Wayfarer

I agree the citations are impressive, that's why I mentioned the Walkley Award. This NY Times piece, by independent film-maker Alex Gibney, sums up th...

Do you think Wikileaks was a bona fide media organisation?

Refresher prior to the forthcoming debate, on what Trump did after the last election and has done since: Continued to spread baseless lies that the el...

I think it’s safe to say, that whatever the fundamental substratum is, it doesn’t consist of things.

But even though fundamental particles and their properties can’t be envisaged, the equations that describe their interactions are accurate to one part...

The qualitative dimension, right? The axis against which a ‘higher good’ is meaningful?

I've been puzzling over, and reading up on, the basic dictum of Plato's metaphysics, which is 'to be, is to be intelligible'. From what I've gleaned, ...

He looked ok on the news footage - a lot more middle-aged but then he’s 52. I don’t see any reason to expect he’s at risk of imminent death. And I don...

Worth noting that the Walkley Foundation recognized Wikileaks and Assange in 2019: https://www.walkleys.com/board-statement-4-16/

I think you’re mis-using the word there. If everything were chaotic, nothing would exist, and if everything were perfectly ordered, nothing would chan...

This OP title would have benefitted from a single-word response: YES?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if in a couple of years he runs for the Australian Greens. He'd be a shoo-in. Gift link to Washington Post wrap on his ...

Obviously a vexed question. My elder son was a journalism student ten years ago (although he hasn’t gone into the profession), But at the time he was ...

I could replicate wikileaks' functionality and advertise its existence in the hope of attracting uploads. Would that make me a journalist?

And didn't my comment elaborate on that very idea?

It is great on a personal level to see Assange walk free after his ordeal - 14 years all up, as his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy was also tan...

Nevertheless, and to all practical purposes, mathematics enables a very wide range of successful predictions, doesn’t it? The mathematical physics und...

One of the main points of Pinter's book is the way cognition works is by carving out gestalts. A gestalt is a meaningful whole - basically, an object,...

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Do you think that discovery, had it been made at the time, would have discredited Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’? Granted, dinosaurs weren’t known t...

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One of the books I was singing the praises of a couple of years back was Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. He’s a maths emeritus (now decease...

That’s not really the point of the lecture, though. It’s about the fact that science is conducted by humans, who are subjects of experience, who are a...

Yes fair point. That pertains to objective understanding of reported sensations, experience, and so on. But without the ability of subjects to report ...

Thank you for your answers, I shall think them over.

Rather hubristic, isn’t it? Actually I want to go back to something you said at the beginning - that religion is ‘built into our firmware. When presse...

Thank you, I shall follow your advice.

An entry on Mellassioux says: I think I can spot a weakness in that argument. My view that we know things as they appear, not to us as individuals, bu...

I think the price of entry is a little steep :yikes: . Serves me right for bringing it up.

Odd as it may seem, I kind of agree. The caveat is that about 99% of people will say, ‘oh, you mean God designed it’. The reason being that, in the ca...

But they’re not designed - not unless you’re defending an intelligent designer. Are you?

Not so. Technology, derived from the Greek ‘techne,’ means something made by art, craftsmanship, or human intervention. Biology, on the other hand, pe...

I think you’re conflating, or confusing, several separate points. My question about the triangle was simply ‘is it a physical object?’ - to which I sa...

What technology are you referring to? I thought we were discussing biology.

But is it a physical thing? Certainly the picture of a triangle is physical, but the definition is a concept.

But it's not a physical thing. It's an idea.

Designed by whom or what?

Quinton Meillassoux introduced the concept of the "arche-fossil" in his book *After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency*. The term refe...

Fair point. But, it does add that ‘most people do not know’ it. And I’m still questioning the sense of it being identified as a ‘biological drive’. Hu...

Sigh. It seems there’s no shortage of perplexities in metaphysics. It’s no wonder that it was ditched.

If that’s so, you should be able to provide a citation.

So why bring Islam into it? why not just stick to biology?

Do Muslims believe that it’s biological firmware? Or doesn’t it matter whether they believe it?

Do you think Muslims would agree that ‘fitrah’ is a biological drive?

Couldn’t classical philosophy ascribe the unintelligibility of the world to the treachery of the senses? It wouldn’t have regarded ‘the world’ as poss...

It doesn’t need to be invalidated. It’s simply irrelevant, even if it is the case.

I don’t know about that. Language has a biological component, insofar as spoken language requires the unique physiology of h. Sapiens. But I don’t kno...

Don’t loose sight of the fact that evolutionary biology is a theory of the origin of species. It’s not necessarily a theory of the origin of everythin...

Might also be useful to recognise the distinction between narcotics and hallucinogens. They’re very different. I don’t know where cannabis fits in the...

The version I read, he wasn’t an abuse victim, he’d been hiking with his family in California and something frightened him and he ran away. They said ...