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Gnomon

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The title of Hoffman's book was intentionally provocative. The term "illusion" can be interpreted negatively as "deception"*1 or neutrally as "concept...
March 28, 2023 at 17:09
Coincidentally, I just read an article in the Feb/Mar 2023 issue of Philosophy Now magazine. It is addressed to "fundamentalist Atheists" who argue ag...
March 27, 2023 at 22:08
Yes. Here's an excerpt from my thesis glossary : PanEnDeism : Panendeism is an ontological position that explores the interrelationship between God (T...
March 27, 2023 at 20:58
Hypothetically, that might be possible. But I'm not aware of any human enterprise that is "contradiction-free" or "all-encompassing". That would seem ...
March 27, 2023 at 17:53
That goes without saying. Philosophers & Cosmologists don't "prove" anything, they merely argue for for their own mental model. In the book I'm curren...
March 26, 2023 at 18:12
Apparently, Penrose is merely postulating that primitive neural nets were not conscious, but evolved toward the kind of awareness that humans experien...
March 25, 2023 at 22:21
I can understand & agree with that argument --- and the perceived need for it --- except for the "completely" specification. There have been several p...
March 25, 2023 at 18:30
Pre-science, primitive people were at the mercy of natural forces. They were confused by & fearful of the exigencies & vicissitudes of Nature, that di...
March 23, 2023 at 17:39
If Natural Evolution theory can be applied to Cultural Evolution, a postmodern plethora of optional forms should not matter in the long run. The compe...
March 23, 2023 at 16:14
Thanks for the suggestions and link. But, I'm no better informed about Wittgenstein than Kant. My GI Bill college education had no place for Philosoph...
March 23, 2023 at 01:11
I'm not sure what you think I'm after. The point of this thread is not the authority, or lack thereof, of Kant's scientific worldview. I simply used h...
March 22, 2023 at 17:30
Yes. I read the book almost 30 years ago, before the universal function of Information became a central focus of my personal philosophy. My current En...
March 22, 2023 at 16:50
Yes, the "Meta" label has debatable baggage. Aristotle didn't classify his Nature topics in terms of falsifiability-by-experimentation, but he did div...
March 21, 2023 at 22:21
As you implied, philosophical pluralism seems to be related to political pluralism. Pre-civilized groups tended to be egalitarian. But as urbanized so...
March 20, 2023 at 21:58
In the book I'm currently reading, Fire In The Mind (1995), by science writer George Johnson, I came across several passages that deal with the conten...
March 20, 2023 at 17:52
In the book I'm currently reading, Fire In The Mind (1995), by science writer George Johnson, I came across several passages that deal with the conten...
March 20, 2023 at 17:43
Kant's polarities probably seemed to be more fundamental from a classical (Newtonian) physics perspective. But quantum physics has knocked holes in so...
March 20, 2023 at 16:31
True. But, I doubt that Western science is seriously challenged by the notion of Eastern self-transcendence, since each person can define his own crit...
March 20, 2023 at 16:11
I am not a Kant scholar, and I had never heard of his list of Antinomies (logical contradictions) until I read the article quoted in the OP. So, Kant'...
March 19, 2023 at 17:57
The Designed Designer (or Caused Causer) challenge assumes that the postulated First Cause exists within the normal space-time system of sequential ca...
March 18, 2023 at 17:26
In my own musings on the development of Information Theory, I take seriously the conclusion of quantum theorists that abstract analog Information is e...
March 17, 2023 at 18:15
I'll defer to Hoffman to answer that question from a better-informed position. In the video linked above, he addresses the conundrum : "does the moon ...
March 16, 2023 at 17:21
The point of this thread is to ask the question : Is it a sin for a professional astronomer to speculate on a cosmological view from god's perspective...
March 16, 2023 at 17:09
Don't take the title of the book too literally. It was intended to be provocative. Hoffman said that he began as a "naive realist". But after years of...
March 16, 2023 at 16:58
Hoffman sheds new light on the old ding an sich question : evolution, via conditional survival, has taught us to treat "appearances" as-if they are th...
March 16, 2023 at 00:22
Hossenfelder is/was an empirical scientist, and she insists that "Physicists must stop doing metaphysics"*1. Ironically, the same warning could apply ...
March 16, 2023 at 00:02
Perhaps. But overestimating the proper scope of Physics might also have bad consequences. Blocking access to metaphysical ideas would turn Philosophy ...
March 15, 2023 at 17:04
I suppose the "antinomies" are merely polar opposite positions that we could take in philosophical arguments. As you implied, Kant was not concerned w...
March 15, 2023 at 16:26
Yes, the cosmic sausage-link image does neatly encapsulate the "Big Bounce" theory of cyclic universes pinched-off from previous 'verses. But such inf...
March 14, 2023 at 17:00
That's easy for you to say. :joke:
March 14, 2023 at 15:48
Yes, the Buddha seemed to be a practical empiricist instead of a theoretical metaphysicist, focused on the concrete here & now instead of imponderable...
March 13, 2023 at 21:51
I agree. Such speculations are metaphysical, not physical. Obviously, reasoning from experience with conditional causes to an unconditioned First Caus...
March 13, 2023 at 21:29
Yes. Magic, like Marketing, is in the business or creating desirable images in the mind of observers. The power of mis-direction does not force, but m...
March 13, 2023 at 17:46
Yes. A driverless car, approaching a fork in the road, would normally plow straight ahead. But with natural or artificial intelligence, it could choos...
March 13, 2023 at 17:35
I was using quibbleable "atomic" in the original Greek sense of irreducible. This thread was inspired by the Big Think article, which mentioned "Kant'...
March 13, 2023 at 17:14
So, was Kant saying that his own Transcendental Idealism is an illusion and an error? Or was he merely warning about how easy it is for reason to acce...
March 13, 2023 at 16:57
I apologize for the muddled message. It was not intended as a formal mathematical definition, but more like a poetic metaphor of mirrored universes : ...
March 13, 2023 at 16:21
Outline : https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ggoddu/modern/272h-k1.html # 1st Antinomy Thesis : The world is limited with regard to (a) time and (b) s...
March 12, 2023 at 22:17
KANT'S ANTINOMIES : *1. "The antinomies, from the Critique of Pure Reason, are contradictions which Immanuel Kant argued follow necessarily from our a...
March 12, 2023 at 21:56
I feel your pain. Having a cow can stretch your cant. :joke: "Clowns to the left of me ; Jokers to the right Stuck in the middle with you" Stealer's W...
March 09, 2023 at 23:10
I do have a theory of how "computation is instantiated in the world". But first, I must take issue with "computation" as a Definition rather than an A...
March 09, 2023 at 18:11
I almost agree. Since our Epistemology (knowledge) is entirely based on sensory perceptions, we can never know anything that is outside-of (or above) ...
March 09, 2023 at 02:07
The notion of "Logical Necessity", as a manifestation of God's omnipotence, reminded me of another aspect of Spinoza's "Deus sive Natura" that is simi...
March 09, 2023 at 01:31
I apologize for tripping your Anti-Theism Firewall*1 -- AGAIN! -- with trigger-words such as "Deus". But I was just curiously exploring ideas related ...
March 08, 2023 at 23:57
Thanks again for the uncharitable ad hominem critique. But based on our fraught history, I wasn't expecting your expert opinion or your support. Just ...
March 07, 2023 at 22:46
What little I know of Spinoza's worldview is second-hand, not directly from the source. Nevertheless, I often note the similarity of his Deus Sive Nat...
March 07, 2023 at 19:11
I'm not an expert on Spinoza. but due to some similarities between his Deus sive Natura god-model and my own information-centric First Cause model, I ...
March 05, 2023 at 23:04
Kastrup seems to be swimming in the same esoteric waters that my own thesis merely dabbles in. The main difference is that he claims to have personall...
March 05, 2023 at 17:32
Yes. That's the purpose of Bayesian Probability. In some scientific and philosophical investigations, the empirical evidence is frustratingly incomple...
March 05, 2023 at 16:20
Since "God" questions are very common on this forum, it's clear that the ultimate notion of "deity" is not yet dead among philosophical thinkers, even...
March 04, 2023 at 18:31