Clik here to view.
Nature Cannot Explain Itself
In his brilliant, aphoristic demolition of the modern, Pure: Modernity, Philosophy and the One, philosopher Mark Anderson explains in a few short paragraphs why nature cannot explain nature: A particle...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Credo: Resurrexit
Except for a couple years when I was in the wilderness, I have partaken each Easter in at least one liturgical celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As a cathedral chorister, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Immergence
When a complex orderly phenomenon such as consciousness arises in matter, it is these days often ascribed to a mysterious emergence of properties implicit in those of its material substrates. But...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Proper Terminus of Any Science
Explanations, and the understandings they mediate, must all terminate (at least in principle) upon *some singularity or other* if they are to hang together – if they are to succeed as explanations by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Gödelian Limit of Political Formalism
It is a straightforward corollary of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem that no strict formalization of political theory can possibly adequate to the multifarity of human reality, either in the most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Subsidiaritan Criterion of Just Coercion
How can we tell whether a given sort of government coercion is just? Government just is coercive control. But coercion eo ipso traduces a man’s dignity – which is to say, his status as an image of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nature Cannot Explain Anything
Nature cannot explain supernature, and nor can it explain itself. Nor then can it explain any part of itself. There be no complete explanation of any part of nature by any other part of nature, or even...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Halting Problem – there is, definitively, more to thinking than computation
Alan Turing Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was inspired by David Hilbert’s question “Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gödel’s Theorem
Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein Kurt Gödel[1] was a Platonist,[2] logician and mathematician who developed the intention of making a profound and lasting impact on philosophical mathematics. His next...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chaos and Order; the right and left hemispheres
In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist writes that a creature like a bird needs two types of consciousness simultaneously. It needs to be able to focus on something specific, such as pecking...
View ArticleOn Some Happy Corollaries of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems
I shall not now reiterate arguments I here set forth to my own satisfaction in 2012, shortly after we got started – with the corrective editorial (and indeed, therefore, also substantive) help of my...
View ArticleKristor & Ilíon: Gödel, Creation, Evil, the Satan, &c.
In my last post on some happy corollaries of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, I tipped my hat to our long time commenter (and an orthospherean from before there was an Orthosphere) Ilíon, who had...
View ArticlePhilosophical Skeleton Keys: The Stack of Worlds
This post supervenes my recent post On Some Happy Corollaries of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (so you might want to review that post, and the earlier posts it cites in turn, in order to find...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Philosophical Skeleton Keys: The Play: Its Wright, Players, & Characters
This post is a sequel to my post on the stack of worlds. It tries to understand a few things about how a stack of worlds might work – or, perhaps, *must* work – and how those workings might help us...
View ArticlePhilosophical Skeleton Keys: The Stack of Worlds & the Literal Fall; &c.
The stack of worlds implicit in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems furnishes a way of understanding the Fall as having happened literally, and in (so far as I can tell) complete congruity with the latter...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Kalam Ontological Argument
The Kalam Cosmological Argument is well known: if the cosmos had no beginning, it would not require a creator. Yay, for the atheist! But then, the cosmos would be infinitely old; and, so, it would be...
View ArticleGödelian Incompleteness → Creaturely Freedom
It seems we cannot be free. To each moment of decision, the schedule of inputs is what it is, and as completely constituting the matter of our decision, so it would seem that it completely forms our...
View Article
