Library:  Modern Documents:  Brian Holtz: Biographical Information

Brief Biography of

Brian Holtz

Name: Brian Holtz

Birth Date (YYYY.MM.DD): 1965.04.20

Education: B.S. Computer Science, University of S. Mississippi Honors College, 1987
M.S. Computer Science, University of Michigan, 1990

Writings:

Personal Testimonies

• Lessons From My Son's Short Life (2001)
• My Conversion From Christianity (2002)
• Conversion Stories of Christian Ex-Atheists (2003)

Philosophy

• Autocosmology: A Philosophical Creed (2000)
• Fundamental Terms of Philosophy, Logic, and Physics (2000)
• Why Is There Something Instead Of Nothing? (2001)
• Knowledge, Truth, and Meaning (2000)
• Philosophy of Mind: A Functionalist Primer (2000)
• Mind and Limits (2000)
• Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Other Paradoxes (2000)
• Ontology: the Study of Being (2000)
• Origin and Justification of Values (2000)
• The Meaning of Life (2000)
• Foundations of Ethics (2000)
• Virtue, Vice, The Golden Rule, & the Ten Commandments (2000)
• Two Dogmas of Empiricism: A Reply to Quine (2002)
• Wilber on Consciousness (1998)

Atheism

• Arguments Against Christianity (2002)
• Possible Explanations of the Gospel Evidence (2003)
• Theism or Atheism: Which Takes More Pride? (2002)
• God's Shrinking Gaps (2000)
• A Taxonomy of Paranormality (2000)
• God: Definition and Proofs (2000)
• Faith, Mysticism, Religion, and Science (2000)
• A Table of the World's Belief Systems (2000)
• Questions For Theists (2001)
• What If God Quit? (2001)

Atheist Polemics

• The Atheist Cage Match Challenge (2003)
• Turkel Rebutted on Trilemma (2002)
• The Possible Faith: A Reply to Turkel (2002)
• Evidence For Souls? A Reply to Miller (2001)
• Christian Think Tank Pamphlet Rebutted (2001)
• Is Christian Revelation Authentic? (2001)
• Wise Men Should Not Believe: A Reply to Anderson (2001)

Science

• Science and Provisional Truth (2000)
• Science's Nine Big Questions (2000)
• Humanity's Most Important Unanswered Questions (2000)
• Why Science Works (2000)
• Why Mathematics Works (2000)
• Evolution: Definition and Evidence (2000)
• Genesis: The Origin of Life (2000)

Futurology

• Humanity's Future (2000)
• Futurology: The Final Three Technological Revolutions (2000)
• Futurology: Impossible and Improbable Advances (2000)
• Possible Future Global Catastrophes (2000)
• Environmental & Political Challenges to Human Progress (2000)
• A Timeline of the Future of Humanity and the Universe (2000)
• The Future of Religion and Philosophy (2000)

Books

• Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits (in progress)
• ToolTalk and Open Protocols (SunSoft Press, 1994)

Memetic Background:

• Raised a practicing Roman Catholic
• Became an atheist at age 21
• Sympathetic to: metaphysical naturalism, ontological materialism, epistemological empiricism and positivism, mental functionalism, theological atheism, axiological extropianism, political libertarianism, economic capitalism, constitutional federalism, biological evolutionism, evolutionary psychology, and technological optimism

Research Interests:

• Wrote Vita: an artificial life simulator in which simulated creatures compete, reproduce, and evolve while their behavior is controlled by mutating programs expressed in a Turing-complete programming language called VitaL.
• Wrote two distributed editors: ShrEdit, CoEd
• 4 U.S. software patent applications filed (1997-2001)

Career:

• Yahoo 2002-: joined Yahoo! to help develop Yahoo! Personals
• Sun Microsystems 1999-2001: led SunONE Webtop synchronization project
• Sun Microsystems 1993-1999: designed the integration of ToolTalk into CDE (the Sun/HP/IBM standard Unix desktop); led Sun CDE enhancement project
• Sun Microsystems 1990-1993: helped develop ToolTalk: Sun's C++-based cross-platform middleware for IPC among persistent distributed objects

Home page: http://holtz.org

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