— 1 — Hullo all and Merry Christmas! I’m home with my family, looking forward to Chinese food and a movie. It seemed like a fun time to share some traditions of my atheist family Christmas. — 2 — On Christmas Eve, some folks read “Twas the Night before Christmas” aloud as a family. At my parents’ house, we read David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries (his essay about his job as an elf in Macy’s Christmas wonderland). We pass the book along in... Read more
— 1 — — 2 — I haven’t read Hitchens’s god is Not Great (though I did beat everyone else in DC to the library to grab Hitch-22 yesterday). Possibly because of my age, I didn’t learn about Hitchens in the context of atheism, I knew him as one of the people on the wrong side of the Iraq war debate. Hitchens was a brilliant writer, but his didn’t always marshall them for good cause. I didn’t have any particularly... Read more
Sorry for the delay in posting. I’ve been wrapped up finishing the final exams/programming assignments for the distance learning classes I’ve been taking from Stanford on Machine Learning and AI. If you want to register to take any of the Spring offerings, you can check the listings here (scroll to the bottom). Anyway, it’s left me in a mood for some science sniping. I’m coming down on the side of Marc from Bad Catholic when he complains about the overhyped... Read more
Ok, here comes part two of my reply to Mark Shea’s post about New Atheism’s War Kinetic Military Action on Christmas. Part one focused on the reasons you might want to think twice before you complain a group hasn’t been victimized enough by a crime to be entitled to be upset. Now, on to the specific tactic of resolving those disputes in court. If you hate the lawsuits, change the law It’s one thing to contend that declaring a statewide... Read more
I think Mark Shea meant to give me a compliment, but if you read his post today, I sound like the atheist equivalent of a Fox News!democrat — the kind of Judas you can point to and say “even atheists think X has gone too far.” So let me take a moment to talk about some of the church-state lawsuits that are a traditional part of the holiday season. The discussion was sparked by an Arizona lawsuit in which the... Read more
After a week of talking about transhumanism, brain-hacking, and the persistence of identity, I couldn’t pass up a chance to comment on Brian Appleyard’s slam on using science to improve people’s moral character. Moral enhancement cannot be a scientific project because neither term has any measurable meaning that can be universalised. Rather, it is an ideological project which would hand power to an oligarchy of neuropharmacologists who would be permitted to decide that somebody – probably them – had the... Read more
— 1 — This has been a very transhumanist week. First there was a question about whether we should want to be uploaded to computers and then a discussion of how conversion (and/or brainmodding) is a process of being born again, but the first step is dying. I’ve got one more transhumanist/identity post in the hopper for the weekend, but, in the mean time, you may want to head to the National Catholic Register to see some more discussion of... Read more
It’s a week of tough questions about transhumanism. After reading my post on moral hazard for uploaded humans, Gilbert asked: OK, so people value other people based on some kind of proximity function. In practice they instinctively use some evaluation procedure that generalizes badly to modern situations (where interactions can be more remote) and even worse* to uploads. Perhaps a bit like different polynomials may be functionally identical on some finite fields but not on others so that using the... Read more
Last week, I was ragging on people who deny meaning in this life or put all their focus on a questionable world to come, and deisach wondered in the comments if I might havc neglected the beam in my own eye: “the idea of enlightenment as total disregard for the world you live in” May I ask, how does this apply to your support for transhumanism (as I think you said you support it)? Pardon me if my notion is... Read more
It looks like my use of slang has gotten us all into philosophical trouble. When I was responding to Ross Douthat’s difficult thought experiment, I summarized the logic of Jennifer Fulwiler (and several other Christian converts I know) as follows: God is not real Atheism logically requires nihilism Nihilism sucks so bad it can’t be true You can’t believe all three at once, and Ms. Fulwiler jettisoned proposition one. I meant to have a fight about the second principle, but... Read more
Unequally Yoked
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In