophy, pseudo-science, science on Mar 30th, 2005 No Comments »
Ken Miller desolves Phillip E. Johnson in this exchange of letters about intelligent design. Johnson is, in my estimation, the worst philosopher who has ever descended from primitive primates. But his inability to fit together his propositions logically is not as pathetic as the content of those propositions.
PBS.NOVA How Did We Get Here (1996)
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