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Wayfarer

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Firings and sackings over this issue are being used as a pretext to purge organisations of ‘elements incompatible with the President’s Agenda’ (MAGA c...
September 13, 2025 at 00:29
September 13, 2025 at 00:05
Incidentally, there was an influential book published in the 1980’s, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. ‘Spiritual Mater...
September 12, 2025 at 23:05
One thing that might be understood about what we might call ‘religions of the spirit’ is that the very knowledge of the ‘higher truth’ is itself liber...
September 12, 2025 at 22:14
And a champion of free speech:
September 12, 2025 at 21:55
Google Gemini. It can be used to improve your expression without letting it take over what you’re saying. Used properly, it’s a powerful technology. I...
September 12, 2025 at 21:29
Is that so? I didn’t know that.
September 12, 2025 at 11:35
And numbers.
September 12, 2025 at 07:08
I like your post. I took the liberty of editing the grammar a little so as to enhance readability: The Nature of an Idea: From Neural Patterns to The ...
September 12, 2025 at 06:55
It is obviously an atrocity of the first order. Ezra Klein, a liberal columnist at the NY Times, pointed out that Kirk, with whom he would disagree ab...
September 12, 2025 at 05:12
I perfectly agree, but the point of the original post, as I interpret it, was the consequences of adapting those kinds of therapeutic philosophies, wh...
September 12, 2025 at 04:27
The ‘original anthropology’ the OP refers to was associated with spiritual movements. For that matter, the original ‘therapeutae’, from whence comes t...
September 12, 2025 at 03:05
That might be because this topic is philosophy of religion.
September 12, 2025 at 02:17
So Jair Balsanaro got the sentence Trump should have got - 27 years for an attempted coup.
September 12, 2025 at 02:16
I agree with that, and I think this is very much the consequence of Cartesian dualism with its 'res cogitans'. That is literally translated as a 'thin...
September 12, 2025 at 00:32
But isn't it very simple to show that there is 'something nonphysical' involved in, for example, mathematics and rational inference (at the very least...
September 11, 2025 at 23:27
As one who came of age in the 60’s I surely did have encounters with lysergines. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and the Summer of Love. It seem...
September 11, 2025 at 22:02
:100: Schopenhauer said that ‘money is happiness in the abstract’. Popularised versions of Buddhist meditation are similar - ‘enlightenment’ as the ul...
September 11, 2025 at 21:15
You define physicalism as the thesis that everything that exists is physical, but then you also agree that philosophy has concerns that “lie outside t...
September 11, 2025 at 20:55
That’s close to what I mean. But it’s also an observation about the peculiarity of the modern sense of existence. David Loy, independent Buddhist scho...
September 11, 2025 at 12:33
Heidegger had quite a bit to say about 'the forgetfulness of being' in Being and Time. He traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and ...
September 11, 2025 at 07:23
I did no such thing. Even the source I quoted said shows how the Greek verb 'to be' carries a rich set of nuances: copulative (“x is y”), existential ...
September 11, 2025 at 04:25
When we use the word ontology, it’s worth pausing to consider what the term actually means. The derivation is instructive. It comes from the Greek ver...
September 11, 2025 at 03:14
I agree that it’s worthwhile to understand the physical basis of mental life—neuroscience and medicine have uncovered a great deal that matters for he...
September 10, 2025 at 22:07
To say that something is physical is already to draw upon a lot of theoretical abstraction and conceptualisation. ‘This means that’, or ‘this is equiv...
September 10, 2025 at 07:43
But Francis Crick, whom you quoted, is well known for exclaiming that 'You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories, and your ambitions, your sense of ...
September 09, 2025 at 22:24
I think the point you’re not seeing is that the question of ‘the nature of the mind’ is not an objective question, in the way that physics is. The sub...
September 09, 2025 at 21:50
I quoted the definition! Memory is an attribute of living organisms, things that have memory. 'The earth' only has memory in a figurative sense. Damne...
September 09, 2025 at 08:11
Computers are created and programmed by us, to perform operations that we intend. They greatly amplify human abilities, but they would not exist were ...
September 09, 2025 at 08:02
The hand cannot grasp itself. Which is the point at issue! Because that is something only known to the subject. You are a patient and courteous interl...
September 09, 2025 at 07:48
The 'physical brain' as an object is only disclosed to us through our awareness or consciousness of it, And in order to begin to understand it through...
September 09, 2025 at 06:03
Yes — but it cuts both ways. These are all bottom-up causal factors — molecular, hormonal, endocrinal and so on. But psychosomatic medicine and neurop...
September 09, 2025 at 03:19
Isn't his book Atheist's Guide to Reality? An excerpt from the NY Times review (2011): Nonplussed to find you in such company, Tim :yikes:
September 08, 2025 at 23:38
by making an observation?
September 08, 2025 at 23:28
:clap: :pray:
September 08, 2025 at 23:10
But the same can be said of the real numbers, generally. Do they exist prior to being discovered? My view is that they don't exist at all except for a...
September 08, 2025 at 22:30
And I've been forthright in my criticism of physicalist philosophy of mind. Above, I mentioned some of them: All of these could be elaborated, but in ...
September 08, 2025 at 22:16
I haven't seen any indication that you will consider any alternatives. If they don't fit with physicalism, you will declare them speculative or 'requi...
September 08, 2025 at 07:14
This strikes me as a conversation which might better be conducted in private.
September 08, 2025 at 02:13
:100: There are many dangers.
September 08, 2025 at 01:23
Agree. My way of approaching these arguments — which, as you say, crop up in many places in the Critique — is to keep in mind Kant’s awareness of the ...
September 07, 2025 at 23:24
I hadn't noticed this passage previously, but there is something that comes to mind from philosophy of religion. This is that a spiritual conversion o...
September 07, 2025 at 22:53
Kant’s critique of rational psychology comes in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (A341–405 / B399–432). His main point is that from the necessary “I thi...
September 07, 2025 at 22:42
You say physicalism “comprises a comprehensive metaphysics,” but I would challenge that. It seems to me that physicalism doesn’t so much seek to provi...
September 07, 2025 at 21:32
In your determination to avoid attributing agency to the observer you assign it to the device, as if it were itself autonomous. But it’s just a projec...
September 07, 2025 at 08:23
I think the mistake here is to assume that because both the hand and the wood (or the device and the quantum system) are continuous in terms of atomic...
September 07, 2025 at 04:12
But notice the implicit dualism between “us” and “it.” The observer is one thing, the observed another. Yet, as Bohr insisted, what counts as a “pheno...
September 06, 2025 at 23:44
I understand that you’re looking for a comprehensive alternative metaphysics. That’s a high bar — one that most philosophers don’t clear. My interest ...
September 06, 2025 at 23:36
The Sanskit 'muni', translated as 'sage', literally means 'silent' (one of the traditional epiphets of the Buddha was 'Sakyamuni', 'sage of the Sakyas...
September 06, 2025 at 22:27