Tertium Quid
exploring a narrative of fundamental mind
Articles and extended notes in various stages of draft:
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universes
Following E.A. Harrison's observation that civilizations create stories, masks, about the nature of The Universe.
- A mechanistic, mathematical world — The idea of a mechanical universe is a relatively recent development.
- Classical worldview — A 17th century worldview continues to dominate much of science.
- Evolution of reductionism and its entanglement with materialism — How we came to believe that the world can best be understood by examining its smallest parts.
- Does quantum mechanics tell us anything about reality? — Reality is not what it used to be.
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science
- Scientific method — Branding ploy or a description of how science is done?
- Quantum Hall emergence — Physical science steps firmly out of the age of reductionism
- The Einstein-Bohr Debate — Is quantum theory incomplete? Einstein thought so.
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technology
- Uncivilization — Our technological civilization is not sustainable.
- Fusion illusion — Tritium-fueled reactors will never deliver power to the grid.
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philosophy
- Metaphysics of science — Science cannot escape metaphysics.
- Thomas Nagel on reductive materialism — A brief summary of his argument against reductive materialism
- Irreducibles — The ‘hard problem’ dissolves if mind and matter are both subsets of an underlying whole.
- Physicalism — The idea that it’s physical stuff all the way down.
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practices
It's not what we believe. It's what we do that really matters
- Life-organizing principles 1 — Would that more people applied these simple directives.
- Full humanness
- Phoenix Affirmations — Christian in intent but much more broadly relevant
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other stories
- The anthropocentrism trap, Part 1 — What 19th-century skull measurements reveal about how we assess other minds.
- The anthropocentrism trap, Part 2 — What the bias conceals.
- Physicalism's promissory note — Physicalism’s response to questions about explaining consciousness is a promise that someday …
- The Big Bang, Quantum Field Theory, and God — The difference between quantum theory and adult conceptions of God is less than most might imagine.