David Eagleman on Possibilianism

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[in brief, reasons that] Science is not about having it all figured out — it hardly is. It’s a particular “toolbox”; the “unscientific” doesn’t belong therein because this toolbox is not expansive enough to bolster anything it can’t directly touch/dissect/explore/etc. [so to attempt to explain the unscientific with science is unTruthful… hi, new age.]

At this point in our knowledge, logically, we can rest somewhere between atheism and our inherited stories, somewhere between exploration and tradition.

The Possibility Space:
needs to be a greater discussion of that landscape
currently: false dichotomy (god vs no god)

Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.

“Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.”

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

Possibilianism is not all-accepting. The tools of science can rule out points on the possibility landscape.
“to sculpt, to structure”

Unknown unknowns,
known unknowns: dark matter, human brain

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  1. olena posted this