The first aim of the paper is to proffer a series of objections to the God machine thought experiment, as presented by Savulescu and Persson, The Monist, 95, 399-421,. The second aim is to show that these objections must be overcome by any form of direct moral intervention by technological means, not just the God machine. The objections raised against the god machine involve questioning its intelligibility in light of established views on the relationship between beliefs, desires, (...) intention and intentional action, pointing out the seeming inability of individuals to attribute warranted moral praise to others or themselves in the case of abstentions from grossly immoral acts identifying a problematic ‘slippery slope’ argument, and questioning the rationale underlying the Freedom Lover’s intention to enrol on a moral enhancement course, as well as arguing that that Savulescu and Persson’s notion of ‘complete freedom’ is too stringent. (shrink)

The continuing debate between Persson and Savulescu and myself over moral enhancement concerns two dimensions of a very large question. The large question is: what exactly makes something a moral enhancement? This large question needs a book length study and this I provide in my How to be Good, Oxford 2016.. In their latest paper Moral Bioenhancement, Freedom and Reason take my book as their point of departure and the first dimension of the big question they address is one that (...) emphasizes a distinction, not highlighted in their original 2008 paper, between a moral enhancement that will ensure an improvement in morality and one that will simply make people more motivated to be moral. The second issue concerns whether anything that would be a “moral enhancement” properly so called, could involve denying moral agents the very possibility of autonomously choosing to try to be good. In this response, although P&S cover a number of other related issues, I shall concentrate on these two points. (shrink)

The God of the Machine presents an original theory of history and a bold defense of individualism as the source of moral and political progress.

If he were alive today, what might Heidegger say about _Halo, _the popular video game franchise? What would Augustine think about _Assassin’s Creed _? What could Maimonides teach us about Nintendo’s eponymous hero, Mario? While some critics might dismiss such inquiries outright, protesting that these great thinkers would never concern themselves with a medium so crude and mindless as video games, it is impor­tant to recognize that games like these are, in fact, becoming the defining medium of our time. We (...) spend more time and money on video games than on books, television, or film, and any serious thinker of our age should be concerned with these games, what they are saying about us, and what we are learning from them. Yet video games still remain relatively unexplored by both scholars and pundits alike. Few have advanced beyond out­moded and futile attempts to tie gameplay to violent behavior. With this canard now thoroughly and repeatedly disproven, it is time to delve deeper. Just as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan recently acquired fourteen games as part of its permanent collection, so too must we seek to add a serious consideration of virtual worlds to the pantheon of philoso-phical inquiry. In _God in the Machine, _author Liel Leibovitz leads a fas­cinating tour of the emerging virtual landscape and its many dazzling vistas from which we are offered new vantage points on age-old theological and philosophical questions. Free will vs. determinism, the importance of ritual, transcendence through mastery, notions of the self, justice and sin, life, death, and resurrection—these all come into play in the video games that some critics so easily write off as mind-numbing wastes of time. When one looks closely at how these games are designed, at their inherent logic, and at the cognitive effects they have on players, it becomes clear that playing these games creates a state of awareness vastly different from that which occurs when we watch television or read a book. Indeed, gameplay is a far more engaged process—one that draws on various faculties of mind and body to evoke sensa­tions that might more commonly be associated with religious experience. Getting swept away in an engrossing game can be a profoundly spiritual activity. It is not _to think_, but rather simply _to be_, a logic that sustained our ancestors for millennia as they looked heavenward for answers. Today, as more and more of us look screenward, it is important to investigate these games for their vast potential as fine instruments of moral training. Anyone seeking a concise and well-reasoned introduction to the subject would do well to start with _God in the Machine_. By illuminating both where video game storytelling is now and where it currently butts up against certain inherent limitations, Liebovitz intriguingly implies how the field and, in turn, our experiences might continue to evolve and advance in the coming years. (shrink)

In early modern times it was not uncommon for thinkers to tease out from the nature of God various doctrines of substantial physical and metaphysical import. This approach was particularly fruitful in the so-called beast-machine controversy, which erupted following Descartes’ claim that animals are automata, that is, pure machines, without a spiritual, incorporeal soul. Over the course of this controversy, thinkers on both sides attempted to draw out important truths about the status of animals simply from the notion or (...) attributes of God. Automatists – led by Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Dilly – developed six such arguments, appealing to divine justice, providence, economy, glory (twice) and wisdom, while opponents to animal automatism developed two arguments, appealing to divine wisdom and goodness. In this article I shall examine the substance of all eight of these arguments, along with their origins, patronage, and variations, and the objections they elicited from opponents, with the aim of determining their suitability for use in contemporary debates about animal sentience and consciousness, and hence their relevance for contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present (...) world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world. (shrink)

Experience machines, popularized in print by Robert Nozick and on the screen by the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix, provide highly or perfectly realistic experiences that are more pleasant and less painful than those generated in real life.1 The recent surge in virtual reality and neuro-prosthetic technologies is making the creation of real-world experience machines seem inevitable and perhaps imminent.2 Given the likelihood of the near-future availability of such machines, it behooves ethicists to consider the moral status of their potential uses. (...) In this chapter, we investigate the use of experience machines in palliative and end-of-life care situations. We pair up various kinds of experience machines with patients in a range of conditions, to illuminate the moral problems and benefits of using experience machines in this way. We argue that the use of Nozickian experience machines to treat patients in most conditions would be morally problematic, most notably for the negative effects on patients’ characters and real-world relationships. Informed by this initial moral analysis, we describe an experience machine that is more closely related to a virtual reality game, and argue that it can avoid the moral problems encountered by Nozickian experience machines. In fact, we argue that this new kind of experience machine could improve some patients’ characters and relationships with real-world people. We conclude that some kinds of experience machines could benefit many patients, especially those in extreme pain and those not in the position to meaningfully interact with their loved ones in reality. We also note that certain kinds of experience machines could be useful for religious people, for whom the range of palliative and end-of-life care options is often thought to be relatively narrow. (shrink)

The present review takes into consideration the existing literature on Professor Dr. Miglena Nikolchina's new monograph, “God with a Machine: Extracting the Human”, with a particular focus on the science-fictional aspects of the book, tracking their culmination in the debates about the future and the inquiries that construct the very notion of humanity.

Implicit God-like and ghost-in-the-machine metaphors underlie much current thinking about genomes. Although many criticisms of such views exist, none have succeeded in substituting a different, widely accepted view. Viewing the genome with its protein packaging as a brain gets rid of Gods and ghosts while plausibly integrating machine and information-based views. While the ‘wetware’ of brains and genomes are very different, many fundamental principles of how they function are similar. Eukaryotic cells are compound entities in which case the (...) nuclear genome might best be thought of more as a government than simply as a brain. (shrink)

In a document penned under the direction of its then-president Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission observed that many neo-Darwinian materialists and their Christian critics share a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. This article explores the thought of Joseph Ratzinger in view of proposing the features of a path that seeks to eschew these faulty understandings of how God causes evolutionary change within our world, thus providing an alternative to the Intelligent Design movement’s approach to creation.. (...) Ratzinger has a deep respect for the integrity of nature, rejecting the notion that God is a “craftsman” who “tinkers” with the world. According to Ratzinger, evolutionary change occurs “precisely in the processes of a living being” even as human beings are “not the mere product of development.” Finally, the emeritus pontiff insists that creation is an ever-present act that unfolds “in the manner in which thought is creative,” a dynamic that he describes variously as a story, drama, melody, and symphony. Wedding these and other key insights, this article submits that Ratzinger’s thought on evolution should lead us to conceive of creation less along the lines of an intelligently designed machine and more as a masterpiece story that is continually being told as its plot unfolds naturally over the course of time. (shrink)

This essay argues that Carl Schmitt’s postwar writings offer an original critique of biotechnology and utopian thinking. Examining the classics of utopian literature from Plato to Thomas More and Aldous Huxley, Schmitt illustrates the rise of utopianism that aims to transform human nature and even produce an artificial “human-machine.” Schmitt discovers a counterimage to the emerging era of biotechnology from a katechontic form of Christianity and maintains that human beings must recognize their shared humanity in God, warning us that (...) without a realm of transcendence, the enemy no longer offers an existential mirror but begins to incarnate foreign values, which must be destroyed completely. By comparing Schmitt with Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway, it is also argued that Schmitt’s thinking unlocks a novel path to exploring the meaning and histories of biopolitics and posthumanism. From a Schmittian perspective, Foucault’s depiction of biopolitics appears as a mere prelude to the coming age of biotechnology that will lead us into a posthuman era. Demonstrating interesting contrasts with Haraway’s utopian vision of the cyborg, it is maintained that Schmitt’s thinking offers a distinctively conservative-Christian critique of posthumanism. (shrink)

We informally discuss some recent results on the incompleteness of formal systems. These theorems, which are of great importance to contemporary mathematical epistemology, are proved using a variety of conceptual tools provably stronger than those of finitary axiomatisations. Those tools require no mathematical ontology, but rather constitute particularly concrete human constructions and acts of comprehending infinity and space rooted in different forms of knowledge. We shall also discuss, albeit very briefly, the mathematical intelligence both of God and of computers. We (...) hope in this manner to help the reader overcome formalist reductionism, while avoiding naive Platonist ontologies, typical symptoms of Godelitis which affected many in the last seventy years. (shrink)

The seventeenth–century chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle argued that the world is like a clockwork machine. This led to the problems of the place of a Creator and of how one can explain the directed, “final–cause” nature of organisms. Boyle thought that he could wrap everything up in one neat package, with a clear place for a designing God, but of course the coming of Darwinism casts doubt on this. Nevertheless, Boyle's thinking does have some very interesting implications for (...) the way in which we today should consider the science/religion relationship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back InTony E. JacksonAd Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In, by Brian Rotman; xii & 203 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, $39.50 cloth, $12.95 paper.Brian Rotman’s book attempts to pull mathematics—the last, most solid home of metaphysical thought—off (...) its absolutist foundations and into the roiling current of postmodernism. His argument works in what has by now become a rather standard manner. He shows how the grounding ideas of mathematics rest upon the insupportable assumption of a realm of absolute truth, “truth perfect, truth outside time, outside space, outside the material world of matter, energy, and entropy, truth somehow able to be discovered or apprehended but never invented” (p. 19). Rotman questions this Platonic grounding in a number of ways.First, with the help of linguistics (de Saussure, Benveniste, Wittgenstein, and Peirce) he provides a semiotic analysis of mathematical arguments as real-world linguistic events. Proof he looks at “not as a form of inference engaged in preserving eternal truths, but as an historically conditioned species of rhetoric” (p. 35). Secondly, Rotman argues that one idea has most secured the fortress-like solidity of mathematical Platonism: the idea of ad infinitum or infinite iteration. Mathematics takes off from the givenness of the natural numbers, our everyday 1, 2, 3 and so on to infinity. It is the “so on to infinity” that frames up the house of arithmetic as it has stood since Euclid. (Euclidean in this context is equivalent to Platonic in the context of philosophy.) But what is the referent of these numbers? Ultimately they are said to be the symbolic representation of the action of counting, which is the “mathematical ur-cognition” (p. 51). And yet we cannot imagine any material human situation in which counting could actually go on to infinity. Therefore, some impossible, supernatural agent (the ghost of the title) must be projected in order for this conception to exist. Similarly, Rotman argues against the assumption of “perfect repeatability” because this notion depends upon some purely imaginary, ideal identity of object or action that could possibly be repeated. Ad infinitum requires and assumes both a disembodied, metaphysical counter and a disembodied, metaphysical counted.So Rotman sets about putting the body back into this symbolic system by rejecting the idea of ad infinitum. Instead of assuming the existence of counting activities that run, in principle, out to infinity without changing their nature, Rotman posits what he calls “realizable iteration,” that is, counting that admits the necessary dissolution or change of whatever repetitive function you begin with. Put simply, he includes the fact that quantitative accumulation or repetition always eventually brings about a qualitative change: at some point in everyday life a difference of degree of the “same” thing or action inevitably becomes a difference of kind. The natural numbers and the ad infinitum [End Page 390] remain blissfully sheltered from this inescapable real world truth, but Rotman reformulates mathematics so as to include this truth in the very idea of numbering.In fact (and he acknowledges this) he theorizes counting after the model of chaos or complexity theory in the physical sciences. Realizable iteration, he says, will bring in the “qualitative differences” forgotten or repressed (the language of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud runs throughout) in the metaphysical version of number, and “display [the qualitative differences] as the emergent effects of repetition” (p. 131). Even numerical addition, for instance, which had been the most linearly continuous of activities, now will be linear beginning from some initial point, but will become increasingly nonlinear as quantitative increase tends towards some point of qualitative discontinuity with what had come before. The point of discontinuity, though certain to appear, is by its nature not specifiable beyond a horizon of probability, and in this, Rotman aligns his arithmetic not only with chaos theory, but also with quantum mechanics. In an appendix, Rotman elaborates at least to a degree the “pre-elements” of his non-Euclidean arithmetic.As chaos theory does not destroy everyday cause... (shrink)

This ambitious work puts forward a new account of mathematics-as-language that challenges the coherence of the accepted idea of infinity and suggests a startlingly new conception of counting. The author questions the familiar, classical, interpretation of whole numbers held by mathematicians and scientists, and replaces it with an original and radical alternative--what the author calls non-Euclidean arithmetic. The author's entry point is an attack on the notion of the mathematical infinite in both its potential and actual forms, an attack organized (...) around his claim that any interpretation of "endless" or "unlimited" iteration is ineradicably theological. Going further than critique of the overt metaphysics enshrined in the prevailing Platonist description of mathematics, he uncovers a covert theism, an appeal to a disembodied ghost, deep inside the mathematical community's understanding of counting. (shrink)

In God Emperor of Dune, Leto II explains to Moneo why people destroyed thinking machines in the Butlerian Jihad: "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." The Orange Catholic Bible (OCB), the key religious text in the Dune universe, forbids the creation of machines that imitate human thinking: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." The OCB focuses on human (...) mental abilities – especially computation, reason, and logic – that have a status that machines should not emulate. In Frank Herbert's universe, divine imitation and creation are presented in conflicting ways: on the one hand, they are strictly prohibited, on the other, they are aspirations for key characters. Mentats replace machines by use of hard, cold, logical thinking and reasoning with machine‐like efficiency. (shrink)

For Derrida, the technological, automatic and mechanical could never simply be defined as external or opposed to the voluntary, conscious and spiritual. The articulation and repeatability of the trace means that there is something machinic that is inseparable from the possibilities of meaning, choice and faith. This paper will draw on various texts – including ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Without Alibi and On Touching – to explore the mutual unravelling of machine and flesh in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. (...) It will argue that the incarnation should not be interpreted as the self-emptying of God, but as the productive resistance of the immanent world to being appropriated by a discourse of transcendence. Taking account of Derrida's engagement with Nancy, it will explore a deconstruction of Christianity that is not ‘mere Christian hyperbole’, but the ruin of salvation itself. (shrink)

Could Artificial Intelligence (AI) play an active role in delivering pastoral care? The question rests not only on whether an AI could be considered an autonomous agent, but on whether such an agent could support the depths of relationship with humans which is essential to genuine pastoral care. Theological consideration of the status of human-AI relations is heavily influenced by Noreen Herzfeld, who utilises Karl Barth's I-Thou encounters to conclude that we will never be able to relate meaningfully to a (...) computer since it would not share our relationship to God. In this article, I look at Barth's anthropology in greater depth to establish a more comprehensive and permissive foundation for human-machine encounter than Herzfeld provides—with the key assumption that, at some stage, computers will become conscious. This work allows discussion to shift focus to the challenges that the alterity of the conscious computer brings, rather than dismissing it as a non-human object. If we can relate as an I to a Thou with a computer, then this allows consideration of the types of pastoral care they could provide. (shrink)

This paper explores the suggestion that our conscious experience is embodied in, rather than interactive with, our brain activity, and that the distinctive brain correlate of conscious experience lies at the level of global functional organization. To speak of either brains or computers as thinking is categorically inept, but whether stochastic mechanisms using internal experimentation rather than rule‐following to determine behavior could embody conscious agency is argued to be an open question, even in light of the Christian doctrine of man. (...) Mechanistic brain science does nothing to discredit Christian experience in dialogue with God or the Christian hope of eternal life. (shrink)

RESUMEN Según Furio Jesi y Giorgio Agamben, la máquina antropológica es un dispositivo histórico que produce imágenes del hombre. En este artículo nos proponemos retomar esta categoría y mostrar que existen dos grandes modelos de máquina según la naturaleza de la imagen generada: la máquina teológica-bíblica, que funciona hasta el siglo XIX y que produce al hombre como ícono; la máquina ateológica, posterior a la muerte de Dios, que produce al hombre como fantasma. ABSTRACT According to Furio Jesi and Giorgio (...) Agamben, the anthropological machine is a historical dispositive that produces images of man. This paper aims at returning to this category and demonstrating that two models of the machine can be found depending on the nature of the image produced: the theological-biblical machine that operates until 19th century and that produces man as icon, and the a-theological machine, after disappearance of God, that produces man as phantasm. (shrink)

The advance of mechanism in science and philosophy in the 17th century created a great interest to machines or automata. Leibniz was no exception - in an early memoir Drôle de pensée he wrote admiringly about a machine that could walk on water, exhibited in Paris. The idea of automatic processing in general had a large role in his thought, as can be seen, for example, in his invention of the binary code and the so-called Calculemus!-model for solving controversies. (...) In metaphysics, the idea of an automata was expressed most clearly in the 1695 article New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication, and the ensuing correspondence with, among others, Foucher, Bayle, Lamy, Jaquelot and Masham. In the article Leibniz discusses the soul as a spiritual machine in the context of pre-established harmony, arguing that God can "give to a substance at the outset a nature or internal force which could produce in it an orderly way (as in spiritual or formal automaton; but a free one, in the case of a substance which is endowed with a share of reason) everything that is going to happen to it, that is to say, all the appearances or expressions it is going to have, and all without the help of any created thing." The basic idea of Leibniz's spiritual machine is that the soul or entelechy is an autonomous and spontaneous unity, consisting of internal active force and producing its own perceptions (both confused and distinct). It is a self-moving machine, driven by its perceptions and appetites, but it follows (without being conscious of it) a lawful series or programme created by God. The entelechy remains the same despite undergoing an infinite number of changes. To Foucher he explained that each state of the individual substance is a consequence of its preceding one, "as if there were only God and the substance in the world". Despite this, the spiritual machine is related not only to God, but through the pre-established harmony to bodies or natural machines. However, as it is not dependent on them, the spiritual machine is superiot to natural machines. In this paper I concentrate on three moral themes related to the spiritual machine: moral deliberation, moral identity and the goal of moral action. All these themes are more or less implicit in the New System, but are discussed in more detail in the ensuing correspondence after the publication of the article. Finally, the themes are given an extended discussion especially in the second book of New Essays on Human Understanding (1704, published 1765), written partly at the same time as some of the correspondence and unpublished related material. I will first give an overview of Leibniz's position concerning the spiritual machine or automaton in the New System and then go on to explore the three moral themes one by one, as they feature in the subsequent correspondence and in the New Essays. I will show that the three topics are essential to the function of the spiritual machine – to Sophie Charlotte Leibniz wrote: "...let us say that everything in bodies happens mechanically, or in accordance with laws of motion, and that everything in the soul happens morally, or in accordance with perceived good or evil." There are many texts that anticipate the views in the New System (notably the unpublished memoir De Affectibus of 1679) and Leibniz continued to discuss its themes later on (in addition to correpondence, for example, in Theodicy of 1710 and Monadology and Principles of Nature and Grace of 1714). Here I focus on the short-term development of Leibniz's views on the topic (around 1695-1705), but I argue that his basic view of the spiritual machine did not change much after finishing the dialogue with Locke in 1704. (shrink)

The young Spinoza and the mature Leibniz both characterize the soul as a self-moving spiritual automaton. Though it is unclear if Leibniz’s use of the term was suggested to him from his reading of Spinoza, Leibniz was aware of its presence in Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Considering Leibniz’s staunch opposition to Spinozism, the question arises as to why he was willing to adopt this term. I propose an answer to this question by comparing the spiritual automaton (...) in both philosophers. For Spinoza, the soul acts as a spiritual automaton when it overcomes imaginative ideas and produces true ideas. For Leibniz, the soul acts as a spiritual automaton when it spontaneously produces its perceptions according to the universal harmony preestablished by God. Thus, for Leibniz contra Spinoza, the spiritual automaton is a means to render intelligible a providential order in which everything happens for the best. (shrink)

I maintain that Leibniz's distinction between 'organic machines of nature' and the artificial machine that we produce cannot be adequately understood simply in terms of differing orders of structural complexity. It is not simply that natural machines, having been made by God, are infinitely more complex than the products of our own artifice. Instead, Leibniz's distinction is a thoroughly metaphysical one, having its root in his belief that every natural machine is a corporeal substance, the unity and identity (...) conditions of which derive ultimately from its substantial form. Natural machines are thus true unities, while artificial machines are mere aggregates of substances and are therefore only accidental unities. I briefly explore this connection between Leibniz's distinction between natural and artificial machines and his views about individuality. I conclude on a polemical note, in which it is suggested that these results undermine the currently popular view that Leibniz renounced corporeal substances toward the end of his life. (shrink)

This essay approaches the “God is dead” theme by offering a new philosophical history addressing what would make belief in divinity, in God, sustainable and unsustainable. I claim that the death of nature and the death of God in the modern era are manifestations of a progressive distancing from a religious philosophy of the Earth that guided human development until the beginnings of civilization. I outline within the space limitations here a new way of looking at the rise of civilization (...) and the modern era by re-evaluating large-scale epochal beliefs and assumptions of progress within a context of sustainable ends and what I have termed sustainable wisdom. From an original evolved out-look I call animate mind, rooted in a religious philosophy of the living Earth, succeeding contractions of anthropocentric mind and machine-centric mind have regressively disconnected from the community of life. This trajectory courses the disconnect from the livingness of things as defining cosmos, to that of machine-centric mind in the modern era, a devolutionary elevation of the feelingless machine, of deadness, of what Erich Fromm described as cultural necrophilia. I propose rebalancing these later contractions of anthropocentric and machine-centric mind with that deeper reality of animate mind, forged as the human evolutionary legacy still present in the human body-mind today. The renewed legacy of animate mind provides a key to what a sustainable God might mean. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Preface; 1. The trouble with God; 2. God unlimited; 3. How to reason if you must; 4. The well-tempered universe; 5. What does it all mean?; 6. Moral equilibrium; 7. What is life without thee?; 8. It necessarily ain't so.

A prominent objection to non-cognitive moral bio-enhancements is that they would compromise the recipient’s ‘freedom to fall’. I begin by discussing some ambiguities in this objection, before outlining an Aristotelian reading of it. I suggest that this reading may help to forestall Persson and Savulescu’s ‘God-Machine’ criticism; however, I suggest that the objection still faces the problem of explaining why the value of moral conformity is insufficient to outweigh the value of the freedom to fall itself. I also question (...) whether the objection is compatible with Neil Levy’s parity principle. Accordingly, I go on to consider an alternative relational freedom-based objection to NCMBEs that aims to explain the fundamental moral importance of the freedom that NCMBEs would violate. I argue that although this strategy might allow the critic of NCMBEs to bypass a powerful criticism of Harris’ objection, it also weakens the freedom-based objection’s compatibility with the parity principle. (shrink)

In his reply to our response to his book How to be Good, John Harris accuses us of saying ‘two mutually contradictory things’ when in fact we talk about two different things. In this short response, we distinguish between moral enhancement and interventions which promote moral behaviour but undermine freedom. We argue that moral enhancement does not necessarily undermine freedom. Interventions, such as the God Machine, which do undermine freedom are not moral enhancements as we conceive of them. But (...) they might nonetheless be justified because freedom must be balanced against other values, such as well-being. (shrink)

At least since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, it has increasingly become accepted that the existence of God is, intellectually, a lost cause, and that religious faith is an entirely non-rational matter--the province of those who willingly refuse to accept the dramatic advances of modern cosmology. Are belief in God and belief in science really mutually exclusive? Or, as noted philosopher of science and religion Richard Swinburne puts forth, can the very same criteria which scientists use to (...) reach theories about everything from DNA to the Big Bang be used to argue for the existence of God? In Is There a God? Swinburne presents a powerful and approachable case for the existence of God. Using the methods of scientific reasoning, Swinburne rigorously argues that science, far from replacing God, provides good grounds for belief in God. With each new discovery and advance, from black holes to quarks, superstrings to continuing evolution, science brings us closer to a complete understanding of how things work--but science can only go so far. Though it can explain much of how the universe works, science doesn't tell us why there is a universe at all. We can understand much of how life evolved, but why is there any life on earth? We can name and explicate scientific laws, but how is it that they operate in the universe? The Darwinian theory holds that the complex animal and human bodies that are here today exist because, ages ago, there were certain chemicals on earth, and given the laws of evolution, it was probable that complex organisms would emerge. But why those laws rather than any other? Why those chemicals? In Swinburne's view, the ultimate grand unifying theory is possible only by a belief in what he calls theism, acknowledging the existence of God: it was God who brought about the natural laws so that humans and animals would evolve. The watch may have been made, Swinburne asserts in reference to Richard Dawkins, with the aid of some blind screwdrivers (or even a blind watchmaking machine), but they were guided by a watchmaker with some very clear sight. At the heart of his argument is Swinburne's belief that the very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing there is an even deeper cause of that order. By embracing a belief in God that acknowledges the truth in science, Swinburne's elegant argument supplies an essential spiritual element to our understanding of order and beauty, the structure beneath the chaos of the natural world. This informed and provocative volume will be essential reading for all readers of popular science, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

H G WellsHerbert George Wells, an English writer, was born on 21st 1866 and died on 13 Aug 1946. He was renowned for his works of science fiction especially 'The Time Machine'. He is also referred as 'The Father of Science Fiction'.

Norbert Wiener has recently pointed out that the relation between God and man, according to orthodox Jewish and Christian theology, is analogous to the relation between men and ‘intelligent’ machines. God is supposed to have created man just as man has created machines. And just as God has endowed man with intelligence, creating him in his own image , so man has endowed the machine with intelligence—i.e. with problem solving capacities of a high order. Moreover, just as the endowment (...) of man with intelligence led to unintended, if not unforeseen developments , so the development of sophisticated computing machinery raises the possibility that some unintended and unwanted consequences may be forthcoming in the man-machine domain. Just such a possibility is realised in the recent film 2001: A Space Odyssey , where a quasi-human computer is represented as having both emotions and purposes of its own. Even though this particular film may be regarded as a bit far-fetched, in some respects, there are nonetheless many who, like Wiener, wonder whether the machines we have brought into being will always behave with reasonable predict ability, and in ways that will promote rather than frustrate human purposes. (shrink)

The article offers an analysis of Simone Weil's philosophy of mathematics. Weil's reflection starts from a critique of Bourbaki's programme, led by her brother André: the "mechanical attention" Bourbaki considered an advantage of their treatment of mathematics was for her responsible for the incomprehensibility of modern algebra, and even a cause of alien-ation and social oppression. On the contrary, she developed her pivotal concept of 'atten-tion' with the aim of approaching mathematical problems in order to make "progress in another more (...) mysterious dimension". In the Pythagorean 'crisis of incommensurables', Weil saw the possibility of defining the relationships between things in terms that are not exclusively numerical. This implies drawing an analogy between mathematical relation-ships and God's relationship with mankind (logos), the basis of a 'supernatural' reformu-lation of the entire scientific understanding of the world. The consequence is a critique of machinism and the possibility to contrast algorithmic reason with a "supernatural reason". (shrink)

Traditional Christianity holds that God is a singular way, not dependent on the conceptual machinations of humans. I argue that God can be plural ways, different in different human conceptual schemes, all the while holding to traditional Christianity. In short, I provide a framework for an ontological pluralism that extends not just to the world being various ways but to God being various ways.

In one of his essays on art, Dutch author and essayist Joost Zwagerman reflects on the work of South African artist Marlene Dumas. Zwagerman addresses in particular Dumas' My Mother Before She Became My Mother, painted 3 years after her mother died. In his reflections, Zwagerman proposes an interpretation of Dumas' work. He suggests that Dumas, in her art, does not accept the omnipotence of death. Maybe against better judgement, but Dumas keeps creating images that not only illustrate the desire (...) for meaning but also embody this desire. The image and the desire for meaning merge in Dumas' paintings. The painting itself becomes an autonomous 'desire machine', according to Zwagerman. In this article, a theological reading of Zwagerman's own posthumously published volume of poetry, 'Wakend over God', is presented, with a specific interest in art, death and God. The sacramental hermeneutics of Richard Kearney and the theopoetics of John Caputo are brought into the conversation to elicit the dimensions of faith and religion in Zwagerman's own 'desire machine'. (shrink)

Computer-facilitated self-service technologies have become ubiquitous in today’s consumer-focused world. Yet, few human–computer interactions elicit such dramatically polarizing emotional reactions from users as those involving SSTs. ATMs, pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and self-scanning retail registers tend to produce both passionate supporters and critics. While negative comments often center on unpleasant personal user experiences, the actual “abuse” related to such systems is really much deeper and more complex. SSTs carry with them a number of potentially insidious consequences, including the exploitation of consumers (...) as uncompensated temporary workers; the sacrifice of our inherent humanity to delegate both skills and cognition to electronic helpers; and the enabling of a new type of posthuman consumer identity, where each transaction is completed by a cyborg entity constructed of the human on one side and the electronic mechanism on the other. As a result, we may ultimately lose the boundary between the human and the machine. (shrink)

Vernon Sternberg of the S.I.U Press was responsible for bringing out the first edition of this collection of occasional pieces. In addition to the title piece, written in 1940, it includes other blank verses: “Machine Tools,” 1940; “The Historical Attempt by Man to Convert His Evolution from a Subjective to an Objective Process,” 1948; “Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage,” 1917–62; “The Fuller Research Foundation,” 1946–51; A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science,” 1956; and two prose essays with geometrical diagrams and (...) tables, “Introduction to Omnidirectional Halo,” 1959, and “omnidirectional Halo,” 1960. I once asked Fuller whether No More Secondhand God meant secondhand as in clothes or second hand as in watch? He seemed bemused by the question and answered with a casualness I found suspect—”Now that you mention it,” he said, “I suppose both.” Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller. (shrink)

writings, however, reveals a profoundly medieval outlook. Smith is preoccupied with the need to preserve order in society. His scientific methodology emphasises reconciliation with the world we live in rather than investigation of it. He invokes a version of natural law in which the universe is a harmonious machine administered by a providential deity. Nobody is uncared for and, in real happiness, we are all substantially equal. No action is without its appropriate reward – in this life or the (...) next. The social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the ‘invisible hand’, that is, the hand of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised. (shrink)