This article seems to reiterate a lot of theories that I don't think enjoy much currency any more; the criticism of al-Ghazali in particular is I think often considered an orientalist trope that turns out to be a meh argument, mostly because the stuff he was arguing against was not necessarily anything that promoted science. Similarly, the article suggests Mu'tazalites were more influential than they were. But they were not a major factor in why the Islamicate* world was ahead scientifically, so their demise as a school of thought or sect in Islam wouldn't have been a factor in Arab/Muslim science's decline.
* Seems to me a good term to use--as the article illustrates, there has been a degree of discussion about which term applies. We are referring to a region that was under Muslim rule and whose societies were naturally influenced by Islam, but whose populations were not all Muslim--in many places, not even majority Muslim for a while, and whose leading thinkers were not all Muslim in terms of faith (Jewish intellectualism flourished at this time and place as well), nor all Arab in terms of race/ethnicity (many Muslim scientists and philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age were Irani).
> What’s more sloppy of an explanation - that the cosmos is somehow conscious and directed life to appear, or that there is an infinite number of universes?
In isolation, with little context or flesh on the ideas, who is to say? The multiverse thing is just a narrative or thought experiment. It's not even a hypothesis.
> Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else?
Maybe, yeah.
> It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological machine.
I think you have a point there, but it's also the case that the only thing we know is our consciousness, which is a thing for which we in fact have no material explanation.
> The smaller context is people saying that earth is the perfect difference to support our life, therefore it must be god that put it there! If the earth was much closer like mercury, there would be no life to say that "well, we weren't placed in the right place- no god".
This is true, to a large degree, but I think misses quite how obtuse it is to (reductively stated) look at the kind of system nature is and figure it must have come about purely by chance. I think it's one of the weaker arguments made by religious people and one of the weaker put-downs by religion-haters, and people don't seem to go deep into what it is about nature they are talking about in this context.
> Stab someone in the head with an icepick and they will be brain damaged and possibly even have a different personality, memory loss etc. So when that person "dies" you think what.. their conscious magically lives on? Which one, the one before being stabbed or the damaged one?
I think there are a lot of cases of people getting injured in their brain and being fine, or people being basically brain-dead and then coming back reporting various types of near-death experience (i.e. they were conscious while brain-dead).
Those are 2 different things. Political appointees (not the same as politicians) might be in charge of deciding whether to bring antitrust lawsuits, but politicians do not, and in any case these things are mostly worked on by career civil servants.
I look at law as software engineering, in an esoteric language, on non-deterministic hardware (people), who are adversarial by the way. How your code runs changes based on the person reading it and what their goals are.
I think it's the other way around; if someone was using Docker to isolate environment for individual scripts, it's like, why not use something more light-weight, such as this
