T_Clark

When I was 18, I spent the summer alone at my grandfather's house working for a developer. My dinner cuisine consisted of a single rotation - beanie w...

Based on very circumstantial evidence (and my own unjustified intuition), I'm betting on life being common and intelligence not being extremely rare. ...

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem unlikely to me that one of the reasons we haven't met alien civilizations is that whenever one reaches a certain level ...

I'm not sure what a highly advanced alien civilization might do, but I agree that assuming they would behave like us is not justified.

Good point! Then again, no one ever accused me of being a sage.

An oversimplification by an order of magnitude or so, but I agree that corporate capitalism is the, or at least one of the, primary villains. A little...

Aw, geez Frank. Now I have to get off my ass and continue this discussion.

What we do by naming, using words, is tell stories. We are telling stories about the world. One of the things stories do is apply human values to the ...

I'm stepping on thin ice, so forgive me if I retract this right away - There are ways of sharing experience other than using names and words. That's w...

I'm ok with this. But this has me scratching my head. How can an apple be a thing if it has not been separated from the rest of everything else. How c...

I was nodding my head in agreement till you got to this. That's not how I see it. There is a sense in which things do not exist until they are named. ...

I don't know anything about "yogic logic," so I'm making some assumptions. I'm ok with what you've written, as long as we stipulate that "turning thou...

I'm mostly ok with this. Naming can be brief and concise because something is lost. Something is also changed. The thing-in-itself is different from t...

I disagree. That's not how I experience either feelings or words. Probably the word "feeling" is not the right one. I generally use the word "experien...

I don't understand. Can you give me an example. Again, an example would be helpful.

Madam. You have misread the article.

The US, with a population of ~340 million, takes in about 20,000 refugees a year. Germany, with a population of ~83 million, took in 1.4 million refug...

I think it's the other way around. Words are chopped up and stacked representations of something much richer. The crystallization you refer to is achi...

I read it a couple of times and still don't really understand what he's getting at. There is this: Which I disagree with. It's like he's trying to def...

I don't understand the distinction you are making between the representation and the naming. How is it represented if not in words? No. That's not wha...

I left something important out. I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It ...

The word I use is "experience." I have many experiences that do not involve words. It's probably true that most of my experiences don't involve words....

You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. This from the web: Talk - speak in order to give information or express ideas o...

This has been going on since Noah walked down the gangway and will likely still be going on when our machine overlords finally take over. And maybe af...

I agree with this.

I agree with this. It doesn't make sense to say I know or understand something if I can't put it into words.

Are there "pre-cognitive" things that can't be put into words that are different from what Lao Tzu and Kant are talking about? I don't think so, but I...

I think you're talking about just the insight that Lao Tzu, and I think Kant, were describing. And they're not the only ones. Many philosophies have a...

Then I'm a bit confused. You wrote: Which is a restatement, in a sense, of the first verse of the Tao Te Ching. You seem to have a grasp of what it me...

Yesterday, @"Janus" had a little back and forth in the "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")" discussion. I claimed that Kant's noumena are sim...

Don't chant "Om" without it.

I'm glad you liked it.

Have you read "Black Cottage?" It's my favorite Frost poem. My favorite poem. One of my favorite written works. It gives me shivers every time I read ...

I'm not the one to give you a better argument than the admittedly weak one I already have.

If you are at all familiar with my oeuvre, you've heard me say that metaphysical ideas are not true or false, they are more or less useful in particul...

I can't speak to most of those. I have been struck by how Kant's noumenon is similar to Lao Tzu's Tao, even though I know he wasn't directly influence...

Actually, the first verse of Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new under the sun. The rest of the chapter explains why. The issue is another old idea...

From the Bible - Ecclesiastes 1:9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Just because...

I agree with this. The mechanisms by which we build our worldview are not usually addressed in epistemology, even though, as you note, that is the sou...

So, is my idea that there are no new ideas a new idea? Definitely not.

This is intended as a serious response. There really are no new philosophical ideas. There probably haven't been any since soon after people developed...

This is a really good idea. Upvote. I didn't vote because too many of them were "neither of the above" for me. Now I'm thinking about questions I coul...

Responses to your OP seem to be talking about a bunch of different things. Some of these don't seem to have much to do with what I think of as ordinar...

Seems to me that if we buy the many worlds interpretation, violation of the conservation of energy and matter is the least of our problems.

Do you have any specific examples in mind?

I'm not really sure if I understand what is meant by "misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in e...

I value mystical ways of seeing things. I started a thread called "My favorite verses of the Tao Te Ching." I'm also an engineer - good at math and sc...

Perhaps the reason you wouldn't have thought of a "consciousness field" is that it's baloney. It's certainly not physics. Or psychology. It doesn't me...

Here's the definition of "cult" I think is the most applicable to this discussion - "A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or pr...

I don't think saying that beliefs can be represented as groups of words gets us out of the hole. Similar ideas can be expressed with different words, ...