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Please join us for the second installment of our 2024 lecture series Daring To Think For Oneself. Daniel Burke will present his lecture entitled - Alien Prophets and Machine Gods: Yearning for a Seccular HeavenMay 20th
Clancy's Fish Pub, Fremantle
Doors at 6pm
Lecture 45-60min followed by QandA
Attendance of the first lecture is not necessary, as they each stand on their own.
Abstract:
The French philosopher August Comte (1798-1857) believed that a modern ‘purely descriptive’ science was destined to characterize our thinking in general. Comte argued that we were on the threshold of a new age, where we would put aside our ‘childlike’ need for deeper, more meaningful explanations of the world and who we are. Where do we stand, nearly two hundred years after Comte's death? The medium of technology has helped to spread positivistic scientific thinking to all corners of the globe, where it permeates nearly all aspects of our lives. Yet it seems that our desire for something more than mere description remains. Indeed, it is not only that the old religions stubbornly persist, but that entirely new ‘theological’ movements have sprouted in the scientific age. I will consider two: belief in a UFO mythos, and AI-technological utopianism. As I shall show, each of these movements seeks to provide us with a narrative that helps to make sense of who we are, where we are going, and what we ought to hope for. Moreover, it is my contention that these movements are not expressions of the remnants of pre-scientific thinking that we have yet to eradicate from our collective consciousness, like some kind of ‘recessive-gene.’ Rather, they are both a reaction to, as well as an outgrowth of, the dominance of narrowly scientific ‘rationality’ at the expense of a broader form of reason that is grounded in human experience.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Clancy's Fish Pub Fremantle, 51 Cantonment street,Fremantle,WA,Australia