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Gnomon

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It's not Religion, as a general human aspiration, that gives God a bad name, but the variety of antagonistic religious sects that defend divergent def...
February 22, 2020 at 19:04
Although, years ago, I had difficulty following Whitehead's abstract argument in Process and Reality, I could see that he was talking about some of th...
February 22, 2020 at 18:26
Off topic : Apparently, the "pale of orthodoxy" is a recent innovation that was devised to justify the inter-faith Ecumenical movement of the 20th cen...
February 22, 2020 at 17:10
That's a common problem in religious discussions : whose orthodoxy are we talking about? Orthodoxy for Catholics would be different from that of Bapti...
February 22, 2020 at 04:10
In my Enformationism worldview, the Laws of Physics are simply initial conditions and logical operators of the program that is running as Reality. The...
February 21, 2020 at 18:44
No. I'm a "G*D-wrote-the-program, and-observes-the-on-going-computation" kind of guy. I call my worldview, which includes a hypothetical creator/progr...
February 21, 2020 at 18:15
That rule only applies to an actor operating within space-time. It doesn't apply to the creator of space-time. As space-time creatures, we don't know ...
February 21, 2020 at 02:28
Yes. Scientists have postulated a variety of rationales to allow the creation of something from nothing. But all are violations of either the Law of T...
February 21, 2020 at 02:19
Voila! Just like magic. That works for Pragmatic Purposes, but for Philosophical Pursuits it's pretty lame.
February 20, 2020 at 17:54
Yes. Since the Big Bang theory indicates that our universe is not eternal, there must be "something" outside of space-time with the power to create ne...
February 20, 2020 at 17:42
In his 1997 book, The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom made the same assertion in these terms : "poverty with prestige is better than affluent disgrace...
February 19, 2020 at 17:38
The term "Intelligent Design" is usually taken as a reference to the top-down short-term creation described in Genesis. But based on current scientifi...
February 19, 2020 at 17:12
The study of the Psyche was considered to be a branch of philosophy (metaphysics) until the mid-20th century. B. F. Skinner attempted to make a pragma...
February 16, 2020 at 17:58
I just finished reading Howard Bloom's 1997 book, The Lucifer Principle. He addresses that very question. And the answer is . . . well, you need to re...
February 15, 2020 at 03:13
Yes. Being is a process. But BEING (the power-to-be) is more like a timeless law or principle. Pragmatic folks take the brute-fact of existence for gr...
February 14, 2020 at 04:04
Perhaps not "all will be as-if it never was". Most of us can find a bit of solace in the notion that we can live-on in our genes, our children will be...
February 14, 2020 at 02:15
That is indeed the strategy of most religions : to look for life's meaning in some kind of afterlife, either in spirit-body or in re-incarnation. Beca...
February 11, 2020 at 18:19
The term "occasions of experience" sounds to me like quanta of incoming information. But my personal experience of the world is continuous and constan...
February 11, 2020 at 04:04
Ouch! A hard-cover of Unsnarling the World Knot is listed for $894.90 on Amazon. It's as way-over my budget as Whitehead's "reality" is way-over my he...
February 10, 2020 at 03:32
That depends on your attitude and viewpoint. Philosophers and Scientists tend to analyze the world into finer & finer distinctions. But that kind of a...
February 09, 2020 at 19:03
Please give me a brief synopsis of how "the bipolar panexperiential physicalism" softens the hard problem of Metaphysical Consciousness in a Physical ...
February 09, 2020 at 17:50
What I enjoy about our dialogs is that we can disagree without being disagreeable. Of course, part of the reason for our mutual broad-mindedness is th...
February 09, 2020 at 02:54
Yes, the Enformationism thesis does give primacy to the “mental” aspects of the world : consciousness, qualia, etc. To non-scientists, including philo...
February 07, 2020 at 22:46
The reality of virtual particles is subject to debate among scientists, but my position is that "virtue" is a Quality, not a Quantity. A virtual parti...
February 06, 2020 at 18:09
Do you have any "un-real-ized potentialities" in your mind? If so, they exist only as ideas until you actualize them. Is there a place in your reality...
February 06, 2020 at 01:23
That synopsis sounds like a summation of the Enformationism worldview. Even what I call Ideality is not an "unconnected reality". It's merely a phase ...
February 05, 2020 at 18:19
Ha! The target is full of holes in all the wrong places. But, if we continue this machine-gun dialogue, the pattern of holes might just get closer to ...
January 31, 2020 at 18:48
I would agree except for your insistence on the primacy of the material world. To me, and many others, Matter is secondary to Mind. This flips the wor...
January 30, 2020 at 23:50
Drat! My nefarious scheme to pull the wool over your eyes was foiled again, by your astute reasoning. :wink: No. That's not what I said. Your astute r...
January 30, 2020 at 19:17
It would help to know what raised the question in your mind. Some context would narrow the range of answers. With no frame, I'll just focus on "Human ...
January 29, 2020 at 02:57
Over & out.
January 28, 2020 at 03:14
I was just teasing you. Modern Science is the best consensus opinion of reality that humans have invented so far. But scientists are far from a quorum...
January 28, 2020 at 03:07
Do you think algorithms (programs) exist eternally apart from a Programmer? Or were they, like computer algorithms, a creation of an ententional mind?...
January 28, 2020 at 02:58
I'm using a conventional mathematical probability concept for my own special purposes. Shannon information is abstract & mathematical. Bayesian Inform...
January 28, 2020 at 00:36
Einstein described the universe enigmatically as "finite-but-unbounded". That literally means "finite-but-infinite". How can we make sense of such a c...
January 27, 2020 at 23:51
Where did you get that? I'm not qualified to offer an expert opinion on the possible future of AI. But some Cognitive & Computer Scientists are skepti...
January 27, 2020 at 21:51
I don't know, What? What does this have to do with my world? I'm afraid the only solipsist I know anything about is me : imagining my own little world...
January 27, 2020 at 21:21
You are talking about a sub-process, perhaps with feedback loops. I'm talking about the whole process, which has a beginning and end. I'm talking abou...
January 27, 2020 at 18:57
Those people are materialists, and imagine that all the stuff in the present universe was stuffed into the Singularity. But that's physically impossib...
January 27, 2020 at 18:39
Qualia is the metaphysical manifestation of Information. Matter is a physical form of the same fundamental stuff. If you want to know how I arrived at...
January 27, 2020 at 17:47
Yes. Because they were looking for a measurable physical force like gravity. But in 1907, Bergson only meant it metaphorically as a natural organizing...
January 27, 2020 at 02:39
It's a long story. My Enformationism thesis takes mundane Information (Quantitative/Shannon & Qualitative/Bayesian to be the essence of both Matter & ...
January 27, 2020 at 02:18
The programmer defines the parameters for success, but not the final form. The program gradually evolves an optimized form to meet the designer's requ...
January 27, 2020 at 01:54
It's both. I view the universe metaphorically as a computer program processing Information. The mechanics of the process is predetermined, but the out...
January 26, 2020 at 17:47
Here's a link to the EnFormAction Hypothesis. The popup in Note 2 gives more details on Emergence, Phase Transitions and Quantum Leaps. But the essay ...
January 26, 2020 at 17:26
You'll have to ask someone familiar with simulated universes. I only know a little about how the real universe (base reality???) works. But I guess an...
January 26, 2020 at 17:09
I'm into Information theory, but I don't understand the question.
January 25, 2020 at 22:57
Although my thesis is intended to reunite metaphysical Qualia with physical Quanta in 21st century Science, the quantum level implications are outside...
January 25, 2020 at 18:00
All of those essential elements are emergent properties of the more fundamental principle of my theory : EnFormAction. EFA can be imagined as a Progra...
January 24, 2020 at 17:57
I doubt you really believe they imagined a Multiverse to fill-in a scary blank in our knowledge by warning people away from the unexplored territory. ...
January 24, 2020 at 00:50