TheMadFool

Not to say I didn't catch your drift but there's such a thing as a definition that's too broad too. Noted with the utmost gratitude. Yet, I have a fee...

Are you, by any chance, referring to the problem of induction? If you are then here's the problem: Suppose we've made some observations and we've noti...

There was nothing before one's existence that could be forced to do anything, let alone to exist. Am I off topic?

Believe me, I've tried but, till date, no positive results from stuff like "stop and live it, you will get what the third thing is". I'm not poking fu...

Most perceptive. Thank you! :up: Any ideas on what this "third thing" is?

Online communities??! :chin: Hard to come by (not the whole truth)...hence the internet, other outlets, and platforms.

Great question! Firstly, to tell you the truth, I/we don't know and the reason this is the case is a big clue in this mystery. The single most importa...

Thanks for noticing! :smile: :up: There was a thread a couple of weeks ago about how Buddhism has become, or is amenable to the interpretation that it...

:up: Why? The reason why I asked this question is that there's a difference between the philosophical notion of the good life and the religious one of...

What a great idea! However, we'd need to scale down the contents of a philosophical curriculum to match the cognitive abilities of young children. Is ...

We can split the difference...between too much and too little there's something to be had.

Impossibility, a concept I struggle with everyday...even the smallest things seem beyond my reach these days. Yet, the same seems not to be the case f...

It seems that if we have two tiles, one a rhombus and the other an equilateral triangle such that the sides of the rhobmus = the sides of the triangle...

Reminds me of a comment made about emotions - actual feelings can't be put into words in such a way that they actually evoke those emotions. I guess J...

I don't understand what you mean at all. To run with your analogy, it's one thing to draw a map after surveying the territory but another thing, as in...

I faced some initial problems understanding your take on Hume's argument but finally managed to make some sense of it... First off, your argument, to ...

I'm aware that math is considered a language in some circles but the nexus between math and reality goes much deeper than mere linguistics. There are ...

@"Jack Cummins" I hope you're still interested in the subject of unpardonable sins as I have something more to add: Speaking from what I've gathered f...

An intriguing question. That you misspelt "essential" as "assential" lets the cat out of the bag. I'm currently doing a project on the history of the ...

I gave the issue some thought. It seems that when we're in the domain of sin there are, at a minimum, two players: 1. the sinner and 2. the sinned (th...

Like it or not, it's true that belief in god is necessry for being good but only for those who haven't encountered alternatives to divine justice like...

I remember coming across this statement: My take on unpardonable sins is rather simple: (another quote) The last quote suggests to me that sin is the ...

Simply put, inherency of qualities such as good and bad imply that these qualities are hardwired, so to speak, into us - they become the so-called pre...

The kindest act would be to not "...rule over all animals..." Freedom is a necessary condition for genuine wellbeing. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?! ...

Ontology is extremely important. The entire world, for humans, can be divided into three simple categories: opportunities, threats, and neither. Whate...

Evolution, we're past that point. Our senses have evolved and are at peak performance at least insofar as human-level events and objects are concerned...

I never understood the naturalistic fallacy. It just doesn't make sense seeing that morality, with its list of do's and don't's, represents a deep dis...

No comment.

Name a law of nature that isn't mathematical and then we can talk. Plus, the fundamental sciences - chemistry and physics - are completely mathematize...

What you said, whether intended or not, raises an interesting question. We know that the universe is governed by laws, mathematical ones at that. Thes...

Trial and error must be random; the list you provided doesn't contain a single item that is. You're doing exactly what another poster did - you're ack...

Thanks for the concern but, no, I'm not well :sad: but for the record, that's not important, it never was, never is, never will be, When I say that al...

Yes but, not to say that your contribution isn't valuable, I was actually hoping for some insight into probability itself. Whether a probabilistic law...

We're more or less on the same page is all I can say. What you said above.

As far as I can tell, the mind, if we must look to what is exclusive to it, deals with abstractions, roughly translatable as thoughts. Do you mean tha...

I was led to believe that hedges aren't used as often as they should be. Of course, logic is comparable to a tool and tools need material to work on. ...

Nice! I like where you're taking this but I'm unsure as to what or where it leads to. Do we have a choice? We know so little. Perhaps, as Neil deGrass...

Perhaps we live in a world where originality has taken a long holiday, likely to be extended for some (unknown) reason. I'm trying to work within the ...

@"KerimF" A religion without rules! A system without rules! Not any system but one that's a religion! While the thought of the Egyptian god of chaos, ...

And...? You're talking about content but a mind's age relates more to the processes - logic for example - that go into creating the content.

Fantastic!. If you have the time and the computing power, no one will hold it against you that you solved a problem using trial and error. Could god b...

I'm aware of the facts that you mentioned. In fact I have a better example if I may say so: Liver and kidney functions, for instance, don't show chang...

You're looking at it from a different angle. You speak from a position that acknowledges our ignorance, vast as the empty space populated by galaxies....

My issue is with inherency for it implies the existence of proclivities, tendencies, inclinations and the like, things that, well, determine our actio...

I didn't doubt for a second that you count among the blessed as I described it :smile: The same, alas, can't be said of my life. :sad:

A couple of things to consider: 1. I'm not entirely sure why I did what I did - treat evolution as god's handiwork. The usual thing to do is to treat ...

Not to be rude or anything but isn't it obvious?

I'm not a hermitologist, if there's such a thing at all, but the proverbial hermit's cave is usually located in the vicinity of human settlements. Tha...

I made a point of mentioning logic. I guess it slipped under your radar. I didn't expand on the role rationality plays in Buddhism. So if you missed i...

Ah! But it's not so simple. The less of a bad example one is, the more of a good example one becomes. One gives up a position in Bad Inc. only to fill...