In 2017 I wrote a piece about the root of so-called “alternative facts.” I blamed the ability of people to accept alternative facts as truth on Western Philosophy, but specifically on Plato’s essentialist view of reality. The piece became my most widely read ever, dwarfing my books and anything else I’ve published online. Frankly, I …
Tag: Philosophy of Science
The Misinformation Age (2018, Cailin O’Connor, James Owen Weatherall)
This is a compelling examination of mathematical models about the way beliefs spread through human social networks.
The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) by Edward O Wilson
This is a weird book, which doesn’t exactly live up to its title. It’s a book of philosophy by a biologist, who spends his time telling us where evolutionary biology is in 2013, what he thinks about aliens and getting mad at “The Humanities” for ignoring science. I can’t say I really enjoyed it all …
The Universe: Cosmology Quest (2004, Randall Meyers)
Full disclosure: I never once took physics in high school and I certainly never took physics after that. My math background is so far in my past that I cannot rely on it. So you have to take everything I have to say about the physics of this film with a giant grain of salt. …
On the nature of the universe
In the CS Monitor‘s book of review of Jim Holt’s Does the Universe Exist?, Troy Jollimore discusses the nature of the universe and the bizarre fact that most scientists and philosophers seem to assume that we have to prove how the universe appeared, as if what existed before the universe – if ever we can say something existed before the …