Which ones should you care about? — Re-Assembling Reality #21a by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt. In Re-Assembling Reality #20, we saw that there is a potentially infinite number of metapersons, and many different ways of relating to them. Most of the humans in the world have regular or occasional relationships with metapersons (which we also…

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. …

How we make gods into objects — Re-Assembling Reality #27e, 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 lasers 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 theories and models of society (See Re-Assembling Reality #26), religious cosmologies also include theories and models of society, even though they are often not consciously elaborated as such. One theory, that exists with variations in…