I have started a new blog/newsletter, where I am writing about my theological views. My goal with this project is to write from both the rational and spiritual perspectives about God.
I hope you find it useful to your own journey in this life:
Ideas related to theology, philosophy, science, and the universe
I have started a new blog/newsletter, where I am writing about my theological views. My goal with this project is to write from both the rational and spiritual perspectives about God.
I hope you find it useful to your own journey in this life:
People say, “Where is God?” But then they look and see the art in this world and say, “How wonderful!” How can they not see that when the Evil One has handed us suffering, it is the Lord God who out of it makes beauty? Know that such beauty comes from God. That all beauty does.
“The Conscious Mind” by David Chalmers is one of the most wonderful, observant, and profound books I’ve read. Whether the hard problem of consciousness exists is for some reason controversial, but it’s something I’ve thought about most of my life. Why is it that we experience reality? Could not this exact universe, as it is physically, have existed without conscious observers experiencing it? As Chalmers puts it, consciousness is both intimate and mysterious. It is the means by which we experience reality, and yet we do not know why we do at all. That said, while I agree that the hard problem of consciousness and interpretations of quantum mechanics are two hard problems whose solutions might overlap in a unifying relief, I am not sure I agree that the Everett interpretation, also known as the many-worlds interpretation, is our best choice. I think other interpretations of quantum mechanics are more plausible and also have potential for illuminating how we think about the hard problem of consciousness as well. Other than this, I am mostly in agreement with Chalmers when it comes to the hard problem. Philosophical zombies can safely skip this one, but certainly for anyone else who is conscious, this is a must-read.
"The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by Paul Hoffman is a biography about the memorable personality that is Paul Erdős, the prolific mathematician, who published with over 500 collaborators. Erdős, who is well-known for his contributions to number theory, set theory, probability theory, graph theory, and more, as well as the invention of the Erdős Number, a measure of one's proximity to having collaborated with him, is of course a subject himself. That said, in Hoffman's biography of him, there is a bit about the behavior of mathematicians and a lone physicist that does well to embody the spiritual and cognitive differences between the two groups, both of which share a passion for mathematical thinking but nevertheless are separable beasts.
The excerpt of interest tells of a mathematics conference in which a group of mathematicians return to the coffee table after a talk only to find a puzzle.