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Gnomon

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No. That's why I have pieced together my own philosophical theory of how the primal Energy (causation) and Laws (information) of the Big Bang could ev...
April 01, 2025 at 15:28
That is a true statement. Yet, a cosmic explosion of matter & energy that continues to this day is an effectual event that deserves some kind of expla...
March 31, 2025 at 21:23
Thanks. I try to know my own limitations. Perhaps, if I was a member of a powerful political party I could change the system. But as a lone militant m...
March 31, 2025 at 17:25
# Creativity is an essential characteristic of a Deity. And also the most universal fact of our contingent (fortuitous) universe. # In my Enformationi...
March 31, 2025 at 16:41
Again, I normally try to ignore Politics for the same reason I don't pay much attention to Broadcast News : if it's news its bad ; "if it bleeds it le...
March 30, 2025 at 21:46
More poetic prose from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain : Thomas Mann was writing in the early 20th century, around the same time that Einstein was fo...
March 30, 2025 at 20:39
Religious and Political Faith is both an Idea and a Feeling that motivates people to do what is not necessarily in their own self-interest, but in the...
March 30, 2025 at 17:06
I'll have to take your word for that. But I suspect that thinking in terms of Eternalism might be like breathing under water. It doesn't come naturall...
March 30, 2025 at 16:47
That may be a simpler interpretation of an arcane term that I didn't grasp 20 years ago, upon first attempting to read a technical philosophical work ...
March 30, 2025 at 16:30
What caused the Big Bang, in your opinion? For almost everything in our space-time Cosmos --- except Dark Energy & Matter --- our scientific logic & r...
March 29, 2025 at 20:32
I'm not a computer programmer, but was introduced to digital coding on mainframes back in the 80s. Hippies & Hares were not much of a presence on my s...
March 29, 2025 at 16:58
Obviously, the characterizations of Autocrat (King ; Prince ; President) and Democrat (rule by committee) are over-simplifications of complex issues t...
March 29, 2025 at 16:19
likes to portray Gnomon as a hippie-dippy hairless-hare-krishnut, chanting praise to an imaginary blue-skinned god-man, with drums, incense, and navel...
March 28, 2025 at 20:52
For a philosophical perspective, the Feb/Mar 2025 issue of Philosophy Now magazine asks "was Machiavelli so bad?" The editorial discusses Plato's Repu...
March 28, 2025 at 16:44
Yes, the AI program known as Evolution is automatically "managing" the process of progressive creation : from near nothing at the Bang, to everything ...
March 27, 2025 at 22:11
That may summarize THE fundamental philosophical question. We can look down at our physical bodies, and feel some connection, but we can't look behind...
March 27, 2025 at 17:37
The void was pregnant with untapped latency, No things yet, just Ideal Forms for seeds, Until an unsparked explosion created light, And the abyss was ...
March 26, 2025 at 23:43
The women portrayed in your videos are not Real but Ideal. You won't find anything that perfect in your local bars or ashrams. They exist only as Idea...
March 26, 2025 at 17:20
The infinite regress wheel-spinning is only a problem in space-time. In Eternity or Block-Time there is no before & after or higher & lower. Materiali...
March 25, 2025 at 20:34
That's a good summary of Immanentist-Materialist doctrine, from an Earth-based animal-mind perspective. Pragmatic Matter-only believers can't imagine ...
March 25, 2025 at 16:59
In a previous post, I said "The God of the Process is both Immanent (what you see) and Transcendent (what you infer), as is my Programmer." To clarify...
March 24, 2025 at 22:06
You got it! The fundamental fact of our evolving world is Change, which is sometimes good, but also can be bad. As Heraclitus noted : Panta Rhei, "eve...
March 24, 2025 at 17:01
You think the Programmer is "sitting around" doing nothing? You may be thinking of Jehovah, who created paradise in six days, and then on Sunday went ...
March 23, 2025 at 21:52
Coincidentally, after writing the post above, I went back to reading a novel on Kindle : The Magic Mountain. There's no supernatural magic in the stor...
March 23, 2025 at 20:59
I don't understand the question. Could you re-word? Regarding divine intervention, I suppose you are thinking of Miracles that bypass Natural Laws. Bu...
March 23, 2025 at 16:59
Whitehead's deity is not limited to Earth. On this forum, we are concerned about the fate of Earth because that is where the philosophical observers l...
March 22, 2025 at 21:50
Earth may be facing obliteration because its upstart little gods have been progressively successful in taking control over paternal Nature, who sired ...
March 22, 2025 at 16:49
Babbage (or was it the lovely lady Lovelace?) called his cranky (mechanical) computer a "difference engine" (a differential is a sign of change in a v...
March 21, 2025 at 20:07
You may be right. But national & international economics are over my little pointy head-in-sand. Yet, I don't despair, because for every bull-in-the-c...
March 20, 2025 at 00:08
Yes. Who's to say that billions of solar cycles without Life (to process matter into viable entities) or Mind (to notice the passage of time) was a wa...
March 19, 2025 at 23:00
Compared to the instant Paradise of Genesis, the gradual evolution of Darwin seems to be fecklessly going nowhere slowly. But my evaluation of Evoluti...
March 19, 2025 at 16:37
I am by nature apolitical. So, I observe current events in government as-if a back & forth football game, in which I have no allegiance to either side...
March 19, 2025 at 16:02
When you come to a fork in a raging river, if you don't make a conscious (responsible) choice, the river will make it for you. :cool:
March 18, 2025 at 16:09
Absolute Determinism would be one-damn-thing-after-another. Randomness is non-linear, so there are forks in the path. Those forks are opportunities fo...
March 18, 2025 at 15:50
Hey! You had me at "free". :blush: Nobody is completely free from determinism. But quantum particles are partly free in the sense that their existence...
March 17, 2025 at 21:22
To those trained in abstract & abstruse mathematics, instantaneous Inflation Theory may sound like a viable alternative to Creation myths. But for tho...
March 17, 2025 at 20:51
What "perfect" or "elegant" universe are you comparing our mediocre world to? From a human perspective, with a 100year lifetime, this natural & artifi...
March 17, 2025 at 17:02
Perhaps, but your hypothetical "average" universes (multiverses?) --- in alternative space-time bubbles? --- are just as questionable & non-empirical ...
March 17, 2025 at 15:49
I see you made an extensive argument against God, but I wouldn't call it a Proof in the mathematical sense. The conclusion is inherent in the assumpti...
March 17, 2025 at 15:31
I haven't seen any references in Whitehead's cosmology of the old "something greater" scholastic reasoning. His thinking was based on contemporary qua...
March 16, 2025 at 21:12
Apparently, what Whitehead was doing in his Process Philosophy is what philosophers have been doing since Plato*1 : discover universal principles in t...
March 16, 2025 at 20:50
Me too. Which is why I developed my own alternative to the worldview of "all mind" by substituting "information" in place of "consciousness". Accordin...
March 13, 2025 at 17:54
Some religions teach that the body is merely a temporary receptacle for the eternal soul --- which is temporarily oblivious to its heavenly history. S...
March 12, 2025 at 17:09
In my previous post, I opined that Whitehead did not mean that Magical ESP could reveal information & knowledge via non-physical channels. But perhaps...
March 10, 2025 at 20:34
That is similar to my notion of G*D : creator of our physical environment (Nature), but not meddling in day to day events. This is like a Programmer, ...
March 10, 2025 at 17:05
All animals have WillPower : the ability to make voluntary movements of the body. In addition, human WillPower includes the ability to choose between ...
March 10, 2025 at 16:11
Our world is indeed deterministic, in the sense that every effect has a cause. But some effects have multiple causes. As a physical metaphor, consider...
March 09, 2025 at 19:37
I'm still not clear about Whitehead's distinction of "Prehension" from "Comprehension". Some definitions refer to "experiencing of past events", but t...
March 09, 2025 at 16:54
Maybe the human mind is a metaphysical Xerox machine. It inputs an original (Real) experience and outputs one or more copies (Ideas, memories,conceptu...
March 08, 2025 at 21:38
Gnomon --- "Did Whitehead believe in extra-sensory perception*3? Based on what evidence?" In an attempt to answer my own question, I have started read...
March 08, 2025 at 17:49