Pantagruel

I just finished a book that closely examined the series of European revolutions in 1848. The reality is that there are a variety of different strata o...

But on the other hand mass also represents that quantity of energy bound in a particle (or anything). Which is interesting because energy can be bound...

Desiring what happens in congruity with Nature is one of the three Stoic Disciplines. "Ultimately, the discipline of desire involves bringing our will...

Wanting what you are going to get could be viewed as a form of Stoicism.

No argument here. I was mathematically blessed. But I was a bit of a fanatical explorer also. I had a bit of a chemical-excess incident when I was six...

Thank you! You might find the Royal Institute series of lectures on quantum fields stimulating. The Universe is made of quantum fields As to the overa...

Well, hang on. If it is the direct 'cause' of there being physical objects, then isn't it in some strong sense 'entangled' with and by the concept of ...

Not just information, though, embodied information. Substance is meaningless without some kind of form, form without some kind of substance. I see inf...

I find information to be an illustrative analogy. Information can be encoded in any number of ways, so in some sense, the nature of the information is...

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society by Jürgen Habermas The role of the sphere of intel...

Is it fair to say the Ryle is attempting to conceptually synthesize matter and mind? In what way does this differ from "embodiment" (something with wh...

I've not read Ryle, so in deference to the specificity of your topic, I'll get my popcorn.

Ironically, science announces its own inherent limitations in the loudest voice of all. You can debate ad nauseum whether resonating waves of neurons ...

As I said, I think the fact that societies can and do put up statues that are an active misrepresentation demonstrates the degree to which we are capa...

Indeed! And the way to understand that is by understanding language, not by trying to artificially constrain it. It's like the people who want to dest...

If you accept that, "liberally", one percent of the population identifies as transgender (how much of that is due to media is another question) that i...

So what you are saying is that, in addition to whatever is encoded in the sentence, there is an additional element which only exists in the actual com...

Well, I know you're gone but your spirit lives on....I think of Spinoza and Leibniz's usage of "the divine mind" or the "the divine intellect." That's...

Are you differentiating meaning from information? Or can meaning be reduced to information in your scenario?

"If introspection and consequent judgements are unreliable, then our belief that we observed what we believe we observed, as well as our belief that w...

guess not

:up:

I have to tell Alexa sometimes three or four times to play stuff on Spotify, and even them I'm lucky if it works. We're in no danger from AI any time ...

I think fractals are a kind of encapsulation of holism - i.e. a general underlying universal characteristic.

Like statistics. I often think about this in terms of cosmology. The unfolding of the various phases of the early universe was essentially statistical...

You're welcome. Fractalness is basically a property of a strange attractor within the phase space of a system - viz. "strange attractors, which are de...

1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport I recently realized I know almost nothing about the wave of anti-aristocratic revolutions that swept mid-nine...

The crux. Laws by their very nature are highly specific - they apply only to a certain type of state of affairs. Boyle's law has nothing to do with La...

Except that the universe is a collision between law-governed and non-law-governed events. So if a fractal structure evolves as a result of its fractal...

À la recherche du temps perdu #3: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

The mind-body problem is based on an apparent discrepancy between the evident nature of thought and the evident nature of the material body. Which is ...

I think that the nature of needs is that they are very universal in character. Certainly with basic needs, which is a great starting place for some em...

I think that the whole point of empathy is that it is a reaching out beyond the personal. You don't need to understand a different world view to help ...

:up: :up: Yes. We are faced with the challenge of achieving a new kind of social consciousness whose operation is predicated on empathy.

I do believe that the current partisan-tendency is a by-product of the way we sub-divide (and govern) our selves along partisan lines. I'm not exactly...

Yes, that's a big one. To what extent are "different worldviews" archaic in light of our current level of cultural and technological development I won...

I think from a technical perspective, humanity is fully capable of engineering a productive, healthy, balanced global society. It just needs to be est...

Right. In fact, economic hardship is widely recognized as a major contributor to a host of problems. I work in the health-care industry and the impact...

Since economic hardship is not a rare thing, there is undoubtedly a wide set of correlations with economic hardship. I believe the saying is, correlat...

:100:

To be clear, you are interested in laying the blame for something that pre-dates these policies on these policies. Got it. Yes, you can easily argue t...

Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century by Howard Bloom

The whole Balbec experience fails to coincide with his expectations. He savours the ideal 'flavour' of places by trying to encapsulate their ideal qua...

Yes, the metaphysical conceit, in other words. That's definitely a contrasting literary tradition.

Which is why I referenced anomie again (and again).

And I'm saying (which I did say) is that the ailments you cited - and I presume you did so because you find them particularly illustrative of the dama...

And with this I concur. It just smacks of political invective. It isn't that I disagree with the underlying sentiments, in fact, I very much agree. Bu...

This I do. And I participate in petitioning against objectionable policies. :up:

I do think what we are talking about stems from the fundamental right-left orientations, and I'm very interested in root causes. For me, it's clear th...

And any policies that exacerbate the wealth gap are culpable of that specifically. And poverty is a leading cause of many ills. But as I pointed out, ...