Pantagruel

Which was really my meaning. The implication of calling it "the information age" is that it should have value. Just so. But what I wrote was just a mo...

The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft

I do not share the belief that utopia means nowhere. To me, this is not vague. Both Mannheim and Ricouer have much constructive commentary on the valu...

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Yes, a rose by any other name. By the way, I corrected the book from "Manufacturing Consent" (which I haven't read) to "Necessary Illusions" (which I ...

I guess it depends on your definition of "respects." I haven't read the entire 260 page apartheid study, but Chomsky goes into a lot of detail about h...

It's almost like these actions are governed by convenient utilities rather than any kind of value commitment.

And it is also the culmination of a systematic policy of apartheid, which was described in this 2022 study by Amnesty International.

History teaches records ad nauseam that we, as a species,are incapable of have hitherto failed in our efforts of deliberative self-governance It seems...

Since every subjective opinion is constructed and framed using concepts which only arise and exist in an intersubjective matrix, I daresay it is reaso...

I'm sure this is true. But is it reasonable? Humanity is a species whose environment is the earth. Yes, a privileged subset of humanity can survive by...

Yes, exactly. Reason has its coherent being in each of us, but humans are prone to living in state of bad-faith with our better understanding. And som...

Here we differ. I think the problem hinges on the desire to assume responsibility. And yet supposedly we live in the information age. So if informatio...

descriptively accurate for sure

Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey

Qua lawfulness.

Well, presumably sound arguments pertain to truths that are not trivially evident. So the function of reason is to both understand and to express, tra...

This seems to entail the instrumentality of reason.

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Teleology would mean that some natural laws, unlike all the basic scientific laws discovered so far, are temporally historical in their operation....N...

Well, Aristotle articulates a kind of non-intentional teleology. However we are again begging questions. The notion that there could be purpose withou...

It's one of the main themes of Mind and Cosmos. As I mentioned, it's a very short book and more than pays back the time invested to read it.

Well if it is teleological then it is purpose-driven. So then enaction of the purpose requires means, which I would call instruments or tools. Which c...

I think that the enactment of an idea would be the abstract idea made concrete.

I'd say that reason is ultimately instrumental. Basically, consciousness is teleology. In "gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself" (Nagel) t...

Well, without the value of the vision of the goal, the goal itself has no value. So it is the idea that creates the value that realizes the goal.

So Nagel feels that the fact of consciousness stands on its own as hard evidence that requires a non-materialist explanation. I think that pretty much...

:100: Very much in line with 'research program' I'm pursuing. If you haven't already read Nagel's Mind and Cosmos I'd highly recommend it. It's a shor...

Precisely. And you can also view complex systems as being more elaborate instances of this phenomenon. Systems can store energy in any of its variety ...

Correct. It's the central question of the book I'm currently reading, Mind and Cosmos. Nagel is evaluating the differences between 'reductive' approac...

Even if the mechanisms that produced biological life, including consciousness, are, at some level, the same as those that operate in the evolution of ...

I just read Thomas Nagel's endorsement of Jaegwon Kim's view of the nature of metaphysics, with which I also "am very much in sympathy": Metaphysics i...

Consciousness certainly directs energy in a meaningful way, which is the basis of the phenomenon of teleology. So if consciousness directs energy, it ...

The nature of experience is that it expands with knowledge. Compare the experience of the human, versus that of the single-celled creatures from which...

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The fact that democracy hasn't yet worked doesn't mean that it couldn't.....

But the point is that it doesn't tell the whole story. Rather, it raises a whole host of questions about the relationships between "properties" and ev...

If you start trying to wrap your head around the emergence of physical properties as the manifestation of pointer states in the process of the decoher...

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel Catriona: Being Memoirs of the Furth...

Yes, you definitely reiterate that with some force. My take is that there is a similarity between his differentiating mind and matter and your differe...

Are you familiar with Laszlo's theory of biperspectivism? This sounds quite similar. The physical and the non-physical each have their own metaphysica...

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

I thought the ending the best part of the book. For me, there was too much meta-commentary throughout. I like my fiction to be either transparent, or ...

I agree. I have been working in this direction for several years now. The concept of instrumentality-tools seems applicable. A tool is essentially an ...

For the record, my personal view is that ethics is not Heidegger's primary focus. I concede its "relative absence" in the interest of ongoing discussi...

I totally agree with this assessment. However, at best we can call this neglect. I don't believe it invalidates his thinking, however it certainly is ...

It's a reasonable assessment. Not every philosophy purports to an ethical dimension. That doesn't entail philosophical nihilism. I'm certainly not a p...

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Yes, your use of the term "support" is sufficiently vague to endorse what I've been saying. I don't doubt he was a representative of a certain set of ...

Nope. And Martin Heidegger wasn't personally culpable for that. The people who were were tried, convicted, and punished. And there have been (and cont...