Wayfarer

You can't stand outside the act of cognition. Put another way, you can't cognise the cogniser. The act of cognition involves subjective and objective ...

If the Cosmos is an 'ordered whole' then the current speculative model of multiple universes does not conform to that description.

Yeah but I still thought it was pretty good.

Right. Accordingly, I suggest that current culture does not have a cosmology as such.

All I'm saying is the location of his car is not a necessary fact, but contingent. So his knowledge of the location of the car is also contingent on c...

My view is the same as the governments of Australia, US, Britain - the invasion of Ukraine is an unjustified act of aggression resulting in the deaths...

The prospect of peace lies wholly and solely with the Kremlin. They have instigated this entire catastrophe.

Oh, ChatGPT, thou wondrous oracle, compose for us a brief sonnet, Shakespearean style, in praise of the power of mathematics for physics. Now there's ...

Chilling story on CNN about the brutal treatement of so-called conscripts fighting for the Wagner group. Meanwhile, the dreadful attrition rate of men...

I have one browser (Firefox, as it happens) which can be set to ‘purge all history when quitting.’ It’s very useful for sites that allow one or two ar...

I read David Albert's review of Lawrence Krauss Universe from Nothing. It is relevant to the OP. Krauss was furious at this review and apparently laun...

I know I'm not qualified to judge, but I suspect Sean Carroll, nice guy that he might be, is basically pretty crap at philosophy.

What is the precise meaning of 'cosmos' in Greek philosophy? As I understand it, it's not strictly speaking synonymous with 'universe'.

Probably both. You know the original etymology of 'sin' is 'to miss the mark'. Useful discussion of meaning of religion here, from which:

I'm struggling to do the reading. Gerson's books are about 90% addressed to other academics in defense of his interpretations, and the whole field of ...

:up:

But there are very different interpretations of what that means. The Eastern Orthodox interpretation is different to the Calvinist, for instance - the...

That they're 'unclear to you' is not an argument against it. It might just as well be an acknowledgement that you don't understand the problem. The di...

Lloyd Gerson says exactly the same in his essay 'Platonism v Naturalism'.

Christianity (and other religious and philosophical traditions) are not one exclusive model. Otherwise there wouldn't be the interminable conflicts be...

I am not at all sure that there is a life beyond this one, but I'm certain that I came into this life with some memory of previous lives, ill-defined ...

James Webb Telescope question costs Google $100 billion ---

I think the wish to reduce everything else to physics, is because physics seems to offer the most unequivocal form of objectivity. In some fundamental...

You're welcome, quite an understandable misread.

'Tack' is the expression. From what yachts do when they need to change course. (Sorry for being pedantic. I suppose it wasn't very tackful :-)

Only that the meaning of 'physus' was interpreted very differently in ancient philosophy, but I don't have anything further to contribute along those ...

But are they? The modern idea of what constitutes 'the physical' is vastly different to the ideas of the ancients. The 'four elements' are a universal...

You're a good sport. I too am an amateur, or rather, as I said, a casual reader, but I try and take these kinds of ideas seriously. -- By way of a foo...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-one-review-platonic-particles-and-waves-of-history-11673628851 (might/might not be paywalled, although it opened for ...

A posteriori, he does, but not as a necessary fact.

Pardon me for saying, but you have a way of presenting these ideas in such a way that it trivialises them. Like you've reached into a scrabble bucket ...

I think you’re putting to much faith in empiricism (pardon the irony). Mathematics, logic and many other disciplines are not strictly empirical. in na...

I have often addressed that question. Again it's a question of philosophy not physics. For practical purposes you can assume the world has been there ...

Not so. ChatGPT is said to be updated to 2021, but someone pointed out it correctly answered that Elon Musk owns Twitter which happened last year.

See Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities.

That is an a priori assertion, but which really could only ever be validated by observation.

Buddhists have a much broader definition of what constitutes 'experience', based on the experience arising from the jhanas. Even though Buddhists them...

One more thing. I know this is a very difficult point to articulate but appreciate the opportunity you have provided for me to try and explain it. The...

Thanks, good feedback, I'll take that on board. But I don't agree it's a matter of taste, although I will agree that it might be due to the limitation...

:up: Thanks, helpful explanation. I might have been making a connection where there wasn't one.

When materialist theories of mind say that something is a product of the mind, then it is positing an identity or equivalence between brain and mind. ...

Not 'entirely'. The fact that mathematics can make predictions that can then be confirmed or refuted by experience is mainly an argument against ficti...

Individual minds, that all operate under the same conditions and parse experience in the same way. Mind is ‘collective’ in the sense that we’re all me...

Well, we can agree on that, at least. But if you look at some of the remarks made by the various talking heads in that Smithsonian Institute essay abo...

As I've often said, I came into this debate not through mathematics, as my school mathematics experience and performance was not very good. It was bec...

Actually I'll hark back to this discussion a couple of weeks ago which I feel ended on a reasonably harmonious note.

That is what I would describe as a jaundiced view. Platonism one of the wellsprings of Western culture which I think still maintains both relevance an...

:100:

Not in my view, obviously, but I won't try and persuade you.

Rather a good series of 10 essays by Marcelo Gleiser on The Big Think about quantum physics and philosophy. Well-informed and level-headed. https://bi...