Related papers: Scientific and Philosophical Challenges to Theism
Relentless progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly raising concerns that machines will replace humans on the job market, and perhaps altogether. Eliezer Yudkowski and others have explored the possibility that a promising…
The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative but…
Cosmos has always sparked human curiosity to unveil and speculate its fascinating secrets. This curiosity has ultimately opened a window to other worlds. After years of observation, computation, and data analysis, scientists have revealed…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
One of the outstanding problems of philosophy of science and mathematics today is whether there is just "one" unique mathematics or the same can be bifurcated into "pure" and "applied" categories. A novel solution for this problem is…
What is physics? What are the limits of what physics can say about the world? In seeking ever-broader theoretical `umbrellas' for physical phenomena, we are seeking unifying principles. Emergent phenomena have turned out to be some of the…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
If God did not exist - people would invent one. The development of human civilization requires mechanisms promoting cooperation and social order. One of these mechanisms is based on the idea that everything we do is seen and judged by God -…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
We turn `the' Church-Turing Hypothesis from an ambiguous source of sensational speculations into a (collection of) sound and well-defined scientific problem(s): Examining recent controversies, and causes for misunderstanding, concerning the…
Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…
This article is a theoretical study on the effectiveness of educational research in the context of Philosophy of science. This topic of discussion, in the area of educational research, has been the subject of intellectual debate and arises…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
It is proposed that the physical universe is an instance of a mathematical structure which possesses a dual structure, and that this dual structure is the collection of all possible knowledge of the physical universe. In turn, the physical…
We note that in general there exist two basic aspects in any branch of physics, including cosmology - one dealing with the attributes of basic constituents and forces of nature, the other dealing with how structures arise from them and how…
It has for ages been a rather constant feature of thinking in science to take it for granted that the respective thinking happens in realms which are totally outside and independent of all the other phenomena that constitute the objects of…