Working Notes: Current Working Notes These notes are the contents of a whiteboard in Tinderbox that I'm using to map out my (more . . .)

The Big Idea: In brief, the idea that I keep circling back to runs something like this. We experience a world that is (more . . .)

What's Going On Now: My original idea for this site never went anywhere. On the one hand, I wanted to create organized content and (more . . .)

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Essays

Current Working Notes

My personal website is at ODBlog . I write about decision theory at my site On Deciding . . . Better . This site is a hyperlinked set of essays using Tinderbox.

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The world that I was taught to work in as a scientist was purely a material one. There is direct cause and effect based solely on physical laws. Those physical laws can be discovered and expressed as mathematical expressions. I worked with mathematical models of neurons that were based on simple physical properties of membranes and electric charge.

I advanced teleologic explanations, hypotheses that some phenomenon or other was there for a particular purpose, and was told that biological systems had no desire to do things. One could not say that animals had eyes in order to see. One could just explain how an eye was able to respond to light and evoke behaviors in the organism. Of course at some level, evolutionary biologists could legitimately look at how eyes had evolved from simpler forms, but of course this was random selection, not purposeful development of eyes by nature.

This clockwork universe without purpose seemed sterile to me. Worse was that this world had no room for free will, aesthetics or ethics. A value free world provided no way to make choices about right or wrong. Of course these behaviors (art, religion, speaking about consciousness or free will) could all be explained as neurobiological clockwork events as well.

There is no room for philosophy in this material world. What is, is. Hairless vocalizing tool-using primates building dwellings and machines, altering the face and climate of their planet. No more and no less.

I can pretty easily slip on a mental filter that lets me view the world in this way, but the way meaning drains from view is creepy. The world becomes grey, like saying a word over and over until it loses its semantic meaning and becomes just a jumble of phonemes.

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov