Is Panentheism Naturalistic?

Joint Causation, Emergence Theory and Panentheism

In this paper I will discuss how joint causation as suggested by Arthur Peacocke can on the one hand serve us in the defense of downward causation within emergence theory and on the other hand lead to a deeper understanding of divine action and interaction in panentheism. The question of downward causation lies at the heart of emergence theory and is of great significance for the question wheth...

Orienting towards social features in naturalistic scenes is reflexive

Saliency-based models of visual attention postulate that, when a scene is freely viewed, attention is predominantly allocated to those elements that stand out in terms of their physical properties. However, eye-tracking studies have shown that saliency models fail to predict gaze behavior accurately when social information is included in an image. Notably, gaze pattern analyses revealed that de...

Moderately naturalistic metaphysics

The present paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaph...

Minimally Naturalistic Artificial Intelligence

The rapid advancement of machine learning techniques has re-energized research into general artificial intelligence. While the idea of domain-agnostic meta-learning is appealing, this emerging field must come to terms with its relationship to human cognition and the statistics and structure of the tasks humans perform. The position of this article is that only by aligning our agents’ abilities ...

Naturalistic Epistemologies and Normativity