Welcome back to our Sci-Fi Film Festival. This week, I continue my conversation with Mike Beidler about The Matrix as we chat about vocation and Christ figures. You can find the first half of the conversation here, including details about Mike’s own red pill awakening on matters of science and his thoughts on using storytelling as an invitation to deeper reflection.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Talking The Matrix with Mike Beidler (Pt 2)
The Matrix
Science Corner: Talking The Matrix with Mike Beidler (Pt 1)
Welcome back to the Emerging Scholars Network Sci-Fi Film Festival! We took a little hiatus, but we’re back to our conversations on various classic and current science fiction movies. Feel free to watch along and join the conversation. This week’s film is another 20-year-old classic from 1999: The Matrix. I’m joined once again by retired U.S. Navy commander (thanks for your service) and American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) & BioLogos affiliate Mike Beidler. Mike previously joined us to discuss The Phantom Menace, a movie that failed to live up to galactic expectations; by contrast, The Matrix came out of nowhere and blew everyone away.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Talking The Matrix with Mike Beidler (Pt 1)
Is Reality Secular? Part 2
What is real? . . . If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain (43)
Material Naturalism
With the above quote from The Matrix (1999), Mary Poplin introduces Part 2 of Is Reality Secular? What is the nature of reality? (Post on part 1). Morpheus’ words and the exploration of Material Naturalism bring back memories not only of a decade of conversation at Carnegie Mellon University as an InterVarsity Campus Field Staff (1996 – 2006), but also nearly a lifetime of my own internal wrestling. So how does Mary Poplin engage:
- Everything is a Thing (Chapter 5)
- Science as the Only Truth (Chapter 6)
- The Purposeless Universe Emerged from Nothing (Chapter 7)
- No Miracles Allowed (Chapter 8)
- The Ethics of Things upon Things (Chapter 9)?
I particularly appreciate the insights she offers from the dialogue between Alvin Plantinga and Tom Nagel. Below is her conclusion to Chapter 5: Everything is a Thing.
[Read more…] about Is Reality Secular? Part 2
Science in Review – October 2012
As you may or may not have noticed (and if you haven’t, just play along; it’ll make me feel better), I’ve been posting a science link of the week every Wednesday over on the ESN Facebook wall.  Facebook seems like a good place for some empirical experimentation; it provides a Wall against which to throw things to see if they stick.  By its nature, it’s a bit ephemeral.  That’s great if something doesn’t work; before too long it drifts down the screen out of sight, and thus out of mind.  But if something was worthwhile, it doesn’t stick around very long either.
So, how about we take the best of those links every month or so and expand them into a blog post.  Right now I imagine it as sort of a “director’s cut” version of the Facebook material. I’ll start with the links and comments I posted, and then expand on the discussion that followed.  I don’t feel comfortable just cutting and pasting the comments of others wholesale, but I think it’s reasonable to summarize and anonymize that content in the interest of bring the discussion to a wider audience and keeping it moving forward.  And since I’ve been trying to frame my links with some questions, I see the blog as a place to offer my (decidedly undefinitive) answers those questions.
Sound good? Â Here we go!
October 17
Variations on “What if *we’re* living in ‘The Matrix’?” have been around a long time. I’m not sure this particular exploration would be definitive either way, but I do admire their effort to make the simulation hypothesis more concrete and testable. As I understand it, the logic appears to be that a simulated universe will be finite in certain particular ways (due to the limits of whatever platform is running the sim), whereas a real universe would be infinite/unbounded. Do you think that’s a reasonable distinction? What other criteria (measurable or otherwise) might characterize a simulation?
Well, this certainly got some conversation going. Â The response was basically “no,” it’s not a reasonable hypothesis because we can’t assume the hardware limitations of current computers would apply to a system capable of simulating the entire universe and which exists in some other universe. Â That’s a fair point. Â One could respond that the Bekenstein bound, rather than the specifics of current computer implementations, ultimately argues for a simulation which is discrete and bounded in some way, rather than infinite. Â But one could just as easily argue that the Bekenstein bound does not rule out systems of infinite size or energy which would then be capable of storing infinite information.