Where does it all come from? Where are we going? Are we alone in the universe? What is good and what is evil? The scientific narrative of cosmic evolution demands that we tackle such big questions with a cosmological perspective. I tackle the first question in Chapters 4-6; the second in Chapters 7-8; the third in Chapter 9 and the fourth in Chapter 10. However, where do we start to answer such questions? In Chapters 1-3, I elaborate the concept of worldview and argue that we should aim at constructing comprehensive and coherent worldviews. In Chapter 4, I identify seven fundamental challenges to any ultimate explanation. I conclude that our explanations tend to fall in two cognitive attractors, the point or the cycle. In Chapter 5, I focus on the free parameters issue, while Chapter 6 is a critical analysis of the fine-tuning issue. I conclude that fine-tuning is a conjecture and that we need to further study how typical our universe is. This opens a research endeavor that I call artificial cosmogenesis. In Chapter 7, I show the importance of artificial cosmogenesis from extrapolating the future of scientific simulations. I then analyze two other evolutionary explanations of fine-tuning in Chapter 8: Cosmological Natural Selection and the broader scenario of Cosmological Artificial Selection. In Chapter 9, I inquire into the search for extraterrestrials and conclude that some binary star systems are good candidates. Since those putative beings feed on stars, I call them starivores. The question of their artificiality remains open, but I propose a prize to further continue and motivate the scientific assessment of this hypothesis. In Chapter 10, I explore foundations to build a cosmological ethics and conclude that the ultimate good is the infinite continuation of the evolutionary process. Appendix I summarizes my position and Appendix II provides argumentative maps of the entire thesis.

The Beginning and the End : The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective

Philosophy lacks criteria to evaluate its philosophical theories. To fill this gap, this essay introduces nine criteria to compare worldviews, classified in three broad categories: objective criteria (objective consistency, scientificity, scope), subjective criteria (subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality), and intersubjective criteria (intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narrativity). The essay first defines what a worldview is and exposes the heuristic used in the quest for criteria. After describing each criterion individually, it shows what happens when each of them is violated. From the criteria, it derives assessment tests to compare and improve different worldviews. These include the is-ought, ought-act, and is-act first-order tests; the critical and dialectical second-order tests; the mixed-questions and first-second-order third-order tests; and the we-I, we-it, and it-I tests. The essay then applies these criteria and tests to a concrete example, comparing the Flying Spaghetti Monster deity with Intelligent Design. For another application, it draws more general fruitful suggestions for the dialogue between science and religion.

http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~clvidal/writings/Vidal-Metaphilosophical-Criteria.pdf

Metaphilosophical Criteria for Worldview Comparison

This article advances a strategic proposal that would enable future research in data/knowledge engineering and natural language processing to take a broader range of meanings into account than can be derived from analyzing text with current methods focusing on syntactic and semantic text meanings. It advocates drawing on the knowledge and common sense meanings that users acquire from NL interactions in their lifeworld, i.e. the 'life-meanings' that are created and shared in social communities. Three philosophical language perspectives are described to derive a research program for incorporating life-meaning based methods into contemporary DKE/NLP research.

New research directions for data and knowledge engineering: A philosophy of language approach

Systems thinking has developed over the decades, into several streams, which seem to operate in parallel with little dialogue between them. Each stresses di erent theoretical issues or problems but, in addressing them, other deeper problems are revealed that are often ignored. This essay briefly reviews three of the streams with the theoretical issues they tackle, and some of the deeper problems. To address these deeper problems, and also to facilitate dialogue between the streams, Dooyeweerd's philosophy is employed to reintepret the theoretical issues in new ways, in which meaning is central. This initial proposal calls for further research.

Reason, Faith and Practice in Our Common Home : Festschrift for Dr. Sytse Strijbos

Much IS research brings a priori theoretical constructs to its domain of study, and this can generate distorted outcomes. To avoid this danger, IS research should be 'lifeworld-oriented'. Characteristics of the lifeworld are drawn from philosophy and applied to examples of IS research. Surprisingly, both positivist and critical research can be both theorizing and lifeworld-oriented, though in different ways. A proposal is then made for 'lifeworld-oriented IS research', which, by taking into account the lifeworlds of both researcher and researched, can make IS research richer and more relevant.

The notion of lifeworld applied to information systems research

This work examines one of the major stumbling blocks of knowledge based systems 
development, namely knowledge elicitation. The challenge is a fundamental one of 
eliciting knowledge from domain experts including tacit knowledge.
This thesis argues that, in the past, knowledge elicitation has been limited since 
elicitation has been performed from one or a limited number of aspects. A method is 
needed to assist in providing a pluralistic approach to knowledge elicitation that will 
aid multi-aspectual viewpoints of the domain knowledge to be elicited. MAKE 
(Multi-Aspectual Knowledge Elicitation) is such a pluralistic method. Using the 
work of Herman Dooyeweerd (1955) MAKE is developed from a sound 
philosophical basis.
Two levels of knowledge are elicited using MAKE. The method starts by building a 
top-level knowledge map that covers all of the knowledge aspects and provides an 
overview of the domain. Such an overview determines the complexity of the domain 
allowing a knowledge based systems developer to see the effects of taking a 
minimalist approach to the development; that is the top-level map may be used to 
help define the scope of a system. The second level involves detailed knowledge 
elicitation. Using a process of abstraction, the concepts defined in each aspect are 
refined to a sufficiently detailed level to enable a system to be built. The resulting 
knowledge forms an ontological view of the domain knowledge.
The empirical work adopting a case study approach has demonstrated that:
MAKE can be used by people who are not necessarily versed in artificial intelligence
techniques or in the philosophy of Dooyeweerd. MAKE has shown itself to be adaptable across a very varied set of domains 
MAKE is adaptable and useful for eliciting tacit knowledge.
It is argued that MAKE indicates a change of direction from methods that are 
currently in use.

Michael James Winfield

Papers

Multi-aspectual knowledge elicitation