•  2
    The prelims comprise: Introduction Programs and Theories Finite Digital Physics Transfinite Digital Physics The Physics of Computation Conclusion.
  • Naturalism
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley. 2019.
    The many kinds of naturalism fall into two main types. Dogmatic naturalists define naturalness using some rule. Progressive naturalists define naturalness in terms of a research program. This research program, illustrated by the sciences, progressively defines things ever more precisely using mathematics. Most traditional religious concepts fail to be natural on any type of naturalism. But progressive naturalists are open to naturalistic revisions of traditional concepts. They do not tie religio…Read more
  • A deity is a superhuman person. Since deities are persons, they are axiologically comparable with each other. They are comparable in terms of their moral, political, and other axiological qualities. I regard all deities as contingent concrete worldbound particulars. To compare deities is to compare possible objects across worlds. I aim to compare the axiological qualities of deities taken from the entire Western ecosystem of deities. I will compare deities in terms of their moral and poli…Read more
  •  13
    Scientific Animism
    In Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion, Springer Verlag. pp. 227-255. 2022.
    Animism has been defined in many ways. Tylor defines it as the “the theory which endows the phenomena of nature with personal life” (1866: 82). Bird-David lists several definitions of animism: “the attribution of life or divinity to such natural phenomena as trees, thunder, or celestial bodies”; “the belief that all life is produced by a spiritual force, or that all natural phenomena have souls”; the belief that “trees, mountains, rivers and other natural formations possess an animating power or…Read more
  •  21
    Atheistic Platonism: A Manifesto
    Springer Verlag. 2022.
    Atheistic Platonism is an alternative to both theism and nihilistic atheism. It shows how any jobs allegedly done by God are better done by impersonal Platonic objects. Without Platonic objects, atheism degenerates into an illogical nihilism. Atheistic Platonism instead provides reality with foundations that are eternal, necessary, rational, beautiful, and utterly mindless. It argues for a plenitude of mathematical objects, and an infinite plurality of possible universes. It provides mindless ra…Read more
  • On religious naturalism
    In Andrei A. Buckareff & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, Oxford University Press. 2016.
  •  1
    Platonic atheism
    In Religious Studies Archive 3. pp. 1-7. 2021.
    The five articles selected for this issue of Religious Studies Archives develop a non-theistic approach to religion and spirituality that can be called Platonic atheism. Platonic atheism emerges as these five articles are set into place and put into dialog with each other. One of the central figures of Platonic atheism is Iris Murdoch, whose work deserves to be revived and studied very carefully by contemporary philosophers of religion. Platonic atheism is an alternative to Christian theism. …Read more
  •  3
    Afterlife
    In C. Taliaferro & S. Goetz (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion, . pp. 1-6. 2021.
    Ancient theories of life after death involve souls and gods. Reincarnation theories say an immortal soul travels from one mortal body to another. Lives are shaped by karmic laws, which may be retributive or progressive. Resurrection theories say that persons are bodies. After you die, God will revive your body, or reassemble it from its atoms, or recover it from information stored in the divine memory or your soul, or replicate it in another universe. Modern afterlife theories rely heavily on id…Read more
  •  10
    As an atheist, Dawkins strives to develop a scientific alternative to theism, and while he declares that science is not a religion, he also proclaims it to be a spiritual enterprise. His books are filled with fragmentary sketches of this "spiritual atheism", resembling a great unfinished cathedral. This book systematizes and completes Dawkins' arguments, and reveals their deep roots in Stoicism and Platonism. Expanding on Dawkins' ideas, Steinhart shows how atheists can develop powerful ethica…Read more
  •  51
    Atheists Giving Thanks to the Sun
    Philosophia 49 (3): 1219-1232. 2020.
    I argue that it is rational and appropriate for atheists to give thanks to deep impersonal agents for the benefits they give to us. These agents include our evolving biosphere, the sun, and our finely-tuned universe. Atheists can give thanks to evolution by sacrificially burning works of art. They can give thanks to the sun by performing rituals in solar calendars. They can give thanks to our finely-tuned universe, and to existence itself, by doing science and philosophy. But these linguistic ty…Read more
  •  18
    Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt t…Read more
  •  32
    Theurgy and Transhumanism
    Archai: Revista de Estudos Sobre as Origens Do Pensamento Ocidental 29. 2020.
    Theurgy was a system of magical practices in the late Roman Empire. It was applied Neoplatonism. The theurgists aimed to enable human bodies to assume divine attributes, that is, to become deities. I aim to show that much of the structure of theurgical Neoplatonism appears in transhumanism. Theurgists and transhumanists share a core Platonic-Pythagorean metaphysics. They share goals and methods. The theurgists practiced astrology, the reading of entrails, the consultation of oracles, channeling …Read more
  •  399
    Skeptical atheism is deeply concerned with the development of a true atheistic belief-system which competes with allegedly false theistic belief-systems. Spiritual atheists are concerned with building a successful atheistic culture to compete with an allegedly dysfunctional theistic culture. These atheisms are compared in terms of their epistemologies, metaphysics, axiologies, eschatologies, soteriologies, prosocial activities, and individual practices. Skeptical atheism is likely to remain a …Read more
  • Review of Grim, Mar, St. Denis - The Philosophical Computer (review)
    Metaphilosophy 246-250. 1999.
  •  304
    Analogical Truth-Conditions for Metaphors
    Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 9 (3): 161-178. 1994.
    It has often been said that metaphors are based on analogies, but the nature of this relation has never been made precise. This article rigorously and formally specifies two semantic relations that do obtain between some metaphors and analogies. We argue that analogies often provide conditions of meaningfulness and truth for metaphors. An analogy is treated as an isomorphism from a source to topic domain. Metaphors are thought of as surface structures. Formal analogical conditions of meani…Read more
  • Generating Metaphors from Networks
    with Eva Kittay
    In Approaches to Metaphor, Kluwer Academic. pp. 41-94. 1994.
    Metaphor's peculiar property to yield cognitive insight-- often in otherwise false sentences -- has been the focus of contemporary studies of metaphor. In Metaphor: Its Linguistic Structure and Cognitive Force, Eva Kittay develops the semantic field theory of metaphor (SFTM). The task of the present work is to formalize some of the central claims of SFTM. Formalization forces us to make the central concepts of SFTM precise and operational, and it enables us to evaluate the consistency and exp…Read more
  •  304
    NETMET: A Program for Generating and Interpreting Metaphors
    Computers and Humanities 28 (6): 383-392. 1995.
    Metaphors have computable semantics. A program called NETMET both generates metaphors and produces partial literal interpretations of metaphors. NETMET is based on Kittay's semantic field theory of metaphor and Black's interaction theory of metaphor. Input to NETMET consists of a list of literal propositions. NETMET creates metaphors by finding topic and source semantic fields, producing an analogical map from source to topic, then generating utterances in which terms in the source are ident…Read more
  • The Will to Power as Parallel Distributed Processing
    In Babette Babich & Richard Cohen (eds.), Nietzsche's Epistemological Writings, Kluwer Academic. pp. 313-322. 1999.
    The will to power has non-trivial physical models taken from the class of parallel dis¬tributed processing systems, specifically wave-mechanical discrete dynamical systems with cyclical entropy. The will to power is thus linked to research in non-linear self-organizing dynami¬cal systems, includ¬ing oscillons, cellular automata, spin-glasses, Ising systems, and connectionist networks.
  •  3
    The Physics of Information
    In Luciano Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Blackwell. pp. 178-185. 2003.
    This chapter has two goals. The first is to explain concepts associated with information and computation in physical terms. The other goal of this chapter is to analyze concepts in physics like space, time, and causality in information-theoretic and computational terms.
  •  167
    Generating and Interpreting Metaphors with NETMET
    APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 4 (2). 2005.
    The structural theory of metaphor (STM) uses techniques from possible worlds semantics to generate and interpret metaphors. STM is presented in detail in The Logic of Metaphor: Analogous Parts of Possible Worlds (Steinhart, 2001). STM is based on Kittay’s semantic field theory of metaphor (1987) and ultimately on Black’s interactionist theory (1962, 1979). STM uses an intensional calculus to specify truth-conditions for many grammatical forms of metaphor. The truth-conditional analysis in STM…Read more
  •  391
    Royce's Model of the Absolute
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48 (3): 356-384. 2012.
    At the end of the 19th century, Josiah Royce participated in what has come to be called the great debate (Royce, 1897; Armour, 2005).1 The great debate concerned issues in metaphysical theology, and, since metaphysics was primarily idealistic, it dealt considerably with the relations between the divine Self and lesser selves. After the great debate, Royce developed his idealism in his Gifford Lectures (1898-1900). These were published as The World and the Individual. At the end of the first volu…Read more
  • Religious Naturalism
    In Andrei Buckareff & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Alternative Conceptions of God, Oxford University Press. pp. 274-294. 2016.
    Religious naturalists say all divine or sacred things are natural. A unifying framework is presented for religious naturalism. Nature has five religiously significant levels of organization. These are nature as a whole, the universe, solar system, earth, and body. Each level involves power, cyclicality, complexity, and evolution. These levels take their religious contents from the Zygon group, the World Pantheist Movement, the New Atheists, the New Stoics, and the Burners. Religious naturali…Read more
  • Digital Afterlives
    In Yujin Nagasawa & Benjamin Matheson (eds.), Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife, Palsgrave. pp. 255-273. 2017.
    Digitalists base their thoughts about reality on concepts taken from the sciences of information and computation. For digitalists, these sciences are prior to the physical sciences. Digitalists emphatically reject substance metaphysics. They are neither materialists nor idealists nor dualists. They have their own novel definitions of bodies, minds, lives, and souls. They talk about digital universes running on digital gods, and they regard nature as a recursively self-improving system of co…Read more
  • The Existence of Software
    Rutherford Journal 5. 2018.
    Many ontologies posit levels of existence. A whole exists at a level above its parts; a set exists at a level above its members. Hardware objects are at the lowest level in a computational ontology. Software objects exist at higher levels. The game of life illustrates a stratified computational ontology. The cells in the life grid are the hardware objects. An event is a function from cells to values 0 or 1. A process is a series of events. A process contains a software object iff its con…Read more
  • Religion after Naturalism
    In Paul Draper & J. L. Schellenberg (eds.), Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 63-78. 2017.
    Theistic religions are not the only religions in the West. Many nontheistic religions are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and natural. Although it cannot be worshiped, this energy can be aroused, directed, and shaped. Hence the energy religions involve tools and techniques for the therapeutic application of the ultimate energy to the self. They are technologies of the self. Attention is focused here on four new types of energy religion. These include the re…Read more
  • Practices in Religious Naturalism
    In Donald Crosby & Jerome Stone (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism, Routledge. pp. 341-351. 2018.
    There are two main ways to develop practices in religious naturalism. The first way is to practice within some traditional religion. Since those religions involve the worship of divine persons, which religious naturalists reject, religious naturalists must develop non-literal or fictional styles of participation in those religions. The second way is to develop new naturalistic religions. Since these will not be religions of worship, they will be religions of self-realization. Self-realizati…Read more
  • Spiritual Naturalism
    In R. Nicholls & Heather Salazar (eds.), The Philosophy of Spirituality, Brill. pp. 312-328. 2019.
    Spiritual naturalists say that spirit is a natural force. Far from being novel or unconventional, spiritual naturalism spans the entire history of Western thought, from the Stoics, through leading modern thinkers, to the transhumanists. Spirit drives the self-organization of matter. The spirituality of any thing is just its degree of self-organization, which is its evolved complexity. But self-organization is self-regulation and self-control. Many spiritual naturalists, especially the trans…Read more
  • Process Polytheism
    In Demian Wheeler & David Connor (eds.), Conceiving an Alternative: Philosophical Resources for an Ecological Civilization, Process Century. pp. 149-165. 2019.
    I develop a version of process theology inspired by Hartshorne. This development aims to reconcile Hartshorne both with recent science and with analytic metaphysics. It posits an endless series of ever greater cosmic epochs. Each cosmic epoch is a subcomputation in a divine organism. Each divine organism is like a phoenix. Just as new cosmic epochs are born from the ashes of old cosmic epochs, so new deities are born from the ashes of old deities. The result is a process polytheism.
  • Naturalism
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 152-66. 2019.
    The many kinds of naturalism fall into two main types. Dogmatic naturalists define naturalness using some rule. Progressive naturalists define naturalness in terms of a research program. This research program, illustrated by the sciences, progressively defines things ever more precisely using mathematics. Most traditional religious concepts fail to be natural on any type of naturalism. But progressive naturalists are open to naturalistic revisions of traditional concepts. They do not tie r…Read more