religion.
6 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-107 v2 | Religion and Science (SEP) | A survey, not an argument. It reports that the scholarly field rejects the conflict model the public holds, and it finds Barbour’s four-way taxonomy (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration) influential but neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Its survey of five traditions shows the relation varies with creed and colonial history, and it describes the field fragmenting into claim-by-claim “science engaged theology”. Its metaphysical content is concentrated in §1.2 (methodological vs ontological naturalism) and §3.1 (divine action under deterministic, chaotic and quantum physics; primary vs secondary causation; chance and providence). | Read |
| NOTE-376 | Shanahan — Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | An avowedly “poetic” attempt to fit consciousness and selfhood to a disembodied 2024 chat agent. Its time would be discrete and discontinuous. Its “I” can be the model or a conversation-bound self that flickers into being each turn; we may slip between them. Such selves can be copied, edited and merged, and spread over branching simulacra. No candidate site survives scrutiny, which is read as Buddhist emptiness and applied back to human selves. Examples are invented usages, not data. | Read |
| NOTE-398 | Atari et al. 2023, the MFQ-2 | A new Moral Foundations Questionnaire, built across 25 populations in local languages: 116 candidate items cut to 36, six each for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, in a “describes me” format. Six factors fit across 19 nations (ESEM CFI .979); reliabilities ω .73–.95; Purity alone fails the alignment invariance threshold. Equality and Proportionality are nearly orthogonal in WEIRD samples. Purity rises most with cultural distance from the U.S. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three national networks. The MFQ-2 predicts criterion scales better than the MFQ-1. | Read |
| NOTE-405 | Rai & Fiske 2011, relationship regulation | A theoretical review. Moral psychology is the regulation of social relationships: an act is right or wrong according to the relational model participants and observers apply, not according to its harm, fairness or purity in the abstract. Fiske’s four models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) each carry a moral motive: Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality. Honour killing, obedient massacre, blood feud and collateral damage are each read as one motive at work. Purity and ingroup loyalty are both Unity. No new data are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-1070 | Woods, Windt & Carter — Contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical | An evidence synthesis of 135 expert texts on the goal-states of Shamatha (Wallace), Transcendental Meditation and Stillness Meditation. It codes 65 features. The states are said to lack thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images and memories, but to keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom, unity and more. They are the same across the practices on 14 features, different on 4 (chiefly Shamatha’s far greater attentional stability and vividness) and unclear on 47. So, on the texts, they are neither truly contentless nor identical. The data are teachers’ descriptions, not participants’ reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1499 | Metzinger — The Elephant and the Blind | More than 500 meditators’ retrospective reports of “pure awareness”, from a survey of 1,403 people in 57 countries, are offered as evidence that consciousness occurs without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. Pure awareness is modelled as the top level of a nested active-inference hierarchy, “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness. The book concedes that retrospective reports cannot show that a state was selfless when it happened, and its summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established” all the same. | Skimmed |