Sam Harris argues in this TED talk that science can be an authority on moral issues. It’s a superb performance, and I think he’s got it approximately right.
We’re now in the first afternoon of the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Today George Dvorsky and I are live-blogging from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. We’re in the Biomedical Research building with about fifty people in attendance. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
What is fundamentalism? What is wrong with fundamentalism, anyway? Is there such a thing as a fundamentalist atheist? What would such a creature be like?
Why do people believe different paradigms and memes over others? At this point in time there are a number of theories that can be utilized to answer this question but they remain crude in nature.
Given the complexity of the world today, plus the risks associated with current and emerging technologies, it behooves everyone on all sides of the biopolitical spectrum to be open to opposing points of view.
“The antiscience tendency in anarchism, which does exist, is completely self-defeating on this score [questions of technology and revolution]. I mean, it is going to take, it is going to require sophisticated technology and scientific discoveries to create the possibility for human society to survive—I mean, unless we decide, well, it just shouldn’t survive, we should get down to, you know, 100,000 hunter-gatherers or something. Okay, except for that, if you’re serious about, you know, the billions of people in the world who—and their children and grandchildren, it’s going to require scientific and technological advances.” – Noam Chomsky
The recent Gods and Politics conference in Copenhagen adopted a “Declaration on Religion in Public Life.” The conference was the first European event of Atheist Alliance International, and was co-hosted by AAI and the Danish Atheist Society.
It has been claimed by biologists that the brains of females and males are different in obscure ways. However, physical differences in adults may be due to psychological and sociological pressures on the brains of each gender, because cultures and societies may exaggerate roles and stereotypes, having an impact on brain plasticity.
On my way through life, I’ve traversed a range of different paths, trying to find something that would satisfy a deep internal desire for ultimate meaning and happy outcomes.
There is good reason for thinking that posthumans will, on the whole, be atheists. And there is good reason for thinking that widespread apostasy would, on the whole, be desirable.
In this third installment of the 2020 Visionaries series [Part1] [Part2], we look at the future of the global environment and of democracy — two areas of concern that will increasingly intertwine in the next 10 years.
A U.S. Federal District Court on April 15th struck down a statute providing for a “national day of prayer.” This case should have been a no-brainer—if a statute of this kind is not an unlawful establishment of religion, then I’m going to be the next pope.
Metaethics is one of those fields where the wheels grind very, very slowly. I do think it’s making glacial progess. But just as there has been huge resistance over the centuries to the idea that God does not exist, so there has been huge resistance to the idea that there are no objective moral oughts, in the strong sense of “objective” that ordinary folk and many philosphers seem to want.
The recent TED talk by Sam Harris brings important metaethical issues into the popular arena. Is there a way to establish the objectivity of morality, and in particular the objective bindingness of utilitarian morality?
Biologist and former Catholic priest Francisco J. Ayala has been awarded this year’s Templeton Prize for his work in affirming spirituality. His best-known popular book is probably Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, published in 2007.
Sam Harris argues in this TED talk that science can be an authority on moral issues. It’s a superb performance, and I think he’s got it approximately right.
The schism over global climate change (GCC) has become an intellectual chasm, across which everyone perceives the other side as Koolaid-drinkers. Although I have mixed views of my own about the science of GCC, and have closely grilled a number of colleagues who are front-line atmospheric scientists (some at JPL), I’m afraid all the anecdotes and politics-drenched "questions" flying about right now aren’t shedding light. They are, in fact, quite beside the point. That is because science itself is the main issue: its relevance and utility as a decision-making tool.
There is no reason at all why groups with differing values cannot co-exist in the same society. All that is required is that neither attempt to coerce the other to live in a certain way.
Associating the Enlightenment with abstract reasoning runs smack up against what should be considered the Enlightenment’s greatest insight—that humans are inherently delusional beings, able to talk ourselves into anything at all.
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