Category Archives: Rationalism

Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.

Then he [the devil] took him [Jesus] up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, "I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me." Jesus said to him in reply, "It is written: You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone you shall serve."

The Gospel of Saint Luke, 4:5-8

AFTER years of contagion across the globe and days of carnage in Ukraine, Catholics needed no ashes crossed on their foreheads last Wednesday to remind them that they were dust and to dust they shall return. Nor was the Lenten message of sin, atonement and forgiveness needing much explanation to see its relevance to the headlines.

Indeed, the March 6 Sunday Mass Gospel reading from Saint Luke, excerpted above, recounting the three temptations of Jesus after his baptism, may well resonate with believers pondering Russia's invasion and fasting for peace in Europe, now caught in the crossfire of bullets and bombs, sanctions and accusations.

How did all this bloody mess happen? Geopolitics and diplomacy experts can spin out intricate analyses and timelines plotting how Russian President Vladimir Putin began with subtle warnings, then brandished threats and troops, and finally unleashed his divisions after dialogue did not get him the security assurances Russia demanded.

But the triple blandishments of the tempter may well tell the story of how Russians went from Slavic brothers of neighboring Ukrainians to missile-firing invaders of the second-largest country in Europe next to Russia itself.

Turning stones into bread

The first temptation, enticing the famished Jesus after 40 days of fasting to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger, is apropos to Russia and Ukraine not only because they are among the 10 largest wheat producers on the planet.

More than just highlighting two giants of grain, our Lord's admonition that "Man does not live by bread alone" underscores what else we need for the fullness of life: "every word that comes from the mouth of God," as other Bible translations add.

In the context of international relations, leaders and governments demand tangible guarantees of security to reassure and impress their peoples. Not just promises of peace, but pledges that fearsome forces would never cross certain lines.

Bread, not just words, even if the promises may speak of God's will for all humanity.

So, Russia wants the most powerful forces on earth, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), never to embrace Ukraine. But even those words the US-led alliance and Ukraine were not willing to give, let alone the bread of NATO boots never stepping into Slavic lands.

With neither words nor bread to bring home, Russia decided to address its fears by marching on the stones of Ukraine and making them bread to feed its hunger for security from Western powers which had invaded thrice in centuries past.

Testing, not trusting

The third temptation sought to stir Jesus into distrust of the Father by throwing himself off a high precipice to see if angels fly down from heaven and keep him from falling to earth. To which our Lord replied: "You shall not put your God to the test."

Certainty and control are what comes to mind in this discourse between Jesus and the devil. So like our modern time of science and technology, when humanity constantly strives to assert control over the world and ascertain proven truths with empirically validated knowledge leaving no room for faith and trust.

So it is between nations: the powers that be must have certainty and control. Trust is never enough, never enough, as a popular musical chants.

Hence, NATO reserves the right to accept whom it may wish into its ranks bristling with the most advanced armaments ever. No matter that such assertion of membership control would erode trust and confidence in a land fearful of invading hordes from the West, especially after the alliance expanded well beyond the agreed limit of its expansion.

Thus, with the Western alliance unwilling to compromise on control, the bear in the east decided to ascertain its security and take armed control of a potential area of hostilities.

The power and the glory

The second temptation appears last in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which may show his Jewish orientation, putting greater value on worshiping God over trusting Him, which Luke may highlight from his perspective influenced by Greek rationalism.

Whether second or third in Scripture, however, the temptation's lure of worldly power and glory is certainly most relevant to the NATO-Russia tussle over Ukraine.

For both President Putin and Russia, at stake are the nation's stature and strength in the world and its quest for the unified glory of "United Russia" the very name of Putin's political party, the largest in the country.

As for the West, no less than President Joseph Biden of the United States, NATO's most powerful member, declared in his first State of the Union Address to the US Congress on March 2 that the conflict with Russia was a global battle between democracy and autocracy,

And the prize is nothing less than the domination by one or the other ideology over the planet and its 7.9 billion souls.

Thus, like gladiators, the great powers bow to the master of the world before dueling to the death, and he will give it to whoever remains standing after the carnage.

As in the Garden of Eden, humanity has again fallen to the tempter. Let us fast, pray and atone for these sins driving our world to perdition.

Follow this link:

The 3 temptations of Vladimir Putin and NATO - The Manila Times

Editors note: a powerful new book by well-known essayist and literary critic Anthony Esolen entitled In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John was recently published by Angelico Press, from whom we obtained permission to share a part of it with our readers. Our own contributing editor Dr. Peter Kwasniewski wrote the Foreword to the book and tells me that it is dynamite. This compact but profound commentary on the Prologue of John should be of great interest to all Catholics but especially those who assist at the ancient Roman Rite, where these opening verses of the Fourth Gospel are read after nearly every Mass.TSF

Paul and John, the storm of fire and the calm immensity of the sea, speak as one. Behold, I make all things new, says He who sits upon the throne in the Apocalypse (Rev. 21:5). Paul spoke of Gods saving work in the same vein, as the full and ultimate making of things forever new: Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Cor. 5:17).

What do we make of such a claim about Christ? I have heard many an unbeliever say that the story of Jesus is but the story of every semi-divine hero in the history of the world. That is not true. Quite the contrary. Let us pause to look at the matter.

Alexander the Great traveled all the way to the oasis of Siwah in Libya to consult the oracle of Ammon, whom the Greeks associated with Zeus. He wanted to say that he was the son of Ammonian Zeus, and not the son of the half-barbarian warlord Philip of Macedon, whom, historians believe, Alexanders ambitious mother Olympias put out of her sons path by assassination. Alexander wanted to stamp his aristocratic card. It is an acknowledged trick of the self-promoter, and the ancients themselves saw it as such. The Julian clan in Rome traced their lineage back to Iulus, the son of that Aeneas who, according to old self-promoting Roman folklore, settled his refugees from Troy upon the Italian shores. This Aeneas was the son of Anchises by the goddess Venus. Every important clan wanted a ticket like that. It is like establishing your membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The Pharaohs in Egypt were considered the earthly personifications of the benevolent god of justice, Osiris, guaranteeing the healthy flooding of the Nile, so that people could cast their seed broadside and the bumper crops would come. The Egyptians believed that divine power flowed through the Pharaoh, sure enough, but no one would say of Tutankhamen the boy-king that he was in himself the origin of the universe, and its significance. There are many stories in human lore about heroes who rise from obscurity and neglect to the heights of glory. Beowulf is one, but Beowulf dies in the end, and the smoke rises above his funeral pyre and is swallowed up in the sky, while the Geats he ruled look forward to annihilation at the hands of the Swedes, their old enemies. The world is also full of stories of men who achieve enlightenment, which they then pass along to their followers: Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Zoroaster, even Longfellows pleasant Hiawatha. Not one of them takes upon his shoulders the sins of the world. Not one of them is or claims to be the Lord of the world.

There is, in the story of Jesus, no sense that he gains enlightenment, no dramatic turning point that puts his life on the path to glory. He is not ever the Prince Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. He is not ever Mohammed, hitherto an ordinary man working among the caravans, visited by a reciting angel in a cave. We have only one account of his boyhood, whence we gather that he was already that same Jesus we know, calmly confident, speaking and listening and replying. There is in his story nothing of Napoleon or Dick Whittington or Epictetus or Oedipus or Arthur or even Moses. The story of Jesus is not like the story of man. It is instead the key that opens the story of man. It brings those stories into the light, for all men, and for each man. I am the door of the sheep, says the Lord. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture (Jn. 10:7, 9). Jesus does not conform his story to ours, but we may find the answers to our stories in his: If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (Rev. 3:20).

And so Saint John brings us back to the beginning, but what does that mean? Let us consider what he surely has in mind, and what he expects those who hear him to have in mind if they are Jews: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew for that wordfor we must remember that John was himself a Jew, thinking first in his native Aramaic and then in the sacred parent language of Hebrew, but writing in his third language, Greekis bereshith, at the rosh or the head of things. I believe that it meant more to the Jewish mind than our first means to us, or at the start, or to begin with, or even in the beginning, if we think of beginning only in a temporal sense, for instance as the first domino to fall in a series.

We should not allow our digital clocks and calendars to mislead us. When the Jews celebrated the feast that marked the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, it was not like what Americans do when they gather in Times Square to watch a conglomeration of electric lights fall, and the numerals change on the historical odometer, whereupon everyone takes a drink, and wakes up the next morning foggy and disillusioned. Says God to Moses: Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles, that is, of barns, granaries, vats,

Seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord thy God shall choose: because the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore shalt thou surely rejoice (Dt. 16:1315).

Seven, of course, is the number of days in the week, and the week is the divine unit of time. It is suggested by the lunar month of roughly four weeks, but otherwise it is not observable, not evident to the eye. If I may stretch a point: the week is like the angels, invisible. We have the week by the memory of what God has done in the beginning: And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it (Gen. 2:23). For that reason they who worship Him must also keep the day holy, for in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it (Ex. 20:11). We in our anti-culture of work that makes many a bad thing and unmakes many a man and woman, and of hedonism that brings no pleasure, are apt to view the command as a prohibition: do no work on the Sabbath. It is better viewed as an invitation: Thou shalt feast! Rest, here, is not simply an interruption in labor. It is the feast, the refreshment, the crown of life. The heavens and the earth and all that is in them are oriented toward the feast. It is the feast that is their root and trunk and crown, their sap and leaf and flower. In the beginning and in the end, there is the feast. []

We walk along a narrow land bridge, with a precipice on each side. To the left is the fall into abstraction and mere philosophy. To the right is the fall into mythology and idolatry. We have here neither Heraclitus nor Homer, but what alone will make sense of each, and both together. So, just as we must not reduce the gospel to a footnote to Greek abstraction, so we must not to reduce the gospel to a story about god-characters, Mr. and Mrs. Zeus, whether the characters are to be interpreted literally or allegorically. The gospel is not a work of mans fevered imagination, nor is it rationalism in symbolic garb. In the beginning was the Word, says John, and if all he meant by it was old dry Stoicism sweetened with some Jewish honey, it is hard to understand why Christians would ever be persecuted by anyone. A shrug would suffice: We are using figures of speech. Figures of speech cover a multitude of vagaries.

Likewise, we may be too accustomed to Johns first verse to feel how stunning it is, as stunning as was the first chapter of Genesis, with its frank, terse, and confident rejection of everything strictly mythological about the creation stories of the peoples roundabout. Here we might pause to take a look at that.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earthat a stroke, the sacred author dispenses with the theogonies you find everywhere else, the generations of gods, such as Cronus usurping authority from his father Ouranos, and Zeus his son doing the same in turn to him, assisted by his strategic political alliance with some of the Titans, the generation of gods contemporaneous with Cronus. There is nothing of that in Genesis, or of Osiris betrayed and dismembered by his evil brother Seti, and his sister-wife Isis gathering up again all his scattered limbs; or of the Babylonian Marduk enlisting the allegiance of the younger gods to slaughter the ancient sea-goddess Tiamat, and then fashioning the universe from her remains. There is no foundational violence or conquest. There is also no star-worship, no planetary mysticism. For God made the luminaries for times and seasons, the sun to govern the day and the moon to govern the night, and he also made the stars, says the author, as if it were an afterthought. It is a poke in the eye of the Chaldean stargazers. As a mythas a story about how the moon got her spots, or why the whale is so big, the creation account in Genesis would have been a failure, but then it is not intended as a myth, that is, an explanatory story, so much as it is a stripped-down poetic revelation of what the world is: the good and wholly gratuitous creation by God, oriented toward its fulfillment in the worship of God, the feast of the Sabbath.

It is also not a piece of political propaganda. In the beginning (of the earth, that is, and of mankind), in Babylon, there was violence and empire, with Marduk emerging as the dominant god, just as the Babylonians had overrun and built upon the Sumerian civilization that came before. In the beginning (of civilization, that is), in Greece, there was political cunning and reason, in the person of Zeus, outflanking the hideous older gods of brute domination. So did the Greeks project the political organization called the polis back upon the conflict of the generations of the gods. In the beginning (of large-scale agriculture), in Egypt, there was a good god murdered, whose fertility and whose benevolence entered the Nile River and the mud at her banks, making Egyptian civilization possible. None of that, absolutely none of it, is to be had from our sacred author of Genesis.

One might expect the author, if we were talking simply of human agency, to present to us the holy city of Jerusalem, the City of Peace, as present in the seed from the beginning. For man likes to cast the gods in his image, which will usually be a national or tribal image. But Jerusalem is not here. Rather the first city-builder we learn of is Cain, also the first murderer of his kin, his brother Abel. And the first prominent city in Genesis is Babel, emblem of the greatness and the folly of Babylon, and forever after the type of human confusion. Babel is the anti-word, the sign of human language itself falling into change and decay, into misunderstanding and strife.

Just as the beginning of all things is not, in Genesis, a civic myth aimed at justifying any specific place or form of human organization, so also the beginning in John is not local or specific or bound to a culture. We here are talking about all men, everywhere, and about each single man. The scope is universal, and the touch is intimate. No broader range is possible, nor any deeper gaze into the dark corners of every human soul. What cultural trappings we find are minimal, no more than is necessary for any kind of human communication to take place. We expect a people who raise corn to give us a Hiawatha, and they do. We expect a people who live beneath the steady glare of the tropical sun to give us a Quetzalcoatl, intense and merciless, demanding his daily tribute in the blood of the peoples enemies. We might expect the Hebrew herdsmen to give us a god of the sheep and the cattle, but they do not. There was no time, and there never will come a time, when the account in Genesis of the creation and the fall of man will not speak home truths about who we are. The ancient here does not grow old. There was no time, and there never will come a time, when the opening of Johns gospel will not prompt the attentive reader to ponder the very being of God, of his relationship to man and to all things, and of the inner life that is Gods own, a relationship of love.

Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

View original post here:

In the Beginning Was the WordExcerpt from a New Book by Anthony Esolen - OnePeterFive

Sturm und Drang, (German: Storm and Stress), German literary movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Goethe and Schiller began their careers as prominent members of the movement.

The exponents of the Sturm und Drang were profoundly influenced by the thought of Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann, who held that the basic verities of existence were to be apprehended through faith and the experience of the senses. The young writers also were influenced by the works of the English poet Edward Young, the pseudo-epic poetry of James Macphersons Ossian, and the recently translated works of Shakespeare.

Read More on This Topic

German literature: Late Enlightenment (Sturm und Drang)

The Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, with its emphasis on feeling and individualism, has often been described...

Sturm und Drang was intimately associated with the young Goethe. While a student at Strasbourg, he made the acquaintance of Johann Gottfried von Herder, a former pupil of Hamann, who interested him in Gothic architecture, German folk songs, and Shakespeare. Inspired by Herders ideas, Goethe embarked upon a period of extraordinary creativity. In 1773 he published a play based upon the 16th-century German knight, Gtz von Berlichingen, and collaborated with Herder and others on the pamphlet Von deutscher Art und Kunst, which was a kind of manifesto for the Sturm und Drang. His novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), which epitomized the spirit of the movement, made him world famous and inspired a host of imitators.

The dramatic literature of the Sturm und Drang was its most characteristic product. Indeed, the very name of the movement was borrowed from a play by Friedrich von Klinger, who had been inspired by the desire to present on the stage figures of Shakespearean grandeur, subordinating structural considerations to character and rejecting the conventions of French Neoclassicism, which had been imported by the critic Johann Christop von Gottsched. With the production of Die Ruber (1781; The Robbers) by Schiller, the drama of the Sturm und Drang entered a new phase.

Self-discipline was not a tenet of the Sturm und Drang, and the movement soon exhausted itself. Its two most gifted representatives, Goethe and Schiller, went on to produce great works that formed the body and soul of German classical literature.

Continued here:

Sturm und Drang | German literary movement | Britannica

life-style, books,

When the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in Nevada announced an essay contest in February 2021, they were raising the stakes in what is set to become one of the most significant controversies in modern science. The topic was the survival of consciousness after death, and founder Robert Bigelow put up US$1 million in prize money, making it the monetary equivalent of the Nobel. Bigelow, who has a long-standing interest in the paranormal and has invested extensively in UFO research, has a counterpart in the late James Randi, a magician and hard-line sceptic who set up a US$1million award for anyone who could offer definitive proof of the paranormal. It remained unclaimed for two decades and was terminated in 2015. But in this instance, Bigelow was not looking for sensational phenomena. The Institute sought applicants who would take an evidentiary approach. There were to be no quotations from scripture, no faith-based outpourings: adjudication would be according to legal and scientific standards of verification. The six judges brought impressive credentials. They were Jessica Utts, emeritus professor of statistics from Irvine; theoretical physicist Harold Puthoff; Jeffrey Kripal, chair of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University; journalist Leslie Kean, who had written front-page stories on UFO evidence for The New York Times; and distinguished forensic neurologist Christopher C. Green. When the list of winners was announced in November, the prize haul had grown to well over US$1.5 million with an additional endowment to reward those on a short list of 29 submissions, all now published on the Institute website. Clearly this bid to promote life after death as the $1.5 million question was something more than gimmickry and wacky extravagance, so what does it all amount to, now that the evidence is out there? Eight out of the 10 authors who each won US$50,000 for highly commended essays, and nine of the 15 on an extended shortlist, hold postgraduate qualifications in the "hard" sciences. They include a pharmacologist, a computer engineer, an evolutionary biologist, a clinical oncologist, a bioengineer, and a postdoctoral research fellow in biomedical engineering. Third prize (US$150,000) was awarded to Leo Ruickbie, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in Britain and author of several books on the history and sociology of paranormal beliefs. Runner-up (US$300,000) Pim van Lommel is a clinical cardiologist whose previous honours include winning the Scientific and Medical Network book prize in 2010. First prize, a unanimous choice, was an essay by Jeffrey Mishlove, who holds the only doctorate yet awarded in parapsychology. Central to many of the essays is a concern with how evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond biological life presents a fundamental challenge to prevailing models of human perception and cognition. As Bigelow put it in an interview on the announcement of the prize, if the mind does not cease functioning with the death of the brain, "Where the hell is your mind?" Mishlove's essay pursues this speculation, drawing on extended discussions he has hosted since the mid 1980s with researchers in diverse fields for his You Tube channel, New Thinking Allowed. Mishlove is a skilled interviewer, meticulously attentive to argument and data, but he knows how to focus on key points and steer the dialogue at a pace that allows a general audience to follow. An early guest was pioneering biologist Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work on the structure of DNA. "It's very rash to say that these things are beyond the scope of science," Crick says, in response to Mishlove's challenge about how consciousness can be understood purely in terms of neurons, "though we can't see how to do it at the moment." A generation later, Mishlove persuades philosopher Ruth Kastner, who belongs to a research group on the foundations of physics at the University of Maryland, to address the question again. Kastner professes herself "paranormally challenged", but interested in how witness accounts of near-death experience may be understood in terms of quantum theories of space-time. She insists, though, on avoiding slippage between modelling possibility and claiming actuality. This points to an essential problem with the brief for the competition. Bigelow does not seek to invest in speculation. He wants evidence, and evidence that will at least point in the direction of proof. But legal and scientific approaches to proof, assumed to be almost interchangeable in the competition brief, are divergent in essential ways. The law counts evidence by "weight", so multiple indicators from multiple sources may add up to proof beyond reasonable doubt. Proof in science depends on identifying causality and being able to replicate apparently causal relationships in predictable ways. Witness testimony, often central to a court case, has no place in scientific understanding. Our senses deceive us, so interpretations we regard as common sense may be no more than consensual delusion. But to what extent should we disbelieve our senses? Ruickbie's essay presents this challenge as what he terms "the Scrooge paradox", a reference to the withered old sceptic in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, who sees a ghost and assumes it's a symptom of indigestion, is an emblem of how human intelligence withers under the constraints of hard rationalism and rational self-interest. It may take a supernatural apparition to burst the locks on embargoed dimensions of the mind. Van Lommel argues that mounting evidence surrounding the phenomenon of near-death experience (NDE) is testing the viability of prevailing scientific assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and the physical brain. There are now over 20 million documented cases of NDE in Europe. "Some scientists do not believe in questions that cannot be answered," but it may be a matter of adjusting the formulation of the question. Not "What is the biological basis of consciousness?" but "Is there a biological basis of consciousness?" Whatever the evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death, scientific proof is surely a chimera. "It's not our system," as Officer Ripley puts it in Ridley Scott's Alien. Only through consciousness can we contemplate the mysteries of consciousness, and if we are doing so in ways that are restricted through certain kinds of framing, we're pretty much stuck. All that can be proved is the limits of science.

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/67a3a0bf-e5d3-47fa-847d-85c7d9bd83da.jpg/r0_831_2428_2203_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

February 12 2022 - 12:00AM

The authors presented evidence, not speculation, to form their arguments. Picture: Shutterstock.

When the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in Nevada announced an essay contest in February 2021, they were raising the stakes in what is set to become one of the most significant controversies in modern science. The topic was the survival of consciousness after death, and founder Robert Bigelow put up US$1 million in prize money, making it the monetary equivalent of the Nobel.

Bigelow, who has a long-standing interest in the paranormal and has invested extensively in UFO research, has a counterpart in the late James Randi, a magician and hard-line sceptic who set up a US$1million award for anyone who could offer definitive proof of the paranormal. It remained unclaimed for two decades and was terminated in 2015. But in this instance, Bigelow was not looking for sensational phenomena.

The Institute sought applicants who would take an evidentiary approach. There were to be no quotations from scripture, no faith-based outpourings: adjudication would be according to legal and scientific standards of verification.

Bigelow Aerospace president and founder Robert T. Bigelow. Picture: Getty Images

The six judges brought impressive credentials. They were Jessica Utts, emeritus professor of statistics from Irvine; theoretical physicist Harold Puthoff; Jeffrey Kripal, chair of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University; journalist Leslie Kean, who had written front-page stories on UFO evidence for The New York Times; and distinguished forensic neurologist Christopher C. Green.

When the list of winners was announced in November, the prize haul had grown to well over US$1.5 million with an additional endowment to reward those on a short list of 29 submissions, all now published on the Institute website. Clearly this bid to promote life after death as the $1.5 million question was something more than gimmickry and wacky extravagance, so what does it all amount to, now that the evidence is out there?

Eight out of the 10 authors who each won US$50,000 for highly commended essays, and nine of the 15 on an extended shortlist, hold postgraduate qualifications in the "hard" sciences. They include a pharmacologist, a computer engineer, an evolutionary biologist, a clinical oncologist, a bioengineer, and a postdoctoral research fellow in biomedical engineering.

Third prize (US$150,000) was awarded to Leo Ruickbie, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in Britain and author of several books on the history and sociology of paranormal beliefs. Runner-up (US$300,000) Pim van Lommel is a clinical cardiologist whose previous honours include winning the Scientific and Medical Network book prize in 2010. First prize, a unanimous choice, was an essay by Jeffrey Mishlove, who holds the only doctorate yet awarded in parapsychology.

Central to many of the essays is a concern with how evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond biological life presents a fundamental challenge to prevailing models of human perception and cognition. As Bigelow put it in an interview on the announcement of the prize, if the mind does not cease functioning with the death of the brain, "Where the hell is your mind?"

Mishlove's essay pursues this speculation, drawing on extended discussions he has hosted since the mid 1980s with researchers in diverse fields for his You Tube channel, New Thinking Allowed. Mishlove is a skilled interviewer, meticulously attentive to argument and data, but he knows how to focus on key points and steer the dialogue at a pace that allows a general audience to follow.

An early guest was pioneering biologist Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work on the structure of DNA. "It's very rash to say that these things are beyond the scope of science," Crick says, in response to Mishlove's challenge about how consciousness can be understood purely in terms of neurons, "though we can't see how to do it at the moment."

A generation later, Mishlove persuades philosopher Ruth Kastner, who belongs to a research group on the foundations of physics at the University of Maryland, to address the question again. Kastner professes herself "paranormally challenged", but interested in how witness accounts of near-death experience may be understood in terms of quantum theories of space-time. She insists, though, on avoiding slippage between modelling possibility and claiming actuality.

This points to an essential problem with the brief for the competition. Bigelow does not seek to invest in speculation. He wants evidence, and evidence that will at least point in the direction of proof. But legal and scientific approaches to proof, assumed to be almost interchangeable in the competition brief, are divergent in essential ways.

The law counts evidence by "weight", so multiple indicators from multiple sources may add up to proof beyond reasonable doubt. Proof in science depends on identifying causality and being able to replicate apparently causal relationships in predictable ways. Witness testimony, often central to a court case, has no place in scientific understanding.

Our senses deceive us, so interpretations we regard as common sense may be no more than consensual delusion. But to what extent should we disbelieve our senses? Ruickbie's essay presents this challenge as what he terms "the Scrooge paradox", a reference to the withered old sceptic in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Scrooge, who sees a ghost and assumes it's a symptom of indigestion, is an emblem of how human intelligence withers under the constraints of hard rationalism and rational self-interest. It may take a supernatural apparition to burst the locks on embargoed dimensions of the mind.

Van Lommel argues that mounting evidence surrounding the phenomenon of near-death experience (NDE) is testing the viability of prevailing scientific assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and the physical brain. There are now over 20 million documented cases of NDE in Europe. "Some scientists do not believe in questions that cannot be answered," but it may be a matter of adjusting the formulation of the question. Not "What is the biological basis of consciousness?" but "Is there a biological basis of consciousness?"

Whatever the evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death, scientific proof is surely a chimera. "It's not our system," as Officer Ripley puts it in Ridley Scott's Alien. Only through consciousness can we contemplate the mysteries of consciousness, and if we are doing so in ways that are restricted through certain kinds of framing, we're pretty much stuck. All that can be proved is the limits of science.

Read more:

Is there life after death? That's the million-dollar question - The Canberra Times

A bee hovers over flowers in front of a crucifix at a cemetery in Santiago, Chile, Feb. 18, 2021. (CNS/Reuters/Ivan Alvarado)

A spirituality closely bound to God's creation has deep roots in Scripture, where in Genesis God separates light from darkness and water from sky, then creates all plants and creatures of Earth and sea and sees how good it is.

The Book of Job, among others, picks up the theme, telling of a God who speaks intimately of the constellations, the many forms water takes, the wisdom of the ibis and the hunger of lions, and the reproductive cycle of deer, bears and mountain goats but has a rather low opinion of the stork's common sense.

A couple of millennia later, St. Francis of Assisi added his voice to those who recognize the interconnectedness of all things, despite the pain of his own illness, finding God in and praising God through all of creation, including the sun, moon and stars, wind, water, fire and the Earth itself.

So it's not surprising that Pope Francis, the saint's namesake, echoes that idea in his own writings, especially his 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home" and Querida Amazonia, the apostolic exhortation that grew out of the 2019 synod for the Amazon.

With his emphasis on integral ecology, Francis ties care for God's creation to our economic, political, social and religious priorities. In a lot of ways, with this pope, ecospirituality has gone mainstream.

The prefix "eco-" before "spirituality" comes from the Greek oikos, meaning home a reminder that "this house is the only one we have, we're all together, what happens in Kolkata affects New York, Santiago in Chile, and So Paulo," Divine Word Fr. Fernando Daz of Chile told EarthBeat.

'We increasingly transform into an ecospiritual community, because ecospirituality develops in community.'

Moema Miranda

"It really is a common home, and this common home is threatened," Daz added. "We're all connected, and this is a way of understanding that home that demands that we look beyond the instrumental rationalism that has guided us in such a destructive way over the past century."

Daz, who has worked for years with Mapuche people in southern Chile, has found Indigenous people to have a more holistic view of the relationship between human and other-than-human beings that calls for "a different perspective ... a way of understanding how we live and why we live in this home that is for everyone, and where everyone must have a place, which we must care for."

He added, "That's where ecospirituality comes in."

'A way of living, a connection'

Moema Miranda sees a similar understanding among people in her native Brazil who struggle with the impacts of mining on their communities. Brazil has seen several mining-related disasters in recent years, including the collapse of a tailings dam at the Brumadinho mine, which sent a deadly cascade of toxic sludge through communities downstream, and the expansion of illegal gold mining.

Miranda, a lay Franciscan, is part of the Churches and Mining Network, which has produced with Verbo Filmes a video, in Portuguese with English subtitles, that explains ecospirituality to people who are new to the idea.

While Brazilian theologians like Ivone Gebara and Leonardo Boff have written for years about the connection between ecology and theology, Miranda and others in the Churches and Mining Network wanted to "understand how the communities that resist mining do so, where the victims find the strength to keep resisting," she told EarthBeat. "Because just accepting the obvious or being cut down by the system seems like the easiest path."

In working with the small farmers, Indigenous communities and people of African descent most affected by mining practices, "we realized it wasn't simply ecological theology, but a spirituality, something much deeper a way of living, a connection," she said.

"This spiritual presence ... doesn't fit into the framework of the rational, the theological," she added. "It's much more. We increasingly transform into an ecospiritual community, because ecospirituality develops in community."

That communal element is something Pope Francis understands well, according to Alirio Cceres, a permanent deacon who advises the Colombian Catholic church's Critas network on matters related to ecospirituality and integral ecology.

Members of a rescue team pray before working in a collapsed tailings dam owned by mining company in Brumadinho, Brazil, Feb. 13, 2019. (CNS/Reuters/Washington Alves)

Francis promotes a "culture of encounter ... with God, with oneself, with other humans and with beings in nature, which also are brothers and sisters, because they are children of the same creator," Cceres told EarthBeat.

For Cceres, "Spirituality is the driving force of life, the very meaning of life. So I think it's important to see it as a context for this papacy, which is very much one of dialogue, of encounter, of openness to other ways of seeing things."

Lessons from the Indigenous world

In Laudato Si', the pope points to the consequences of losing that sense of oneness with all of creation, writing that if humans lose their sense of awe and wonder at creation, "our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs."

He adds that St. Francis' "poverty and austerity ... were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled."

For Daz, although the Franciscan St. Bonaventure and others have put a theological foundation under it, theology is not enough to describe the relationship of humans with the rest of creation.

'In the Indigenous world, the relationship with a tree, a lake, the forest, the sky, the stars, the moon, the sun, is not a systematic, rational, logical study. It is an experience of connatural knowledge.'

Divine Word Fr. Fernando Daz

"In the Indigenous world, the relationship with a tree, a lake, the forest, the sky, the stars, the moon, the sun, is not a systematic, rational, logical study. It is an experience of connatural knowledge," he said. "What the Indigenous world gives you is the opportunity to reconnect with creation."

Sr. Caroljean Willie, a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati, saw that during her years as the Sisters of Charity Federation's representative at the United Nations.

Each year, she would attend the two-week conference of the U.N. Forum on Indigenous Issues, Willie told EarthBeat. "And every single year [the Indigenous participants] would say the same thing to us: You all keep talking about taking care of creation, talking about sustainability. But nobody's talking to us, and we've been doing it all our lives."

Panentheism: finding God in all things

For Willie, who now directs EarthConnection, her congregation's environmental center in Cincinnati, spiritual growth is one response to God's prodding to leave one's comfort zone.

The risk, however, is misinterpretation of the kind that occurred at the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon at the Vatican in 2019. Two days before the synod officially began, Francis marked his namesake's feast day, Oct. 4, with a tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican Gardens, accompanied by delegates to the synod, some of them Amazonian Indigenous people.

Conservative Catholic critics pounced, claiming that the prayer around a mandala-like banner where participants had placed symbols was pagan and showed that Francis tolerated or perhaps promoted, in works like Laudato Si' pantheism, or the worship of nature as a god.

But worshipping nature as a god is not the same as praising God in all of creation. The former is pantheism and the latter is panentheism with just two letters marking the difference between heresy and orthodoxy, said Franciscan Fr. Daniel Horan, director of the Center for Spirituality at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, and an NCR columnist.

"Catholic Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, maintains that God draws near to all of creation," a theme that begins with the second verse of the first book of Genesis and continues throughout the Old Testament, Horan told EarthBeat.

In his Canticle of the Creatures, St. Francis does not worship the sun, moon and other natural elements as gods, but clearly says he praises God with them and through them.

St. Francis and his followers embraced "this idea that nonhuman creatures, the rest of God's creation, also have an inherent relationship to the divine ... because God is the one source of all creation, human and nonhuman alike. We're all united together, as Pope Francis would say, in the spirit of integral ecology. All creation is connected," Horan said.

And just as the natural world evolves, Willie said, ecospirituality raises questions that call Christians to deepen and widen their understanding of the divine.

"If we see the universe as ever-expanding, then how are we allowing our frame of reference to change?" she said. "And if the universe is evolving, how am I allowing myself and my concept of God to evolve?

"And I think it questions our concept of God. Is it static or dynamic? And what about our prayer life? Is it static or dynamic? I think ecospirituality calls us to recognize what Thomas Aquinas said many years ago: The first book of revelation is creation."

Ecospirituality leads to an understanding that "we are part of an interrelated, interconnected, evolving web," she added. "It calls us to live in right relationship with all of creation."

Enter your email address to receive free newsletters from EarthBeat.

See the rest here:

Ecospirituality is more than ecology and theology. It calls us to reconnect. - National Catholic Reporter

A new book by ecologist Rebecca Nesbit argues that its time to stop being romantic about nature and make some rational decisions about what to save

By Simon Ings

Would cutting down the last oak tree on Earth make you a bad person?

Vandervelden/Getty Images

Tickets for the Ark

Rebecca Nesbit

Profile Books

IMAGINE you are the last person on Earth. On your dying day, you cut down the only remaining oak tree, just because you can. Are you morally in the wrong?

Rebecca Nesbit would argue that you arent. A science writer and ecologist, she has form in tackling subjects where scientific rationalism and general intuition dont necessarily line up. Her first book, Is That Fish in Your Tomato?, explored the pros and cons of genetically modified foods. In Tickets for the Ark, she turns her spotlight to the moral complexities of conservation.

She points out that, given we cant save every species, we have some difficult decisions to make. For example, if push came to shove and their extinctions were imminent, should we choose to preserve bison or the Siberian larch; yellowhammers or Scottish crossbills; salmon or seals? And what criteria should we use to decide? Charisma, perhaps, or their edibility? Are native species more important than invasive ones? And is it morally acceptable to kill some animals to make room for others?

Working through these gnarly issues, Nesbit shows how complex and problematic conservation can be. In particular, she questions the way that efforts tend to focus on the preservation of species. This, she points out, is really us deciding to save what we can easily see. If our aim was to preserve the planets biodiversity, we could as easily focus on genes, individual strings of DNA or the general health of whole ecosystems, she argues.

At times, Tickets for the Ark reads as a catalogue of errors on the part of well-meaning conservationists. Many conservation projects are attempts to reverse human interference in nature clearly an impossible task, considering we have been shaping the biosphere for at least 10,000 years.

Far from being a counsel of despair, though, Tickets for the Ark reveals the intellectual vistas that such blunders have opened up. Even supposing it ever existed, we know now that we cant return Earth to some prelapsarian Eden. All we can do is learn how natural systems change sometimes under human influence, sometimes not and use this information to shape the future world according to our values and priorities.

In a sense, of course, we have always done this. What is agriculture, if not a way of moulding the land to our requirements? But now that we have learned to feed ourselves, perhaps it is time to think a little more broadly.

If we accept that conservation is about the future not the past, the most troubling conundrums fall away

To do that, we need to accept two things: one, that nature is a social construct, and two, that conservation is about the future, not the past. Then the most troubling conundrums in conservation fall away, writes Nesbit. The death of the last oak, at the hands of the last human, becomes merely the loss of a category (oak tree) that was defined and valued by humans a loss that was inevitable at some point anyway. It is a conclusion that is counter-intuitive and feels uncomfortable, but Nesbit says that it should be liberating because it leaves us free to discuss logically what we should save and why, and not just fight an anti-extinction battle that is doomed to failure.

With this in mind, we can consider what conservation efforts will achieve for entire ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole without wasting our time agonising over whether, say, British white-clawed crayfish are natives, or if dingoes are a separate species from other wild dogs, or whether we are morally entitled to introduce bison to clear the steppe of Siberian larch. Larch is a native species, but it is also covering and warming ancient carbon-sequestering permafrost. In an era of potentially catastrophic climate change, Nesbit argues that we should keep our eyes on the bigger picture.

This is an ambitious and entertaining book, which foresees a dynamic and creative role for conservation in the future. Having freed ourselves of the idea that species belong in their original ranges, we may decide that it makes more sense to shepherd the most vulnerable species into new habitats where they have a better chance of survival. A brave proposal but, as Nesbit points out, for some species, such drastic measures may be the only option.

More on these topics:

Excerpt from:

Tickets for the Ark: Which species should we save from extinction? - New Scientist

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Perspectiva, pp. 1500, 89.95

The dust jacket of The Matter With Things quotes a large statement from an Oxford professor: This is one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever. Can any contemporary work withstand such praise? The intelligent general reader (the books target audience) should, however, not be discouraged, for Iain McGilchrist has to be taken seriously: a Fellow of All Souls, eminent in neurology, psychiatry and literary criticism, a thinker and its impossible to avoid the term a sage. His previous book, The Master and His Emissary, was admired by public figures from Rowan Williams to Philip Pullman. Some consider McGilchrist the most important non-fiction writer of our time.

Such enthusiasm is unusual for the narrow subject of our divided brains. But the neglected science of hemisphere difference, returned to centre stage by McGilchrist, provides the key to larger issues. Moreover, the earlier work, substantial as it is, seems to have been a preparation for The Matter With Things, whose two handsomely produced volumes contain the entire corpus of McGilchrists thought. Initially unreviewed, and undeniably long and expensive, its first print run nonetheless sold out quickly, and readers reported becoming completely immersed. It is now once more available.

Western civilisation is in a predicament exemplified by alienation, environmental despoliation, the atrophy of value, the sterility of contemporary art, the increasing prevalence of rectilinear, bureaucratised thinking and the triumph of procedure over substance. The lesser aim of The Matter With Things is to identify the common basis of those conditions, and to understand and perhaps improve them. But its greater purpose is to enable us to know the world we inhabit.

The world only exists for us inasmuch as we perceive it. We do so as embodied human beings, in particular through our minds. But clinical evidence shows that our divided brains offer two completely different ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere analyses lifeless parts; the right synthesises the living Gestalt whole. The right perceives the real landscape; the left constructs an artificial map. The right encounters the new, and is the hemisphere of music, poetry, humour and irony. The left is comfortable with categories, labels, the literal and the familiar. The two hemispheres constantly intercommunicate; however, since many aspects of language preferentially engage the left hemisphere, our modern, overwhelmingly verbalised existence promotes left-brain dominance. Yet countless studies demonstrate that in many areas the left hemisphere is obtuse, overconfident, fantastical and wrong. The right hemisphere, once misnamed the silent hemisphere, is better at understanding the world, whereas the left seeks to manipulate it. Self-validating left-brain modes of thought continually push us in the wrong direction, towards the hall of mirrors in which we now exist.

The ambition of The Matter With Things is to take the hemisphere hypothesis and to conduct through its lens a detailed examination of truth. McGilchrist discusses the paths that lead to truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination. A professional scientist, and thus a believer in the power of reason properly understood, he shows that both are easily corrupted by left-hemisphere thinking. The results of hyper-rationalism are often indefensible: philosophers who deny the existence of consciousness (with what faculty?) or geneticists who persist in arguing (in Darwins name but contrary to his intuitions) a mechanistic selfish gene theory of evolution, a model as superannuated as Newtonian physics.

Even this undertaking is not the books central concern, for McGilchrist then examines even deeper questions: the truth about time, flow and movement, space and matter, consciousness, purpose and, as a tremendous capstone, our sense of the sacred. These are areas where we cannot confine ourselves to left-hemisphere techniques of analysis, because to analyse something is to reduce it to parts, whereas these topics are sui generis and cannot be separated or broken down. (Zenos paradoxes expose the delusive effect of atomising time: Achilles never catches the tortoise.)

Instead, McGilchrist invites us to see the world synthetically, recognising the necessity of the left hemisphere but the superiority of the right. The world is revealed as composed not of static objects (the Things of the books title), but of dynamic processes and relationships; a world not separated from and dispassionately observed by us, but one that only through us comes into being in which, as Yeats says, we cannot know the dancer from the dance.

McGilchrist seeks to give an account at last, true to experience, to science and to philosophy. The range and erudition are astounding (the bibliography alone runs to 180 pages). Even if one used it for no other purpose, his book is a treasure store of quotations a polymath, he has read and seems to remember everything. He stands upon the shoulders of the giants whose words he amply cites. His forebears include Heraclitus (not Plato), Pascal (definitely not Descartes), Goethe, Wordsworth, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, William James, Whitehead and Bergson. Drawing out the implications of quantum physics, he discerns an ever-unfolding pattern and purpose in the cosmos and, while rejecting the propositions of organised religion, he ends up on the side of God (for want of a better verb), meanwhile giving the reductive atheist position a formidable kicking.

Yet there is nothing wacky or tendentious about this book. McGilchrist writes readably and with poetic sensibility. The tone is courteous (except in the face of others intolerance), modest and above all wise. Those who do not normally read about science or philosophy will never do so in better company. Like the Bible in a Victorian drawing room, this is a book that you should keep permanently open, for the Oxford prof has a point: after reading it you will never see the world in the same way again.

Read more here:

Know your left from your right: the brain's divided hemispheres - Spectator.co.uk

In our partisan, post-truth age of fake news and follow the science, the link between facts, narrative and power has never seemed more stark

This article is taken from the February 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now were offering five issue for just 10.

Pontius Pilate might have been the first postmodernist. Quid est veritas? What is truth? he asked the Truth Incarnate, before washing his hands and acceding to the baying mobs demand for blood in order to keep his grip on power. Pilates question has been read numerous ways through the centuries, but has rarely been more relevant than today. Our society has a problem with the truth, though no one seems to agree on just what that problem is.

Weve been here before or at least somewhere rather like it. The meanings of truth, fact, knowledge, and related concepts are not timeless absolutes, nor has freedom of speech always been seen as the best way of arriving at truth, nor indeed as a self-evident good at all. Rather, our present assumptions about the meaning of truth and the way to obtain it arose relatively recently in historical terms, during what we over-enthusiastically call the Enlightenment.

While Ren Descartess search for indubitable truth is often credited with unwittingly ushering in the Age of Reason, the first wave of rationalism really began in late seventeenth-century England. Deists such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal argued that revelation was superfluous, since the essential part of Christianity, its ethics, was clearly apparent to natural reason.

God became no longer the transcendent Creator and ultimate source of Truth, but merely another object in the universe about which truths could be derived by the application of human reason. All was to be subordinated to the individual human mind and its ability to apprehend.

Influenced by the English Deists, an international cabal of epistemic vandals set about purging society of customs, institutions, and modes of thought that failed to correspond to the new vogue for rationalism. This was a great era of image-breaking and indeed of image-making. Voltaire was not above spreading falsehood in the pursuit of his truth; he used his gift for satire to pour scorn on the foundations of eighteenth-century society the Church and monarchy setting the stage for revolution.

Rationalism in its most virulent form, promulgated by men such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine, found its ultimate expression in the terror and bloodshed unleashed in France and in British North America. Edmund Burke wrote his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, arguing that a political doctrine based on purportedly rational abstractions like human rights was no fit way to govern a society of complex and fallen human beings, and that the violent revolutionary disorder would inevitably lead to tyranny and single-man rule.

Phoenix-like, new institutions arose across the Western world from the Enlightenment bonfire of church and state. This new democratic era also called for a new sort of man: a professional class of technocrat whose superior knowledge would inform the deliberations and ultimately the decisions of the electorate, thereby driving government policy.

Academic and other bodies arose to provide this expertise, professionalising knowledge creation and harnessing truth to political power. Free speech was enshrined in law as a way of disseminating information and opinion, in the belief that propositions would be sifted and winnowed in the public sphere, enabling a broad, though changeable, political consensus to be reached on the truths that were to govern society.

Mere societal pressure to tell the truth has no effect upon those who are immune to shame

This idealised state of affairs has never quite been realised, as historians such as Sophia Rosenfeld have pointed out. For a start, Burke was right: human beings are limited in apprehension, and the general bank and capital of nations and of ages is more likely to furnish us with a realistic, workable political consensus than abstract deliberation based on a heady admixture of often contradictory expert knowledge filtered through the varying intellects and personal experiences of individual members of the public. Contra Voltaire and the Deists, competition in information does not necessarily work to dispel errors in interpretation, and many truths have never been self-evident to natural reason.

More importantly, the Enlightenment left the question of what counts as truth and who ultimately decides upon it deliberately unanswered; truth was envisaged as a frangible, socially constructed consensus needing to be continually refined and renewed by means of public debate. Undergirding this process was the absolute necessity for trust: public trust in institutions and in ones fellow citizens to act in good faith while seeking truth and exercising political power. This explains the elaborate public oaths, rituals, and modes of plain speech that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which Rosenfeld chronicles in her 2019 book Democracy and Truth.

But what happens when that trust breaks down? Maximilien Robespierre identified the parallel dangers facing Revolutionary society when he wrote in a February 1794 report promoting the Terror that Democracy perishes by two excesses: the aristocracy of those who govern, or the contempt of the people for the authorities which they have themselves established; contempt in which each faction or individual arrogates to themselves the public power, and reduces the people, by the excess of disorder, to annihilation or to the power of a single person. These words prophesied his own doom.

The tenuous and imperfectly realised Enlightenment ideal of socially constructed truth wed to political power still undergirds Western society and its institutions as we now realise to our cost. We have retained much of the outward display that formerly marked truth-telling, including our reverence for plain-speaking politicians and some of the legal and journalistic apparatus that is meant to protect free speech and hold power to account. However, mere societal pressure to tell the truth has no effect upon those who are immune to shame, or who choose to prioritise power over verity.

Subsequent philosophical and political developments have deepened the fissure at the heart of our society into a chasm; in the 300 years that separate us from the Enlightenment, we have, step by blind step, so exalted the individual and subordinated the will to truth that only the will to power remains. Terrors greater than that of the French Revolution have been the inevitable result, as the great mechanised slaughters of the twentieth century show.

The Enlightenment ideal has come under fresh challenge in the political and social crises of the more recent past. Academics are still quoting (and misquoting) Michael Goves suggestion that the people of this country have had enough of experts over five years after the fact; challenges to epistemic authority obviously rankle.

Oxford vice-chancellor Louise Richardson, speaking to an audience of fellow academics at the 2021 Times Higher Education World Academic Summit, said: With the vaccine, it seems like the public cant get enough of experts. Many of our scientists have become household names. We have demonstrated through the vaccine work and the development of therapeutics and so on just how much universities can contribute and thats enormously helpful to our cause.

Venerating the science as a unitary entity is the opposite of scientific

Our cause? The Covid-19 pandemic has held up a mirror to the most disturbing aspects of our epistemic crisis. That it is impossible to have a dispassionate, rational, evidence-based debate on the merits and demerits of any aspect of public health policy has become a truism, as tribes have emerged marked out by whether (or not) they choose to wear masks or take vaccines. Each lays claim to certain bodies of experts, and expert knowledge, declaring that the science is on the side of their tribe.

This is not science; its scientism a quasi-religious, totalising view of science as if it were capable of describing all of reality, and further that science is the only valid way to acquire true knowledge of that reality. Venerating the science as a unitary entity and speaking of those who interpret evidence differently or find different points salient as deniers or sheep is the opposite of scientific. It is, however, precisely what one would expect when ownership of the truth brings with it great power.

The Left has wholeheartedly and vocally embraced the idea of truth being about power. This is, in fact, one of the foundational axioms of much postmodern thought. Ironic, then, that their ostensible opponents on the Right are acting on the same fundamental assumption, seemingly without realising it to be such. The governments seeking to enforce its particular definition of free speech on university campuses by threatening, inter alia, to withhold institutional funding arises, in the final analysis, from the same underlying worldview as the desire by university administrators to enforce their preferred orthodoxy.

Historical debates have ceased to be a reliable guide, because both the scale of the conversation and the stakes have increased. Access to information and to the means of disseminating it is now democratised to a degree unthinkable a generation ago, and arguments over the essence and location of expertise have proliferated with the sense that everyone has a right to provide their own expertise. Inexorably we have reached the point where truth, rather than being constructed collectively by means of reasoned debate, is constructed individually by means of self-identification and there is no way of determining between my truth and your truth absent recourse to the truth.

As Rosenfeld writes, Post-truth is, at heart, a struggle over people as holders of epistemic authority and over their different methods of inquiry and proof in an intensely partisan era. Enlightenment philosophy does not provide the tools to resolve the conflict between groups who lay claim to truth in order to legitimate their claims to power, not least because it assumes the necessity and even the inherent goodness of that struggle. Likewise, it provides us no palatable method to repair public trust once it has broken down, and no recourse against those who wear their shamelessness like armour.

Michel Foucault was correct when he tossed out the idea of the truth regime: that what we consider to be the truth and how we arrive at it are at present both products of, and contributors to, existing structures of power. But this is a choice, not a law of nature. Better understandings of the meaning of truth and the methods and purpose for obtaining it are available.

One of these is another of the major schools of early modern thought: empiricism. Francis Bacons 1620 Novum Organum argued for the development of true knowledge about the natural world based on inductive reasoning applied to observation of events a methodological scepticism that still forms the basis of our scientific method.

While Bacons method of obtaining natural knowledge was scientific, as a devout Anglican his purpose for obtaining it was ultimately moral and theological: for the glory of God through the better understanding of Creation, and for the relief of humanitys ills. In his preface to the Instauratio Magna, Bacon warns against attempting to gain knowledge for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things. [] For it was from the lust of power that the angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it.

Pilate chose to condemn truth to death in the pursuit of power, leaving himself no means by which to face his own nature in the hope of redemption. As Pilate subsequently found, however, power is illusory. The moment you make truth about power, you have sold the pass.

Read more:

A crisis of truths | Charlotte Gauthier - The Critic

We have built an entire city without cutting down a single tree, says the Patagonian hotelier and self-taught architect Eduardo Roth, who is better known simply as Roth. Created over a period of nine months, without any architectural plans beyond the edict to work harmoniously with the natural surroundings, Azulik Uh May is a cultural centre 30 minutes drive north-west of Tulum that rises from Mexicos Mayan jungle like a mycelium temple. At its centre sits the SFER IK Museion, acavernous 52ft domed art space formed from bejuco vines, concrete and fibreglass. Inside, there are fire pits and fountains, abundant plant life and undulating pathways that circumnavigate the trees rising from the amorphous floor.Its a museum, but not as we know it.

There are no columns or conventional structures, says Roth of his City of Arts. Everything is sustained by magic. Rather than bulldoze this verdant jungle terrain to make way for cement mixers, all the building materials were made on site, using age-old techniques, and everything was constructed by hand. The only rules were that we couldnt cut anything, and that we must respect the formation of theforest floor and the water, he explains. The aim is to elevate jungle living by blurring the boundaries between outside and in. Built according to biomorphic principles, itsdesignechoes the configurations of nature, including the helix shape of the vine. Roths on-site home contains 79 trees. He calls it improvised architecture, andthe results are transformative and enchanting.

Before Azulik, Roth worked in publishing, running newspapers in Mexico City in the 1980s, then heading up an advertising firm in the 2000s. He lived in Tulum for more than 20 years, where he created the original Azulik Tulum eco-resort and SFER IK museum, before he relocated to the jungle three years ago. The experience ignited a deep fascination with Mayan culture he calls it the magic of the Mayans that informs the Azulik philosophy.

Its one of the oldest cultures in the world, says Roth. They hold knowledge that has yet to be understood by westerners. If we protect them and learn from them, then we have the chance to grow not just sustainably from an ecological point of view, but emotionally too, gaining happiness and sanity and wellbeing.

A gallery that doesnt have a single flat wall is fertile ground for art

When the Brazilian curator Marcello Dantas first made it to Uh May last January on the suggestion of a friend, it blew him away. I stepped inside and thought, what the hell is going on? he says. Ive been making museums for more than 30 years, but this place is breaking every one of the rules and succeeding. Dantas was so enamoured that he was compelled to write an article chronicling his experience on the flight home, and was immediately invited back. He came for a week, but stayed for a month, says Roth, who swiftly hired Dantas as the museums artistic director.

Roth has certainly found a kindred spirit, someone who shares his enthusiasm, creativity and insatiable appetite for ideas. He is one of the most alive people I know, he says of Dantas, who sees himself as an interpreter, placing Azuliks ecological and cultural vision into context, and acting as a storyteller for SFER IK. The duo revel in the nonconformity of their collaboration, which feels more like a friendship than a professional partnership. There is no working process, only an effort to interrogate, expand and enact one anothers ideas the bigger, and bolder, the better.

This all starts, of course, with the museum. A gallery that doesnt have a single flat wall or floor, that is not obeying any of the conventions, is a fertile ground for art, says Dantas. The antithesis of a white cube, its architecture invites artists to move beyond the canvas and create immersive installation art that directly answers its unique demands. There is nowhere to even hang a painting here.

Even if we dont realise it, the traditional museum experience is prescribed on a set of conventions: you pop on headphones, move along a predetermined path of the audio tour, then exit through the gift shop. For Roth and Dantas, this conveyor belt of culture is a westernised ideal, designed as far as possible to eliminate risk. We live in a world of extreme control, says Dantas. But this is a space for intuition. You take off your shoes and do whatever you feel. There might be a bird in a tree; something might be wet or textural. It ignites a different level of curiosity. SFER IKs architecture poses a particular challenge for artists. Most are struck by the appearance of the museum, but most dont have an immediate answer to how their art can exist there, says Dantas. They have to develop it. Herein lies the excitement. If the artists can respond creatively we will find a new grammar and new forms, hesays. This, in many ways, is SFER IKs reason for being.

The museum relaunches next month, having been shut atthe height of the Covid crisis, with the inaugural exhibition titled Maxx. Tokyo artist Makoto Azuma will fill SFER IK with his most monumental botanical sculpture yet. This towering 15m wooden structure, formed from a lattice-work of interconnected tree trunks and branches, will be decked with indigenous plants and flowers. Azuma is known for his ambitious creations that explore the fleeting beauty of nature in an effort to decode the hidden power of plants suspending blooms in ice, sending them into the stratosphere and to the bed of thePacific Ocean. At the close of the show, when his behemoth is dismantled, its blooms will be shared with the community. This ephemeral ecological statement sets a radical tone for a biannual programme of site-specific shows.

Alongside the museum are a series of working studios, including Roths architectural practice as well as art and craft ateliers spanning everything from macram to metalwork. Its an international melee of creativity: there areItalian architects, Brazilian bio-designers and local Mayan creatives working together in a way that marries theancient and modern. Under the Azulik banner they make furniture and clothes, experimenting with the possibilities of fungus, seeking solutions to far-reaching environmental problems such as water protection. Roths ambitions dont end in the Yucatn Peninsula. In northern Peru, he runs avolunteer-led regenerative farm that researches and records the Amazonias medicinal plants. He is also working on similar Azulik-style eco tourism and art projects in Panama, Puerto Rico and Saudi Arabia.

Dantas shares Roths view that, as the disappointments of the COP26 summit proved, rationalism will not provide an answer to the worlds increasingly urgent woes but hope prevails. When youre in Uh May youre sure life will survive, says Dantas. This is a place where the network of nature is so beautifully orchestrated you get the sense that humans are irrelevant to the equation. Its a positive proposition: cede control, and the earth can heal.

Link:

Inside the Guggenheim of the jungle - Financial Times

The explanatory power of human language has been essential to the evolution of human beings, as it enables us to accurately predict a multitude of phenomena without going through a multitude of potentially painful discovery processes. Is it possible to endow machines with similar abilities?

In the new paper Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks, a research team from Sapienza University of Rome and OpenAI introduces an explanatory learning procedure that enables machines to understand existing explanations from symbolic sequences and create new explanations for unexplained phenomena. The researchers further propose Critical Rationalist Network (CRN) deep learning models, which employ a rationalism-based approach for discovering such explanations in novel phenomena.

The researchers summarize their main contributions as:

The proposed Explanatory Learning (EL) framework is treated as a new class of machine learning problems. The team restructures the general problem of making new predictions for a given phenomenon as a binary classification task, i.e., predicting whether a sample from all possible observations belongs to the phenomenon or not.

The team introduces Odeen, a puzzle game environment and benchmark for experimenting with the EL paradigm. Each Odeen game can be regarded as a different phenomenon in a universe where each element is a sequence of geometric figures. Players attempt to make correct predictions for a given new phenomenon from few observations in conjunction with explanations and observations of other phenomena.

The researchers then propose Critical Rationalist Networks (CRN) deep learning models, which are implemented using two neural networks and take a rationalist view on the acquisition of knowledge to tackle the EL problem. The team notes that CRN predictions are directly caused by human-understandable explanations available in the output, making them explainable by construction. CRNs can also adjust their processing at test-time for harder inferences, and are able to offer strong confidence guarantees on their predictions.

Correct explanation rate of CRN and other empiricist models

In their evaluations, the team compared CRNs to radical (EMP-R) and conscious (EMP-C) empiricist models on their Odeen challenge. The results show that CRNs consistently outperform the other models, discovering the correct explanation for 880 out of 1132 new phenomena for a nearest rule score (NRS) of 77.7 percent compared to the empiricist models best of 22.5 percent.

Associated code and the Odeen dataset are available on the projects GitHub. The paper Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks is on arXiv.

Author: Hecate He |Editor: Michael Sarazen

We know you dont want to miss any news or research breakthroughs.Subscribe to our popular newsletterSynced Global AI Weeklyto get weekly AI updates.

Like Loading...

Follow this link:

Sapienza U & OpenAI Propose Explanatory Learning to Enable Machines to Understand and Create Explanations - Synced