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Gnomon

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Do you consider Philosophy --- "contrived solutions" --- a waste of time? Should we all just accept our personal intuition, without making any attempt...
December 09, 2023 at 22:08
Yes, my thesis accepts that our world appears to be Dualistic in that Mind & Matter are polar opposites : like something & nothing. Yet, we only know ...
December 09, 2023 at 21:20
"Conscious Experience" is a form of repetition of a concept in different words, for emphasis. I'm not emotionally "against" Panpsychism ; it serves a ...
December 09, 2023 at 20:50
Other than reading his book, Incomplete Nature, I have not gotten deeply into Deacon's scientific & philosophical system. So, anything I might say may...
December 09, 2023 at 17:50
I plead the fifth! What if I did? Do you have philosophical issues with these fanastic & unproven ideas? For the record, I am not now, nor ever have b...
December 08, 2023 at 21:49
Panpsychism*1 & Panexperientialism typically postulate that Conscious Experience is a fundamental element of nature, implying that it existed prior to...
December 08, 2023 at 18:19
Ha! I remember my blog posts in general, but give me a break, I'm old and I don't have a photographic memory. So, if I need to recall some technical d...
December 08, 2023 at 17:05
You might get a better answer from , since he practices meditation. I tried it years ago, but my introverted mind is too ADhD for me to completely sto...
December 07, 2023 at 17:24
I'm not sure which quote you are referring to. But if it's the "patterns that connect", I use the notion of Information as Pattern frequently in my ex...
December 07, 2023 at 16:50
The etymology was merely intended to indicate the primitive origins of the concept of "Consciousness", in the evolved or learned ability to distinguis...
December 07, 2023 at 00:52
Perhaps you have a broader definition of "Consciousness" and "Perception" than I do. The "C" word literally means "to know with/together", implying sh...
December 06, 2023 at 17:26
Perhaps, but I was thinking in terms of Blindsight*1, in which the physical senses seem to "Perceive" things in the world without forming conscious Co...
December 05, 2023 at 21:53
I think you have the right idea, but I have one quibble : physical Perception is sub-conscious until metaphysical Conception. We only become conscious...
December 05, 2023 at 18:02
For Emotions to be considered philosophically, you might need to use a more appropriate term, such as "Feelings". Emotions are typically construed as ...
December 05, 2023 at 17:42
I doubt that Chalmers was talking about Physics when he coined the phrase "hard problem". Consciousness is not "hard" in a physical sense, but in the ...
December 05, 2023 at 17:00
I doubt that Koch was trying to provide a technical or dictionary definition of "Consciousness". But "feeling" encompasses how each of us experiences ...
December 05, 2023 at 16:41
Yes. I quoted Christof Koch in my post above : "consciousness is the feeling of life". :smile:
December 04, 2023 at 22:05
For me, it is. I view Philosophy as the study of the meta-physical (immaterial) aspects of nature, such as Consciousness. However, I do understand tha...
December 04, 2023 at 22:03
Materialists like to belittle the "Hard Problem" by implying that philosophers deny the "obvious" fact that Consciousness is nothing-but a body-contro...
December 04, 2023 at 18:00
Sorry, that was tongue-in-cheek. I didn't mean for it to be taken literally. It's a verbal equation, not a mathematical equation. :smile: However, sin...
December 04, 2023 at 16:59
Yes. There seems to be a hierarchy of consciousness among living beings, from single-cell organisms to cetaceans. But personally, I would prefer to re...
December 04, 2023 at 16:58
My only problem with Chalmer's philosophy of Panpsychism is in his word choice. He uses "consciousness" to label his fundamental element. But I prefer...
December 04, 2023 at 16:46
Chalmers seems to think that "everything is conscious" in some sense of "thing" and "consciousness". But I doubt that he believes that atoms are littl...
December 03, 2023 at 18:04
In the Enformationism thesis, Consciousness is viewed as an emergent form of basic mathematical Information. If you don't understand, or agree with, t...
December 03, 2023 at 17:55
This quote from Chalmer's essay on the "hard problem of consciousness" touches on a key issue of our philosophical debates. He asks whether Informatio...
December 02, 2023 at 17:49
My post spelled the term "Generic", not "Genetic, Information*1. In my thesis, I use GI as a modern version of Plato's "World of Forms" to suggest a s...
December 01, 2023 at 22:44
Yes. I see Information & Consciousness as elements of the same cosmic continuum. But Information (power to enform ; to create meaningful & useful form...
December 01, 2023 at 17:50
I was surprised to see this side-topic dialog still going-on, and even jumping from Evolution to Consciousness forums. Your original formulation --- "...
November 30, 2023 at 23:31
In my Enformationism thesis, life-from-non-life was the core mystery to be explained by any new Cosmology. Materialism has nothing to offer on that fr...
November 30, 2023 at 18:16
Yes. My use of "teleology" in the quote was ironic. Darwin's term "natural selection" was probably intended to avoid any interpretations of super-natu...
November 29, 2023 at 18:02
Sorry. I thought you were referring to a more universal theory of evolution, that would expand on Darwin's biological focus, to a more general underst...
November 28, 2023 at 22:59
Unfortunately, all of us world observers are physically limited to seeing open-ended "chains" of events without beginnings or endings. Admittedly, we ...
November 28, 2023 at 18:24
Perhaps, as an Epistemologist, you are using "information", in an Ontological sense, as a synonym for "experience" or "knowing"*1. Anyway, your what-i...
November 27, 2023 at 22:42
Yes, but. By "universal truth" I was referring to "explanatory power". But both of those idioms may be judged critically on the basis of physical evid...
November 27, 2023 at 16:56
The classical mechanistic model of physics was formulated by Newton*1, but I wasn't familiar with the Neo-Mechanistic Model (NMM)*2. My understanding ...
November 25, 2023 at 18:18
November 25, 2023 at 17:01
seems to envision his role on this forum as a Socratic gad-fly pecking & poking the transcendent pretensions of quixotic philosophy. But in practice, ...
November 24, 2023 at 18:13
The adjective "unrealistic" was intended only as definitive, not derogatory. Matter is "realistic" in the sense of hands-on practical or pragmatic uti...
November 24, 2023 at 17:46
"corrected" 's observation that "much of modern thought" is Nihilistic*1. But I think he missed the point. Way didn't say that "modern science" is nih...
November 23, 2023 at 18:19
Your post reminded me of the old idiom : "that's my two bits worth" ; typically referring to an unsolicited opinion. The monetary reference was to a q...
November 23, 2023 at 17:02
Other than Zarathustra, I'm not familiar with Nietzsche's opinions on Reason & Purpose. But one definition of Nihilism may shed some light*1. It seems...
November 23, 2023 at 01:00
I will assume that your philosophical "reality beyond" is something like Plato's Ideality, or Kant's mysterious realm of the ding-an-sich ; not a reli...
November 22, 2023 at 18:00
I may be opening a new can of worms neurons here. But, I wonder if AI mechanisms --- emulating brain states --- can reason*1 (infer novel ideas), or d...
November 21, 2023 at 22:51
In a philosophical sense, I think of "Symmetries" as logical relationships, which are the essence of Information. Existentially, those inter-relations...
November 21, 2023 at 18:14
Yes. Unfortunately, some on this forum seem to think that the job of Philosophy is simply to criticize our use of language. Perhaps the noun "being" a...
November 21, 2023 at 17:55
To make sure I understand what you meant by "universal evolution" I googled the term and found the Chardin site. If you were not referring to that par...
November 21, 2023 at 17:12
Information used to be defined in terms of knowledge / meaning contained in a mind, especially connotation or denotation that is personally relevant t...
November 20, 2023 at 23:03
Please elaborate on the "system structure" relative to Aristotelian "form"*1. Is it your own insight, or do you have links to sites that explore that ...
November 20, 2023 at 18:27
I recently read two essays relevant to philosophical questions about the hows & whys of the Emergence of Life and Mind from a material world. The firs...
November 19, 2023 at 22:56
That's my remembrance from Chardin's Phenomenon of Man essay, which I read many years ago. :smile: The Phenomenon of Man : Teilhard argues that just a...
November 19, 2023 at 21:28