When scientists have more in common with priests and theologians — Re-Assembling Reality #27g, by Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer In Re-Assembling Reality #27f, we noticed that there can be a tension between the counter-intuitive intellectual objects created by religious intellectuals, and the experiences and perceptions of regular religious people. We also noticed that the same tension exists between the…

How science and religion bend our minds — Re-Assembling Reality #27f, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt In Re-Assembling Reality #27b, we talked about how, in the way science is currently practiced, the intellectual objects of science tend to eliminate the agency of persons from their models. On the other hand, personhood, both of humans and of…

How we make gods into objects — Re-Assembling Reality #27d, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt Each community has its own metapersons and its ways of nurturing relations between them and other community members. …

The power and the cost of objectifying — Re-Assembling Reality #27d, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt There is no such thing in the real world as frictionless planes, classical genes or atoms, or rational consumers. These are intellectual objects, which transform things “out there” into a mentally manageable number of features, which can then be manipulated…

Why physicists name their atoms Re-Assembling Reality #27c, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt There are benefits to creating intellectual objects that do not take persons as agents into account. As we discussed in Re-Assembling Reality #26, if I want to model a crowd, I can do it by…

Why do we prefer numbers? — Re-Assembling Reality #27b, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt A crucial intention behind the creation of intellectual objects is that they can be communicated so that, when the intellectual object enters the mind of another person, that person can reasonably be expected to be examining the same thing in…

How we create the tools to think about things Re-Assembling Reality #27a by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt. In Re-Assembling Reality #18, we considered the process of objectification — how we turn entities into objects. When we turn a stone into an arrowhead or a dog into an experimental specimen, the thing under consideration — the stone or…

Where they overlap and differ from social science — Re-Assembling Reality #27, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt Just as social scientists build models of society (See Re-Assembling Reality #26), religious cosmologies also include models of society, even though they are often not consciously elaborated as such. One model that exists with variations in different religious traditions is…

The map isn’t the territory — Re-Assembling Reality #26, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt In our essay on life, we considered vitality as a primarily individual phenomenon. But humans are social beings. We can never survive alone. One of the worst punishments ever given to humans is solitary confinement. Social life is not an…