Idealism Without God

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Yetter-Chappell
Keyword(s):  
Unity Of Consciousness ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
Attributes Of God ◽  
Physical Laws

This chapter develops a novel non-theistic (quasi-)Berkeleyan idealism. The strategy is to peel away the attributes of God that aren’t essential for the role he plays in idealist metaphysics. Neither God’s desires, intentions, beliefs, nor his status as an agent is relevant to the metaphysical work he does in sustaining a robust reality. When we peel away these things, we’re left with a view on which reality is a vast unity of consciousness, weaving together sensory experiences into the familiar world around us. The chapter argues that if reality is fundamentally phenomenal in this way, we can give a unique account of perception that robustly captures direct realist intuitions of reality forming the ‘constituents’ of our experiences. The chapter assesses the unique virtues and challenges such a view faces, paying particular attention to the question of whether idealism entails a profligacy of physical laws.

Sensory Experiences Questionnaire

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace T. Baranek ◽  
Fabian J. David ◽  
Michele D. Poe ◽  
Wendy L. Stone ◽  
Linda R. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experiences

Creating the Wind

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-31
Author(s):  
Élodie Dupey García
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Natural Behavior ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Postclassic ◽  
Comparative Examination ◽  
Meteorological Phenomenon

This article explores how the Nahua of late Postclassic Mesoamerica (1200–1521 CE) created living and material embodiments of their wind god constructed on the basis of sensory experiences that shaped their conception of this divinized meteorological phenomenon. In this process, they employed chromatic and design devices, based on a wide range of natural elements, to add several layers of meaning to the human, painted, and sculpted supports dressed in the god’s insignia. Through a comparative examination of pre-Columbian visual production—especially codices and sculptures—historical sources mainly written in Nahuatl during the viceregal period, and ethnographic data on indigenous communities in modern Mexico, my analysis targets the body paint and shell jewelry of the anthropomorphic “images” of the wind god, along with the Feathered Serpent and the monkey-inspired embodiments of the deity. This study identifies the centrality of other human senses beyond sight in the conception of the wind god and the making of its earthly manifestations. Constructing these deity “images” was tantamount to creating the wind because they were intended to be visual replicas of the wind’s natural behavior. At the same time, they referred to the identity and agency of the wind god in myths and rituals.

Food Matters

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Martha Finch
Keyword(s):  
Food Studies ◽  
Religious Group ◽  
Cultural Group ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Common Food ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Sensory Effects

Each week in my religion and food course during Spring 2016, a student or I brought foods related to the religious group we were studying into the classroom for all to try. With the first dish they tasted, students asked, “So what makes this food ‘religious’?” This question formed the central theme throughout the semester as we wrestled with what religion is in the context of food and foodways: the network of material aspects (food itself; practices like growing, distributing, cooking, eating; sensory experiences such as taste) and conceptual aspects (ideas, meanings, metaphors, symbols, values such as taste) of food in a particular social/cultural group. The familiar and unfamiliar foods elicited visceral reactions from students. This essay argues that paying closer attention to religion as an independent interpretive category and especially to food itself, as a material agent eliciting powerful sensory effects that precede religious ideas and enable those ideas, provides an alternative to dependence on common food studies’ interpretive categories and on the Protestant-influenced focus on food as abstracted symbol or metaphor of ‘meaning.’

Causal determinism and a totally global fatalism from the third-person perspective

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyang Yu
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Causal Determinism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Neural Substrate ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
The Third Person

The human brain and the human language are precisely constructed together by evolution/genes, so that in the objective world, a human brain can tell a story to another brain in human language which describes an imagined multiplayer game; in this story, one player of the game represents the human brain itself. It’s possible that the human kind doesn’t really have a subjective world (doesn’t really have conscious experience). An individual has no control even over her choices. Her choices are controlled by the neural substrate. The neural substrate is controlled by the physical laws. So, her choices are controlled by the physical laws. So, she is powerless to do anything other than what she actually does. This is the view of fatalism. Specifically, this is the view of a totally global fatalism, where people have no control even over their choices, from the third-person perspective. And I just argued for fatalism by appeal to causal determinism. Psychologically, a third-person perspective and a new, dedicated personality state are required to bear the totally global fatalism, to avoid severe cognitive dissonance with our default first-person perspective and our original personality state.

Reversible Computing: An Introduction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Eftimiadi ◽  
Enrico Pugni Trimigliozzi
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Computing Systems ◽  
Reversible Computing ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
Structural Aspects ◽  
Computing Models

Reversible computing is a paradigm where computing models are defined so that they reflect physical reversibility, one of the fundamental microscopic physical property of Nature. Also, it is one of the basic microscopic physical laws of nature. Reversible computing refers tothe computation that could always be reversed to recover its earlier state. It is based on reversible physics, which implies that we can never truly erase information in a computer. Reversible computing is very difficult and its engineering hurdles are enormous. This paper provides a brief introduction to reversible computing. With these constraints, one can still satisfactorily deal with both functional and structural aspects of computing processes; at the same time, one attains a closer correspondence between the behavior of abstract computing systems and the microscopic physical laws (which are presumed to be strictly reversible) that underlay any implementation of such systems Available online at https://int-scientific-journals.com

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Ubiquity of Harmonies

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 68-84
Author(s):  
Adam Drozdek
Keyword(s):  
Attributes Of God ◽  
The Way

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), who is remembered today primarily for his novel Paul and Virginie, was mainly interested in showing the grandeur of God through his investigations of nature. He viewed nature from the teleological perspective: everything in it has some reason and the human task is to detect this reason. He provided hundreds of examples of such reasons, on many occasions exposing himself to derision. The article shows the importance of orderliness of nature, as it manifests itself in interlocking harmonies, as the way he followed to establish the theological conclusion regarding the existence and the attributes of God.

Consideration of the temperature factor of atmospheric air when determining standard consumption of fuel and energy resources for train traction

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (6) ◽  
pp. 375-381
Author(s):  
K. M. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Processing ◽  
Specific Consumption ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Effect Of Temperature ◽  
Influence Coefficient ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Specific Flow ◽  
Temperature Changes ◽  
Work Area ◽  
Physical Laws

Abstract. Influence of air temperature on the consumption of fuel and energy resources (FER) on train traction is due to a number of physical laws. The extent of this effect is specified in the Rules for Traction Settlement (RTS). At the same time, when rationing FER consumption for train traction, a specialized methodical base is used, which involves a different approach to accounting for the effect of temperature on FER consumption for train traction. At the same time in different documents of this base, the effects of low temperature on the absolute and specific consumption of fuel and energy resources on train traction are taken into account in a different way, which is due to the lack of consensus among specialists on the way this factor is taken into account. Specialists of JSC “VNIIZhT” carried out an analysis of a significant amount of driver’s routes data, results of which showed that the dependence of the specific flow rate on temperature, on the basis of which the corresponding influence coefficient is determined, needs to be periodically updated. In addition, when technically standardizing the consumption of fuel and energy resources (for the locomotive crew work site), the temperature effect coefficients need to be calculated for a specific work area and direction of motion on it, while using the average network coefficient values will lead to errors. When calculating additional flow of fuel and energy from the effect of temperature for electric multiple units (EMU), the equations of regression dependencies should be used, obtained by statistical processing of data on temperature changes and specific consumption of fuel and energy resources for EMU and determined for each series of EMU when working on a particular suburban area.

On the displacements of the contours of the optic-electronic space images. Mathematical modeling of displacement

2017 ◽  
Vol 992 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.G. Voronin
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Modeling ◽  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Mathematical Model ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Design Features ◽  
Space Images ◽  
Electronic Imaging ◽  
Measuring Accuracy ◽  
Physical Laws

The article opens a cycle of three consecutive publications dedicated to the phenomenon of the displacement of the same points in overlapping scans obtained adjacent CCD matrices with opto-electronic imagery. This phenomenon was noticed by other authors, but the proposed explanation for the origin of displacements and the resulting estimates are insufficient, and developed their solutions seem controversial from the point of view of recovery of the measuring accuracy of opticalelectronic space images, determined by the physical laws of their formation. In the first article the mathematical modeling of the expected displacements based on the design features of a scanning opto-electronic imaging equipment. It is shown that actual bias cannot be forecast, because they include additional terms, which may be gross, systematic and random values. The proposed algorithm for computing the most probable values of the additional displacement and ways to address some of the systematic components of these displacements in a mathematical model of optical-electronic remote sensing.

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