But how? Part 28: But why?

Various aspects and versions of this one have been tackled before, but I decided to approach this directly when reading about some of the alternate theories (other than the Big Bang) regarding the beginning of the known universe. The author said that there were two approaches to some of the traits that have been proposed as alternate scenarios:

  1. We can attempt to devise a theoretical mechanism to explain those phenomena, while simultaneously maintaining all the successes of the prior theory and making novel predictions that are distinct from the prior theory’s predictions.
  2. Or we can simply assume that there is no explanation, and the Universe was simply born with the properties necessary to give us the Universe we observe.

The second outright announces that no one’s even read more

You telling me or asking me?

Over at Why Evolution Is True far too many days back (time really has been getting away from me,) Jerry Coyne ran a post on how he, as an atheist, found ‘meaning’ in life. Surprising few who have engaged in such discussions before, religious commenter ajmgw saw fit to correct everyone’s impression, which Dr. Coyne featured in another post. For the edification of all, it reads:

The read more

Homey don’t play that

As a species, we like to occasionally speculate on extra-terrestrial life – what it would be like, how prevalent it is, what we could learn from it, and so on. More than speculate, really, because we’re actively looking for it (or at least some of us are,) and have done some interesting theoretical science along those lines. I’ve written a few posts about it myself (first of a read more

Friends with benefits

I’m not surprising anyone when I say humans are a social species, both from the biological definition and from our own self-description. But it goes further than that – we’re socially-influenced and socially-dependent, meaning we make a really stunning number of our decisions based on how we feel others will respond to them, often without any other consideration at all. This isn’t read more

Book review: How the Mind Works

If there is one book that I recommend to everybody, regardless, it’s Demon Haunted World, the most efficient, readable, and interesting book to promote critical thinking that I’ve ever come across. But underneath this pursuit lies a curious question: why there is an apparent deficit in critical thinking in the first place.

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None of this looks familiar

I’m the middle of a book that will be reviewed here upon completion (well, not right here, but up above somewhere,) and in the meantime, I keep running across thought-provoking content that I want to expand upon. I haven’t been taking notes, preferring instead to keep moving forward on the book, because it’s been taking a while – I’m actually doing much more read more

Buried at the crossroads

I wish I could draw political-style cartoons, because then I’d open this with an illustration of an unkillable zombie, or maybe Jason from the Friday the 13th franchise, with the label “Free Will” on it…

This time around it’s an article in Slate from Roy F. Baumeister entitled, “ read more