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Gnomon

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Can you refer me to the "pagan philosophy" that argued for a transcendent rational soul on "impeccable rational grounds"? Or will you give me your own...
December 19, 2019 at 17:48
No. The Enformationism worldview does not imply predestination or essentialism. Instead, it views evolution as Ententional*1 in the sense of modern Ev...
December 19, 2019 at 17:12
Are you saying that Reason is a divine "endowment" and not an evolutionary development? The "nonsense" statement said that "animals are capable of rea...
December 19, 2019 at 00:59
Yes. The ancient Greek philosophers observed that humans were superior in some way to animals, but obviously not in physical attributes. Since all aut...
December 18, 2019 at 18:16
Insightful observation! Scientific Facts are supposed to be value neutral, whereas the application of those "facts" as "oughts" is a value judgment ba...
December 18, 2019 at 04:14
For animals there is no need for an absolute BEING to explain our contingent existence. But humans are not content to live in the here & now. We explo...
December 17, 2019 at 18:40
Yes. Conservative personalities are not all the same, but they generally tend to be uncomfortable with change & complexity, preferring predictability ...
December 17, 2019 at 17:55
What the "bo" will tell you is that, for the practical purposes of reproduction, the gender rainbow is reduced down to three colors : 1. male, 2. fema...
December 17, 2019 at 04:14
Thanks for the warning. I do intend to stay out of gender politics, and any other bi-polar forms of human interaction. At the moment I'm just trying t...
December 17, 2019 at 02:50
That may be true. But as I said, "After a brief review, I get the impression that today the notion of fixed categories in nature is held primarily by ...
December 16, 2019 at 18:35
Just for the record, I was putting words in the mouths of non-theists, who treat Nature as the ultimate moral authority --- as in the Naturalistic Fal...
December 16, 2019 at 18:17
Bula! Good point. I suspect that Essentialists believe the simplest categorization is the truest : Male/Female (two values) versus the confusing loose...
December 16, 2019 at 18:09
Yes. "Innate is better" is a nutshell version of the Naturalistic Fallacy. But that seems to be a very common assumption ("pervasive and persistent"; ...
December 15, 2019 at 23:48
I can understand why the Bronze Age Bible condemned homosexuality. First, they had no knowledge of genetics, and judged gender only by obvious charact...
December 15, 2019 at 19:04
I agree with your intuition that Information is essential to Life (Enformy), and the cessation of information processing is what we call Death (Entrop...
December 15, 2019 at 04:00
Yes. That's the point of the BothAnd philosophy. Materialist Science and Spiritualist Religion serve well in their own Magisteria : physical vs emotio...
December 14, 2019 at 04:01
I agree that ID uses materialistic arguments to counter materialism. From empirical evidence, they reach the same conclusion as materialists : "it's t...
December 13, 2019 at 19:51
In my personal Enformationism thesis, I hold to a synthesis of both views (BothAnd). Most materialist scientists & philosophers, assume that randomnes...
December 13, 2019 at 01:01
What do you mean by "radical charity", in the context of Truth and Knowledge? I'm not familiar with Donald Davidson, but a quick Google search found t...
December 12, 2019 at 00:34
Cognitive researcher Donald Hoffman, in his recent book, The Case Against Reality, offers an interesting metaphor that may shed some light on your que...
December 12, 2019 at 00:26
Me too! Although I suppose that question has been debated to death on some forums, if not this one. But the OP raised a different question for me : Is...
December 10, 2019 at 03:18
If quantum particles are "real" objects, why are they labeled with the unreal term "virtual"? I suspect that your understanding of quantum "virtual" i...
December 09, 2019 at 19:06
You point to my discernment failures, but you fail to support your personal definitions with applicable examples that might help me to see where you a...
December 09, 2019 at 18:35
Teach me. Show me how I misinterpreted your "words". :smile:
December 09, 2019 at 18:22
Lem's association of Ergodicity with History was probably based on a philosophical, rather than mathematical, definition. Mathematical theories of dyn...
December 09, 2019 at 18:15
So, you believe that "virtual" and "potential" existence are equivalent to "real" and "actual or physical" existence? Hence, nothing in the world is "...
December 08, 2019 at 18:22
If you don't like the Google definition of "Virtual", which alternative definition would better suit your personal preference, and preconceptions? Tha...
December 08, 2019 at 17:57
Ha! I suspect that Hitler was more of a Strong Attractor than a Flitting Butterfly. His "Make Germany Great Again" (MGGA) campaigns were obviously att...
December 08, 2019 at 17:44
In my brief online review of Ergodic theories, I noticed that they are mostly applied to abstract mathematical concepts, such as Riemann Manifolds and...
December 08, 2019 at 05:05
Yes. A symbol points to something else. But it is not the actual something else. And the something else is not necessarily concrete or real. It may be...
December 07, 2019 at 19:24
I'm beginning to see a part of our communication glitch. You seem to think that a "virtual electron" --- as represented by illuminated pixels on a com...
December 06, 2019 at 20:01
So, what's the problem?. As far as I can tell, no one here is denying that humans have two ways of thinking about existence : sensory reality and ment...
December 06, 2019 at 01:41
See my reply to Mww. :smile:
December 05, 2019 at 19:44
Yes. The intrinsic Either/Or aspect of our apparently dual "Reality" is what Einstein was talking about in his Theory of Relativity. What's real depen...
December 05, 2019 at 19:42
You seem to be confusing subjective concepts with physical objects. In the typical bar magnet illustration of a magnetic fleld, you never sense the fi...
December 05, 2019 at 01:25
In what sense can Qualia be physical? Is "redness" a force or a material object? That question is the crux of the mind-body debate. Physicalists try t...
December 05, 2019 at 00:49
I'm only superficially familiar with Ergodic Theories, and what little I know comes from the Information Philosopher instead of sci-fi authors. As far...
December 04, 2019 at 23:35
That's exactly why Evolution, according to Hoffman, has hid the "chaos" of ultimate reality from the eyes of humans with limited intelligence. That pa...
December 04, 2019 at 18:41
I had my own reasons for coining the neologism "Ideality". Partly to serve as a contrast to the noun "Reality". And partly to make a distinction betwe...
December 04, 2019 at 18:24
I agree. That's why my thesis proposes a Programmer / Enformer / Creator outside of space-time. Panpsychism explains the intelligible order in the uni...
December 04, 2019 at 18:11
Yes. In my thesis, I refer to the "force" or "intention" behind progressive evolution as EnFormAction, which is similar in effect to the various notio...
December 04, 2019 at 17:49
I suspect that the confusion comes from using the word "consciousness" as-if it's an object or substance. Instead, Consciousness is a process of trans...
December 03, 2019 at 19:18
That's why I make a pragmatic distinction between Reality (sensory) and Ideality (mental). Unfortunately for the Realists, what we take for real objec...
December 03, 2019 at 18:18
Unfortunately, defining "experience" and "existence" has been a subject of debate in philosophy for millennia. Scientists typically try to limit exper...
December 03, 2019 at 04:20
This sounds similar to my own worldview, except for some of the outdated terminology. "Experience" and "Consciousness" and "Panpsychism" are terms tha...
December 02, 2019 at 19:43
The answer to that question depends on whether the "goal" of evolution is Quantitative (reproduction) or Qualitative (teleology). Atheists assume that...
December 02, 2019 at 18:24
That's why I limited my example to vertebrates. For sheer reproductive power, single cells that divide every few minutes don't need much intelligence ...
December 02, 2019 at 18:02
I'm sure that was his intention. And he doesn't have much to say about Platonism. In his chapter "Illusory" though, he says, "In Plato's allegory of t...
December 02, 2019 at 00:28
Yeah! It's just philosophical locker room talk. :nerd:
December 01, 2019 at 23:49
That may well be, but a lot of smart people, including pragmatic scientists, not noted for fanciful thinking, argue that Materialism might also be a f...
December 01, 2019 at 23:42