God and eternal boredom

Inflation and Eternal Inflation

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by eternal inflation are unobservable, it is argued that eternal inflation has real consequences in te...

Boredom, Information-Seeking and Exploration

Any adaptive organism faces the choice between taking actions with known benefits (exploitation), and sampling new actions to check for other, more valuable opportunities available (exploration). The latter involves informationseeking, a drive so fundamental to learning and long-term reward that it can reasonably be considered, through evolution or development, to have acquired its own value, i...

The phenomenon of boredom

Boredom remains a poorly understood phenomenon despite its evident association with dysfunctional behavior and mental health problems. However, little research has been devoted to the topic, and the bulk of studies have almost exclusively been quantitative in design. For this reason, a qualitative, interpretive phenomenological study was carried out, during which ten participants were asked for...

God Knows (But does God Believe?)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (forthcoming) report that a non trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, ...

A Philosophy of Boredom