I have always "answered" Dennett in my mind to the effect that he must have a completely different experience of what it means to be conscious than me...
I get that, but the term does have overtly physical connotations. I thought that disengaging the term "violence" from the whole idea of ethical violen...
Perhaps the use of the term violence is misleading. I was a martial artist, and our tournament fighting was extremely violent, but our philosophy was ...
Yes, this overlaps with the theme of the other thread I mentioned - what are the effects of the integration of tools into human culture, for society, ...
Yes. Individual humans consistently exhibit self-centric cognitive biases in interpretation, which results in biases in perception. Humans as a specie...
I've just presented a premise to the effect that it isn't pseudo-science. I hear what you're saying though, it is often abused. But then, so is scienc...
I am leaning towards the much-maligned concept of spirit. Energy presents a dizzying array of forms. And evolution has been going on for an extremely ...
I've just been re-reading Foundations of Cognitive Science by Michael Posner, and the chapter on experimental methods kind of concludes directly on po...
I agree, there's a case to be made for conflating consciousness and self-consciousness. My main idea is, that if nature evolves to produce these disco...
Yes, I knew this was coming. But the self-perpetuation of the manufactured portion of the "natural" world consisting of human products is contingent o...
Ok, I will look at that for sure. Do you think there is any reason in principle why there may not be even higher levels of description than those acce...
Karl Jaspers notes that there are obvious discontinuities happening between different levels of description corresponding to the apparent hierarchy of...
I don't believe that violence is ever an ethical choice. But I think that the "defense of reason" position may be one of the strongest. edit: Toward t...
I first read this shortly after the book came out. When I was eleven I found it picking through the grown-up side in the library. Re-reading the wikip...
I'm just reading Foucault's Madness and Civilization, which characterizes the horrific brutality with which the Age of Reason addressed what is antith...
I'm not so focused on the power dynamic aspect of things. But I do think more and more people know less and less about the world they live in. Farmers...
There a huge knowledge-deficit that is a snowballing social problem, yes, for sure. Seems to me that, in a situation like this, the more technology ev...
Interesting. Having found out recently that I am coming into enough money to finally retire, I have been asking myself what I would like to do. Of cou...
Technology is not an end in itself; it is just one of many means that we humans employ in the project of survival. So even if our goal is only to surv...
In The Open Universe Karl Popper has some interesting arguments about the theoretical limitations of omniscience within known physical constraints. Wo...
Philosophical "truths" are inevitably derived through processes of reasoning that traverse the boundaries of induction and deduction. So they are not ...
Madness & Civilization by Michel Foucault A fitting start to 2022? My 2021 readings, in chronological order: First Principles by Herbert Spencer Nicho...
But are we talking about scientific truths? Or moral truths? What about aesthetic truths? Moral and aesthetic truths can appear to contradict natural ...
It isn't so much that science is to blame for today's woes as that people try to use science in lieu of traditional normative institutions; for which ...
I have one high-CBD strain that seems to facilitate hyper-focus, great for reading and writing. I find I read a little slower, but I really squeeze ev...
Yes, I was hypothesizing about the transfer of some essential spiritual thing into a bio-mechanical context and wondering at what point the translatio...
I wonder if my consciousness were transferred to another body (brain) whether my signature would stay the same, or be slightly different because of di...
As far as I see, Huxley fits squarely in the tradition of spiritual realism, by which I mean that the spirit is real. As I mentioned, this is in gener...
I think it is necessary to recognize at the outset that identifying the mind and the brain is a uniquely western problem. Eastern cultures have a trad...
If you become aware of a bias you have begun to mitigate it. So even if bias can't be eliminated, this does not mean we should not attempt to minimize...
According to Joseph Sirgy, people in general function through a combination of the desire to achieve self-consistency, self-esteem, and self-knowledge...
Lots of things happen can happen in nature that are disruptive of their surrounding systems. These things either disappear, or completely disrupt exis...
Interesting. And this is the kind of thing that makes me think that cultural contents (what is understood) are as important as the thought process its...
This would be your first mistaken assumption. People do not think purely sequentially. Trivially, the Zeigarnik effect shows this, where the mind tend...
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