One key point that came up in all the commentaries was that there is a mismatch between what skeptical scientists mean by free will and what the general public understands. Nahmias articulated this most forcefully. Scientists may say that free will is an illusion, and by that they mean that science has no place for supernatural entities that mysteriously intervene in the flow of events to overr...

since a long time ago, poets and orators used various knowledge sources and human sciences to express thoughts, intentions, and their intellectual achievements. for instance, they utilized natural and supernatural elements and names of geographical places as the sources of their artistic creation. the old poets and orators, which are known as the laureates and frontiers of classic literature, u...

Jewish tradition understands a miracle as a wonder that manifests God’s beneficent power. A miracle (nes in Hebrew) could be supernatural, but it need not be. While God has the ability to act in a manner that goes against the “orders of creation” (sidrei breishit) that He has established, the regularity of this order itself wondrously manifests God’s beneficent power. A central goal of Judaism ...

The Zen koan is mysterious to many and its significance remains disputed by scholars. Is it a challenging therapeutic device, to be left behind like a raft after crossing the river, or a self-transparent statement of the liberated mind? Is it a logic-defying paradox or does it have its own performative rationality? Is it a spontaneous and often irreverent oral expression or a complex and staged...

All species face adaptive problems that need to be solved in order for an organism to survive and reproduce. The adaptations that have emerged to overcome these problems are designed by natural selection and are often specific to the environment in which they evolved. For the majority of our hominid ancestors living and evolving on the Savannah plains of Africa, it is thought that among the mos...

We consider open dynamical systems, subject to external interventions by agents that are not completely described by the theory (classical or quantal). These interventions are localized in regions that are relatively spacelike. Under these circumstances, no relativistic transformation law exists that relates the descriptions of the physical system by observers in relative motion. Still, physica...

This paper explains why scripted dialogue shares some crucial properties with discourse. In particular, when scripted dialogues are generated by a Natural Language Generation system, the generator can apply revision strategies that cannot normally be used when the dialogue results from an interaction between autonomous agents (i.e., when the dialogue is not scripted). The paper explains that th...

Despite claims about the universality of religious belief, whether religiosity scales have the same meaning when administered inter-subjectively-or translated and applied cross-culturally-is currently unknown. Using the recent "Supernatural Belief Scale" (SBS), we present a primer on how to verify the strong assumptions of measurement invariance required in research on religion. A comparison of...

Evidence on mental illness stigma abounds yet little is known about public perceptions of intellectual disability. This study examined causal beliefs about intellectual disability and schizophrenia and how these relate to awareness of the condition and social distance. UK lay people aged 16+(N=1752), in response to vignettes depicting intellectual disability and schizophrenia, noted their inter...