Links with Little Context

Stream.org

Bedeviled by my Wife's Dementia
By Douglas Groothuis
"Through these trials, Becky struggled to write and edit. As her health declined, each work became more difficult than the previous one. After writing two books, she labored for four years co-editing a major work on the theology of gender, contributing a long and carefully argued chapter. That was the last thing she wrote for publication. But page after page of my writing—books, reviews, essays, and academic papers—were marked by her corrections, questions, and deletions. We seldom argued over any of it. She made my work better, and we both knew it. Only God, Becky, and I know how much of her wisdom is woven into my work.

But she did not edit this essay."


Perception and the Cartesian Theater
by Michael Egnor
[Warning: Philosophy Ahead. Materialist and non-Materialist philosophies make a difference.]

"Locating perception in the sense organs and/or in the brain is a central fallacy of modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind. The study of perception -- central to cognitive science -- is itself unmoored from reality by the implicit or explicit presumption of the Cartesian theater. A scientist trapped in a Cartesian theater can have no sure knowledge of external reality, which is the very object of science, and even the study of the Cartesian theater itself entails merely an infinite regress of Cartesian theaters, a Lowes multiplex of subjectivity and exclusion from reality."

How Yale University Became a Savage, Bigoted Tribe
by John Zmirak

"America is ruled by a political and media elite that takes as self-evident truths a long list of outrageous fallacies. Like post-hypnotic suggestions, these false beliefs linger beneath the surface of lazy minds. They wouldn’t withstand ten minutes of sustained intellectual argument. Luckily for them, they’ll never have to. These cobbled-together opinions aren’t passed on through reasoned discourse, and rarely have to make their way through the rational sieve of the mind. Instead, they travel from person to person on a transmission belt of fashionable sentiment and self-congratulation, attracting new subscribers by dangling the hope of membership in a self-selected elite of “decent” people who hold “enlightened” ideas that make them sophisticated and praiseworthy. These views lurk in bumper stickers and status updates, are transmitted in winks and nods, retweets and likes, rarely brushing against the sharp edge of opposition. When you dare to contradict such a precept, its believer won’t hunker down to engage you. He’ll roll his eyes, nod condescendingly, and silently cross your name off his “list” of respectable human beings. The dialogue ends there."