How Deep is Blue? The Present Future of AI
We face the field head-on to evaluate what the pundits are saying, what scientists are building, and how close we really are to the edge of the precipice.
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Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century
When we talk about biocultural evolution in the 21st century, my bet is that religion broadly understood will take center stage as the most important and unpredictable variable for better or worse.
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Spiritual Transformation and Scientific Research: A Unique Religion and Science Initiative atMetanexus Institute
Although readers may have seen advertisements for books or brief announcements about the Spiritual Transformation Project (STP; 2002-2005) developed by Dr. Sol Katz, this issue of the Global Spiral intends a fuller acquaintance. It includes an overview of the project, book reviews, chapters from two of its resulting publications, and two original papers, based on ideas…
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A Brief History of the Spiritual Transformation Scientific Research Program
The John Templeton Foundation first funded the Metanexus Institute to develop and conduct a program of scientific research focused on spiritual transformation (STP). In July 2001, at the formal beginnings of the Metanexus Institute, we accepted the challenge of extending the already developed constructive dialogue between religion and science into a newly emergent field, hypothesis-driven,…
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“Experience Contains More Ideas than We Have Words”: Created Co-Creator as Science and Symbol
From the Metanexus lecture series “By Nature Creators: Coming to Terms with Human Nature” I. Creating Meaning in a World of Surplus Ideas If this were a sermon, its text would be a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s book, Interpretation Theory: “Because our experience of the world provokes more ideas than we have words to express…
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The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg
From the Metanexus lecture series “By Nature Creators: Coming to Terms with Human Nature” I. What’s at Issue? The issues at the heart of this evening’s presentation are illustrated in a very ordinary experience I had last week. For the past two or three months, I had noticed a red patch growing on my thumb. …
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The Cyborg and the Golem
The golem is born of dust, and it is returned to dust when its creator deems that it has fulfilled its purpose. But, for the golem, the difference is that the creator in question is not supernatural, but natural, another of the created—a human being like you and me.
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The Infinite Library: An interview With Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier coined the term virtual reality and now regrets it, he’s a computer genius and a philosophic genius and an experimental musician with a collection of instruments from around the world.
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Review of James E. Huchingson’s Pandemonium Tremendum
Metanexus: Views 2001.12.31 3504 words If one probes deeper than a mere description of God and the world, one thenencounters problems concerning how God and the world interact, if indeedthey do. Although this kind of analysis calls for metaphysics, yet asHuchingson points out, old world views which, after all, die hard, impedeconstructing a vision of…
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Is Music Dead?
David Cope, the author of more than seventy published compositions and a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, invented a form of artificial intelligence that can emulate the great composers. It is called Experiments in Musical Intelligence.