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I'd question that - it is because it is interpreted through the subject-object perspective that we fail to grasp its import. This interpretation subje...
May 08, 2023 at 22:50
That's empiricism 101. I think Whitehead was quite aware of that when he wrote the book. I think the point is that empiricism itself always starts wit...
May 08, 2023 at 05:21
You say that because of your faith in the unerring testimony of the senses. Yet the fact that there might be a woolly mammoth behind a hill (or not) i...
May 08, 2023 at 02:46
Very good. I've not read much of Hannah Arendt though clearly a profound thinker. I think the kind of 'direct seeing' we're discussing is more charact...
May 07, 2023 at 10:55
'What to do' is bound up with 'how things are' or perhaps more to the point 'what things mean'. Science does a great job of measurement, quantificatio...
May 07, 2023 at 05:03
As I tried to point out ealier in this thread, I think the issue is bound up with the emphasis on 'belief' as the sole criteria of what constitutes a ...
May 07, 2023 at 00:25
That is not the sum total of the subject although it's an important part. Aristotle's argument for a first cause is based on the observation that moti...
May 07, 2023 at 00:14
Someone once told me that all generalisations are false, although I took it with a grain of salt.
May 06, 2023 at 23:44
As I noted earlier, Auguste Comte, founder of sociology and of the idea of positivism, attempted to create just such a secular church movement, The Ch...
May 06, 2023 at 23:27
Interesting that stuffy archaic Christianity defends freedom of the will as a matter of principle while scientific materialism views humans as automat...
May 06, 2023 at 09:42
Dharma and religion have overlaps but they’re not exactly the same.
May 05, 2023 at 07:05
Dawkins would denigrate religion as being something like a mind-parasite. It is what he invented the terminology of 'memes' for (which is one of the i...
May 05, 2023 at 00:53
Yeah Richard Dawkins would say that. Although he would make an exception for evolutionary biology of course.
May 05, 2023 at 00:17
That they're parasitic on religion? Auguste Comte, founder of sociology and inventor of 'positivism', also tried to found a replacement for religion. ...
May 04, 2023 at 23:29
/uploads/resized/files/q9/w8itj1bxrpaf4nj9.gif Huston Smith's depiction of the Great Chain of Being
May 04, 2023 at 22:49
I came into contact with the Theosophical Society through the Adyar Bookshop, which was an institution in Sydney until early in this millennium when i...
May 04, 2023 at 22:46
I wasn’t attempting to trivialize anything. All I meant was that the fact that living beings began to appear on the earth doesn't undermine the idea t...
May 04, 2023 at 09:48
You mean, ‘manifested’.
May 04, 2023 at 07:19
I will add, science itself has a parallel discipline - the point of the scientific method being to eliminate the personal, the idiosyncratic, the subj...
May 04, 2023 at 03:28
I think you are, but it's an unwinnable argument, as there will always be counter-examples, such as those @"Tom Storm" has given. When I studied Compa...
May 04, 2023 at 03:07
I think it's essential to it. As I said in my first comment, the question 'why are we subjects of experience?' is a strange question. It's tantamount ...
May 04, 2023 at 01:59
As the crux of the issue. Seems to me that Humphries addresses one aspect of the problem - what is the evolutionary rationale for this capacity? Why a...
May 04, 2023 at 00:08
How about, consciousness is a fundamental simple of experience? Even despite the fact that I comprise billions of cellular operations, many existing o...
May 03, 2023 at 23:07
What occurs to me, reading that article, is that what his model is describing is ego, the self's idea of itself. I don't think it addresses the aspect...
May 03, 2023 at 22:13
Both the Russian and Chinese Communist parties set out to eradicate religion, and to institute 'scientific communism', but both of them failed. (Since...
May 03, 2023 at 07:08
One philosophical point to consider in all this is the implication of David Hume's 'is /ought' problem and the difficulty of deriving the latter from ...
May 03, 2023 at 00:18
I mentioned the book The One, by Heinrich Pas, earlier in the thread - see this Aeon essay by the author with a synopsis of some of the ideas in that ...
May 02, 2023 at 22:43
This is the question that the article proposes to address: Isn't it rather a strange question?
May 02, 2023 at 05:59
The issue is that the fine-structure constants are prior to anything evolving whatever. If they were different in some slight degree then there would ...
May 02, 2023 at 01:33
Do thermometers and computer systems warrant being kind? Are they subjects of experience? It seems perfectly obvious to me that they're not, but it's ...
May 02, 2023 at 01:05
Horse's mouth:
May 01, 2023 at 23:53
They're ratios. And what I said was responding to So, my reasoning went, if matter (matter~energy) represents the 'hyle' of hylomorphic dualism, what ...
May 01, 2023 at 09:45
It's a philosophical point - that the value in question is invariant, doesn't change over time, has no units associated with it //and furthermore that...
May 01, 2023 at 03:22
I do read Ethan Seigel's posts although I notice that he's been dropped from Forbes. He's a great explicator. From that article: Sounds awfully like '...
May 01, 2023 at 03:05
Nothing at all, but no need to go to any further trouble.
May 01, 2023 at 01:51
I wonder if those could be conceived as analogous to the fundamental existence-enabling constraints identified in cosmology (e.g. Martin Rees' 'six nu...
May 01, 2023 at 01:30
Then I can't see the point of you're introducing with ' Buddhism's "anicca", "anatta", "dukkha-karma"'. Are you saying that these are examples of the ...
May 01, 2023 at 00:57
To what end, though? The theory is, that ignorance is the attribution of permanence to that which is by nature impermanent, i.e. arising of thoughts, ...
May 01, 2023 at 00:30
I never used the word 'blindness'. I simply said that the popular rejection of the notion of the divine origin of natural law is a factor in the debat...
April 30, 2023 at 23:28
Whereas in reality all you will end up with a heap of feces-smeared and broken typewriters. (Although I do sometimes wonder if they're not harnessed e...
April 30, 2023 at 23:09
I didn't intend to imply wilful blindness but that could equally be said of your second sentence, as, at the time, the Christian worldview comprised a...
April 30, 2023 at 22:59
I think it foolish to deny that there is an order in nature, but I also think that the answer to the question of why there is such an order, and what ...
April 30, 2023 at 22:22
Fair enough.
April 30, 2023 at 09:27
When you get down to 'fundamental constituents of existence', what are the choices? Any suggestions?
April 30, 2023 at 07:24
‘Information’ is not a substance (in the philosophical sense.) The word has no meaning without specifying what information is being referred to.
April 30, 2023 at 06:54
How is it a different question? For the physicalist, the physical substrate is fundamental, consciousness is epiphenomenal. So explaining consciousnes...
April 30, 2023 at 05:13
It might be worth mentioning Science and Non-Duality. This started as a conference in San Rafael in California in 2009. They now have conferences in m...
April 29, 2023 at 23:49
It is about establishing a reduction base. The reduction base is the set of concepts, entities, or principles that are considered fundamental or basic...
April 29, 2023 at 23:26
Trying doing that without employing concepts :wink:
April 29, 2023 at 22:06
Do processes such as metabolism, homeostasis and reproduction 'emerge from' simple lifeforms such as single-cell organisms? Or are those metabolic pro...
April 29, 2023 at 22:03