Wayfarer

Tree rings contain evidence of forest fires, ice-cores atmospheric records. I'm not disputing that. But I'm saying that the mere existence of those da...

Mathematical platonism says that intelligibles such as number are real even if not existent, being the same for all who think. Mathematical ratios and...

You do recall the anecdote that Einstein once exclaimed, when walking with one of his friends, 'surely the moon still exists when no-one is looking at...

Who could be anywhere :lol:

Computers and libraries are human inventions. Whatever order they have originated from that.

Can't have one without the other though. People often say, well measurement is any form of registration on any instrument, but we would never know tha...

namely, an intellect :lol:

I remember us recently discussing Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the 'instrumentalisation of reason'. Pinker's notion of reason falls squarely in...

A simile comes to mind: imagine that 'the idea of the cat' is a silhouette in front of a light-source through which light is projected so as to create...

I'm going to stop arguing this point, you've been telling me this over and over for years, and I just don't think it stacks up. Over and out.

Hey I know, I've got immediate family in the US, son and family live in a really nice town in Wisconsin and I visit there regularly (last there in Aug...

That's more like it! I think the religious idea of 'the life eternal' is meaningful (although hardly anyone here will agree). In the popular imaginati...

There are places where I would want to own a gun if I were to live there. New Guinea, for instance, is said to be a very dangerous place to live, with...

I deleted my comment. I will try and make a more serious point. Merely declaring that 'everything is meaningless in the light of eternity' is a kind o...

Is there such a thing as uninterpreted information? Put another way, how does anything constitute information until its been interpreted? I mean, the ...

But that's informative to us. The difference with the information encoded in DNA is that it is morphogenetic, i.e. it causes things to happen, it tran...

'The existent' and 'the uncreated' are different domains in classical metaphysics. Lawrence Krauss published a book 10 years ago, A Universe from Noth...

I'm certainly not claiming any kind of enlightenment on my part, but I'm not prepared to agree that the whole Platonic tradiition merely ends with que...

'We', eh? ;-) There is in the later Platonic and neo-Platonic corpus a philosophy of illumination, much of it later incorporated into Christian mystic...

Biden's Chip Act has had a massive impact, Intel and TSMC are both building multi-billion dollar plants in the US (unlike DJT's much-touted refrigerat...

Interesting that the only place outside human activities and animal communications that something like transmission of information occurs is in living...

There is a reason the forms are also known as universals. If they were specific to each and every particular, the whole idea would crumble.

That leaves aside a whole class such as numbers, conventions, principles, universals, and related. the question as to the sense in which number exists...

Point taken :up:

Be sure that’s not an excuse for not trying. It easily morphs into the nihilism which is an affliction of our age.

Same root as 'phenomena' - very interesting. I had the idea that 'phantasia' came to mean 'mental image' in later philosophy.

'Miracles are not against nature, but against what we know of nature' ~ Augustine.

Know exactly what you mean. I had a marathon thread here in the past about just this kind of thing. The broader situation is, modernity divides the Un...

Sorry about that. Figure of speech connoting deadly warrior.

There's a well-known story of the death in Africa of a man called Anthony Lawrence, in 2012, who was known as the 'elephant whisperer' for his work in...

:lol: But the thought of going up against X million Taiwanese ninjas soldiers ought to give anyone pause (even the PRC). A lot of what goes under the ...

D’oh! Not Taiwan invading Australia! China invading Taiwan! :brow: That’s been a headline hypothetical in the local media the last two days, and it’s ...

That's the ticket! Appeal to fear and division. Just your kind of schtick. The fear is not China invading Australia, but Taiwan, which then turns into...

He's not that new-found. He was mentioned here a few years back and promptly laughed off as a crank. But since then he's published quite a bit and he'...

The identification of gun ownership with appeals to Jesus is itself a particularly revolting aspect of American conservatism. Really signals a very de...

that's where we differ. I don't think that's what 'form' means. Socrates truly is the form 'man' but the form 'man' is common to all men. Likewise for...

Socrates is an instance of the form ‘man’ but not all men are Socrates. There are not a multitude of forms as there are multitudes of individuals.

That story is the first I'd heard of him, it appeared in my newsfeed. In fairness that is a brief excerpt from an entire book, not yet published but h...

Whatever is recorded by instruments remains data until it's interpreted. Data comprises units of information which in themselves do not carry any spec...

Kastrup has two PhD’s, a large and growing publications list, and is very much becoming part of the global philosophical dialogue on consciousness, as...

Oh in your book, definitely, but it’s a dull read :-)

Good to see Kastrup makes it into that discussion. I'll find time to read it later. (In relation to which, he notes that Kastrup's 'dissociated identi...

Again, here, the distinction of 'what exists' and 'what is' has to be discerned. 'Existence' pertains strictly to particular existents. The meaning of...

Writer Paul Auster on the violence endemic to American culture https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/america-built-by-religious-fanatics-who-promoted-a...

Do they ever exist? Certainly not in the sense that gas clouds and galaxies exist. But wherever sentient beings evolve they will be able to discern th...

Yes. But forms, as a matter of principle, are not themselves particulars. There is not a separate form for each individual. That's the 'principle of i...

I don’t know if current physics does constitute materialism. There are plenty of idealist aspects within it.

All true but how does it show that the elements of experience have any ultimate material constituent? What is this ‘matter’ that all is hewn out of? S...

It's a mistake to say in respect of the opposition of materialism and idealism, that they are somehow equivalent or that they are two horns of a dilem...

All I can refer to is in the passage I quoted: Reading further into it, 'forms' are obviously central to it. But there is a passage further in the art...