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Lectures
start
promptly at 7:30PM and are held on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of each
month January 2024 through May 14, 2024. Our
meetings are held at the New New Chinese Buffet, 3822 Belt Line
Road, Addison, TX 75001 (972) 243-1198, Zoom access will NOT be available.
1-9-2024 Diverse evidence that we are in a MIDAS simulation
Justin C. Fisher, SMU Philosophy
Many
philosophers acknowledge at least a small possibility that what we are
experiencing is not a fundamentally physical world, but instead a
massive computer simulation. A realistic simulation might be
difficult to distinguish from a "real world", so many have taken
simulation hypotheses to be unlikely possibilities that we can't quite
rule out, but also have no positive reason to think are
true. The philosopher Nick Bostrom famously argued that the
question of whether we are in a simulation is linked to the questions
of (a) whether civilizations would survive long enough to develop
advanced simulation technology, and (b) whether such civilizations
would then build massive simulations. As a consequence, evidence
involving (a) and/or (b) may weigh in favor of simulation
hypotheses. In addition, I will argue that many other sorts of
evidence weigh in favor of thinking that we are in a particular sort of
simulation: a Multi-threaded Incrementally-Detailed Ancestral
Simulation (MIDAS). This includes evidence from physics and
quantum mechanics, evidence that we are (apparently) on the homeworld
where we evolved, and evidence involving our semi-competent handling of
existential threats like pandemics, global warming, and artificial
intelligence. As such evidence accumulates, MIDAS simulation
hypotheses seem to be making the same transition that our theory of
evolution has made: shifting from being an intriguing but
impossible-to-verify "just so story" about a world far removed from our
immediate experience, to being the most plausible and coherent way to
make sense of overwhelming evidence from a diverse array of
fields.
Click the link below to listen to the talk on Zoom:
Passcode: jCZM.5ws
1-23-2024 Words, Meaning, and Life
David Patterson, Ph.D.
Based on the book Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life: A Jewish Father’s Ethical Will By David Patterson
This
presentation begins with a brief explanation of what an ethical will is
and its role in Jewish tradition, as well as other traditions.
The book examines the meanings and the teachings found in eighteen
selected words, because the numerical value of the Hebrew word for
life, chai, is eighteen. Here we shall consider three words and
how they are connected: word, meaning, and life. The discussion
opens with a reflection on the word and the capacity of words to create
and to destroy. The soul is made of words, according to Jewish
teaching; the essence of the human being is to be a speaking
being. As a speaking being, the human being takes on meaning
through a relation to another human being; there is no meaning in
isolation. Indeed, there are times when, in the darkness of our
isolation, we collide with meaninglessness. In the second part of
the talk, then, we shall consider where meaning is to be found.
For example, some connections between meaning and mission, mission and
future, will be explored. It turns out that meaning lies not in
what is known but in what is lived, which brings us to life. The
Torah summons us to choose life, saying: “Behold, I have set before you
this day life and good, and death and evil… . So choose life, in
order that you may endure, you and your seed.” If choosing
life does not mean simply surviving, what can it mean? And what
does it have to do with the choice between good and evil?
Finally, the talk will briefly consider what all of this has to do with
wisdom: is philosophy the love of wisdom or perhaps the wisdom of love,
as Emmanual Levinas suggests?
Click the link below to listen to the talk on Zoom:
Passcode: J#G8Q+@.
2-13-2024 Second-Best Ethics Part 2
Mark Curtis-Thames, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the El Centro Campus of Dallas College
“Systemic
Ethics” is the name given to an application of social systems theory to
normative ethics. This yields a “second-best” ethics equally accessible
to people of any worldview. A decision-making toolkit is derived from
systemic ethics, which can be applied via a straightforward protocol to
situations needing decision. The talk will quickly catch the audience
up to last fall’s approach, lay out the decision-making tool and then
involve the audience in a trial of the method.
Click the link below to listen to the talk on Zoom:
Passcode: Wrbb+g8p
2-27-2024 Probing the Hiddenness of God
Speaker: Chad Engelland, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, University of
Dallas
Is
it possible to seek God and not to find him? J.L. Schellenberg argues that an
earnest though unsuccessful seeking of God counts as evidence against the
existence of God, who, being all good, would want to be known. Drawing
on the thought of Augustine and Aquinas, the speaker will argue that such
divine hiddenness, while counting against all other gods, can be regarded as
both natural and fitting for God the creator, for: (1) God as creator would be
necessarily hidden to his creatures in virtue of belonging to a different
dimension (the author of a story belongs to a different world than the story
penned), and (2) God could permit such natural hiddenness to enable a free and
creative seeking of him, which attends to the dimensional difference and
thereby delivers a truer understanding of its target. To be hidden is a
fitting attribute of God the creator and therefore need not impugn
his goodness or call into question his existence.
3-12-2024 The Cultural
Evolution of Religion and God
Speaker: David Alkek, MD
In the entirety of human history, religion and beliefs in gods
have changed and evolved. Scientific approaches to explain this phenomenon are
as follows: the functional or adaptive approach; the evolutionary psychology
approach; the search for causal explanation; and the developmental psychology
perspective. We will explore these in detail and examine how religion is still
evolving today.
Click the link below to listen to the talk on Zoom:
Passcode: t&1XC&N9
3-26-2024 The Hegelian Conception of History and the Turn-of-the-20th Century Progressive Movement
Speaker: Tiffany Jones-Miller Professor of Politics University of Dallas
Many Americans today understand that
the turn-of-the-20th century progressive movement believed the US
needed to be reformed. Few, however, understand the depth of
their reconsideration of America, much less the role Hegel’s idealist
conception of History played in shaping their re-assessment.
Embracing a teleological view of human nature (and History), the
earlier progressives rejected a liberal conception of the limited
nature of government in favor of a self-consciously “new” conception of
the State ordered toward the perfection of humanity. The object
of social reform, accordingly, was to finish the developmental process
of History by abolishing whatever gap remained between the human ideal
(or end) and the way in which men actually behaved.
Click the link below to listen to the talk on Zoom:
Passcode: @!o2F7?u
4-9-2024 Fathoming the Human
Mind – an Historical Perspective: The lives and work of Freud, Jung, Meyers and
Briggs
Don Wolman, BS (MIT),
MS (Tufts)
This presentation, “Fathoming the Human Mind – an Historical Perspective”
chronicles the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the
mother-daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Meyers. From this
historical perspective, it is possible to understand the forces that shaped
their remarkable lives and their differing approaches to the human subconscious
mind. Together, they left a fascinating legacy as they struggled to fathom what
it means to be human.
4-23-2024 Philosophical and Psychological Responses to
Climate Change
Dr. Bill
Woodfin, MD
Though
climate scientists have been warning for decades of the existential threat of
climate change individuals, governments, and corporate entities are not
addressing it to a degree appropriate to avoid the worst of its consequences. This
lecture will explore the various factors psychological, philosophical, social,
financial, and political that might account for these failures.
Click on the link below to listen to the talk. Open the PP Presentation to loot at the slides.
5/14/2024 How We Change Our
Minds: A Discussion about Worldview Based on Thomas Kuhn
Andy Jennings, MS,
MDiv., Ph.D.
In his famous
work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that
science moves forward not by small incremental changes based on new data, but
through paradigm shifts based on crises of outlying data. As he says in a late
chapter title, scientific revolutions are often a matter of changing one’s
world view rather than a result of accepting minor alternative ways of
interpreting data. In this Kuhnian vein, we can ask a broader epistemological
question about what it takes to convince someone to change not just their
scientific paradigm about gravity or cosmology but about all of reality. In
modern parlance, a worldview is one’s fundamental assumptions about reality, a
framework in which one forms other beliefs about ethics, religion, politics,
and more. Taking Kuhn’s theory as a starting point, this paper will consider
how we build our noetic structures out of basic worldview assumptions that
govern our perceptions and belief formations. It will then consider what it
takes to persuade another person to give up one worldview for another and why
such persuasion is so difficult.
Click the link below to listen to the talk on Zoom:
Passcode: %F3eV0i*