Page 20 - Daniel Dennett News Today

Just in time for Easter, a new survey revealed an astonishing change in religious adherence in the US. For the first time in eight decades of asking about this issue, the polling organisation Gallup found that less than 50 per cent of American adults belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque. This was down from 70 per cent in 1999, a proportion of the population that had remained almost constant since the late 1930s. Across the Atlantic, it has been reported that in the UK’s most recent censu...

Deconstructing Jackie In an interview in the  Guardian in 2017, the celebrated rationalist Daniel Dennett declared: “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.” If Dennett’s anathema was heard in the afterlife by Jacques Derrida, who died in 2004 renowned as the progenitor of what is commonly described as postmodernism, his shade must have smiled. Nothing is more charac...

Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. We deliver big-picture science by reporting on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives. Read a new chapter in the story every Thursday.

Credit: The MIT Press The MIT Press has announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O). A first-of-its-kind sustainable framework for open access monographs, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. D2O gives institutions the opportunity to harness collective action to support access to knowledge. Beginning in 2022, all new MIT Press scholarly m...

Jane Austens concept of information (Not Claude Shannons) 12 Jul 2017; 1 Jun 2018; 7 Aug 2018; 29 Aug 2018; 4 Sep 2018 10 Mar 2015; 29 May 2015 (Added introduction);4 Jun 2015; 30 Apr 2013; 16 Dec 2013; 27 Dec 2013; 6 Aug 2014; This file is available in two forms CONTENTS Introduction: Shannon vs Austen Many scientists and engineers, including, surprisingly, some psychologists and neuroscientists, seem to think that what the word "information" and its equivalents in other languages refer to is...

The Philosophers Magazine Zebras, Bacteria and Asteroids Toby Friend on what’s real and whether whatever it is can be part of a unified science Two tenets are of significant concern to today’s philosophers of science: one continues to be that age-old idea of Scientific Realism, the other is a more contemporary assertion of the Metaphysical Unity toscience. Although the motivations for or against them a...

Absolute nothingness and non-self: The reigning worldview of global power elites and western ruling classes By “ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no longer restricted by the Trump administration, issued an extensive federal public health order late Friday requiring all individuals to wear masks over their mouth and nose on nearly all forms of public transportation and private ride-sharing services—and makes refusal to wear a face-covering a violation of federal law.” CDC—N...

" " God speaks to Moses through a burning bush in this 15th-century German manuscript. According to the controversial theory of psychologist Julian Jaynes, every human tradition that entails prayer or divine voices is an echo of a time in which our bicameral brains simply worked that way. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images What is consciousness and how did it emerge in human beings? Great thinkers have pondered these questions for ages – and the subject continue...

The dozens of books that arrive at the Seven Days offices over the course of a year span a wide range of genres, topics and moods. We get tiny poetry chapbooks bound with thread stitches, as well as critically acclaimed novels, meandering memoirs and folksy self-help guides. We acknowledge as many as space allows — as long as the author lives in or very near Vermont. And since you can scarcely throw a stick in this state without hitting a writer, this is a pretty great place to be a reader. ...

needs philosophers. This thought has been nagging at me for a year now, and recently its been growing like a tumor. One that plenty of folks on the net would love to see kill me. People dont put much stock in philosophers these days. The popular impression of philosophy is that its just rhetoric, just frivolous debating about stuff that can never properly be answered. "Spare me the philosophy; lets stick to the facts!" The funny thing is, its philosophers who gave us the ability to think rat...