Elysian Enterprise: Bibliography : Introduction
Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time. p228
Using "Faith" and "Reason" to label the two worldviews is derived from Tolstoy’s quotation below. Faith in God does not imply absence of reason, nor does denial of God’s existence imply reason. We are all, perhaps, equal mixtures of faith and reason, differing only in specifics.
Leo Tolstoy. Confessions. Confessions, by Tolstoy and The Tragic Sense of Life are very powerful and moving. Both take the power of reason far, dissatisfied with the nihilistic endpoint, they fade into mysticism. They refuse to accept that this is all there is, but are equally unwilling to accept that they do not know. Attached is the full text of Confessions.
Gerald J. Gruman. A History of Ideas About the Prolongation of Life, Transactions of the American philosophical Society, Vol. 56, Part 9, The American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, December 1966, 102 pp. $3.00. See book review: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/V1p229y1962-73.pdf.
Revelation: The disclosure or communication of knowledge to man by a divine or supernatural agency. [Oxford English Dictionary]
That intellectual power or faculty (usually regarded as characteristic of mankind, but sometimes also attributed in a certain degree to the lower animals) which is ordinarily employed in adapting thought or action to some end; the guiding principle of the human mind in the process of thinking. [Oxford English Dictionary]
Ultimately, includes a myriad of possibilities, such as Purgatory, Limbo, intermediate lives, reincarnation, etc.
In the next sentence Einstein continues “Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.”
A theory also makes predictions that can be tested.
A perfect number is a number equal to the sum of its factors. For example, the factors of six are 1,2 and 3. The sum 1+2+3 = 6.
Which, by the way, is precisely our real-life situation.
See his many books, including Beyond the Cosmos. Navpress. 1999. ISBN 1-57683-112-4
Elysian Enterprise: Bibliography : Philosophy & Reason
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases,
clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes
propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or
eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to
brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a
scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues
and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea
catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but
technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize
my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way
that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't
just a way of talking the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is
actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the
nervous systems of individual men the world over.@ [The Selfish Gene. Richard Dawkins. ISBN:
0192860920]
The doctrine that mind and matter exist as distinct
entities.