thoughts in and out of season
People are impressed by science, and rightly so. The problem is that they are convinced that science will eventually account for everything, so much so that they think it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.
That’s evidently wrong. So far as I can tell, science—so far … More ...
Enlightenment was supposed to make everything perfectly clear. It has done so by ignoring everything that can’t be made perfectly clear, acting as if such things don’t exist and can’t possibly exist. How though is that enlightenment?
In my last entry I suggested that materialist science can’t deal with all realities, even all important realities. It can’t give an adequate account of “importance,” for example, and if you can’t sort out what is more and less important you can’t deal with anything at all. In other words, materialist science can’t even make … More ...
An obvious problem with a materialist understanding of the world is that we have subjective experience and can’t begin to imagine what a materialist explanation for subjective experience would look like. What do atoms and the void have to do with our sensation of redness, as opposed to redness as a wavelength of light, type … More ...
Alexander says his views on architecture are based on “a conception of the world in which the air we breathe, the stones and concrete our city streets are made of—all have life in them … This is not merely a poetic way of talking. It is a new physical conception of how the world is … More ...
I’ve just finished reading The Phenomenon of Life, the first volume of Christopher Alexander’s four-volume work The Nature of Order.
It’s really extraordinary. For those who aren’t familiar with him, Alexander’s an architect and theoretician who’s horrified by the inhumanity of contemporary architecture and has spent his life trying to define principles that … More ...
Truth and beauty enable us to place and orient ourselves in a world that is larger and more full of things that are worthwhile and interesting than the closed system of resources, desires, technology and formal logic that modern thought presents. That’s why contemplation is basic to the good life.
That kind of statement sounds … More ...
Mathematics and beauty seem to give us something to admire that is independent of us and somehow ideal or spiritual. People have therefore thought that they point the way to transcendent goods and suchlike. An objection to that way of thinking is that mathematics and beauty are purely matters of form and don’t tell us … More ...
Plato suggests mathematics and love of beauty as doors to the transcendent. Most mathematicians are Platonists, I think—they believe mathematical objects exist independently of human thought and action and even physical reality—but mathematics today is too closely connected to measurement, analysis and prediction of natural phenomena, and the tendency to resolve it into arbitrary axioms … More ...
Liberal society says it leaves the question of ultimate goods up to its members. That’s not possible, since every choice implicitly defines what is worth choosing and thus what is good. Every society, like every human being, thus accepts a definition of the good that is as specific and comprehensive as its system of habitual … More ...