The claim is ‘pattern recognition is the essence of philosophy’. Big claim! And also reductionist, in my view - a ‘nothing but’ kind of claim. I don’t...
Why thanks! There are plenty of patterns in nature, I’m not disputing that. I’m taking issue with the claim in the OP which is much stronger than that...
I would have thought faulty reasoning was a better explanation. And there are patterns in for example crystal formation that have no specific meaning ...
Isn’t the fundamental characteristic of a pattern that it is a repeating sequence? I mean, I can write any number of series of characters, alpha or nu...
Ratios are not necessarily patterns, are they? Like when the Pythagoreans discovered that dividing a string by specific proportions, it produced diffe...
Emerson’s reading of karma. Incidentally nobody has mentioned the anecdote which inspired the DK thesis. I’m not going to look it up again, but it had...
The term ‘supernatural’ is the Latin equivalent of the term ‘metaphysical’. They have similar implications, but ‘supernatural’ denotes a category of t...
But that doesn’t do justice to the predictive ability of maths, to make discoveries about reality that could otherwise never be made. It sells it shor...
If you can recognise ‘=‘ then you’re pretty well on the way, aren’t you? What kind of basic intellectual machinery would you have to have to recognise...
They’re not objects, except in the metaphorical sense of being ‘objects of thought’. But they’re common to all who think. That’s the point. That’s wha...
Well whatever the nature of number 7 is, we are all in perfect agreement as to what it means, regardless of your ethnicity, location, historical conte...
You might enjoy Alva Noë‘s book, Out of our Heads: Why You are Not your Brain. He is part of a broader movement called ‘enactivism’ which argues that ...
How is the term 'memes' not simply a metaphor or an idiomatic expression? They can be physical, mental, objective, subjective - however you want to de...
Hume was the godfather of positivism. Consider the closing paragraph of his Treatise: But the same criticism can be applied to his Treatise. David Sto...
That all of our individual minds also form part of a collective consciousness. Jung's idea of a collective unconscious. The Buddhist doctrine of ?l?ya...
I am a pretty patient and conscientious poster. I found, to my dismay, when the old site died, that I had accumulated about 300,000 words of posts, as...
:up: You're a drink of water in the desert, you know. Bollocks. You said in this thread, and I quote: This is patently false. Write in any term paper ...
I could never get my head around 'the form of largeness' either. When I first encountered it, it was pretty near a show-stopper for me, but I'm contin...
I hope so too. Although I had in mind the many thousands who haven't had COVID or even know anyone who has, but who can't go to work - like, a builder...
well it's obviously a deep question and probably a controversial subject matter. But I think there's a theme in world philosophy of there being 'mind'...
It's a very fluid situation. In June when this outbreak started, I think the government felt they could suppress it like we had in 2020. But then it b...
Not quite. The modern translation is ‘intellect’ but it’s a bit starchy to convey the gist. The Wiki entry is a good intro. ‘nous’ is preserved in ver...
It's pretty straightforward. Those who don't obtain to the mainstream attitude that science is the arbiter of what is real are 'peddling woo'. As I ha...
why thanks, Amity! You sure live up to your forum name! And I'll take this oportunity to mention my follow-up to For Sophia, a song called Imaginary V...
I'm objecting to the idea of reducing the faculty of reason to pattern recognition. I've seen people hawking that idea on philosophy forums and I thin...
No. Numbers are not patterns. Bad idea. Reason and sensation are different faculties. Read that post I linked to on Aquinas, it says something extreme...
Since Descartes, there is the apparent division between physical and mental - but I think there's something deeply the matter with that. Maybe it's a ...
I think this to mean that bits of matter somehow represent ideas, in the same way that codes represent objects in, say, computer systems. It seems nat...
Heisenberg sums up the explanatory power of atomism in his speech, The Debate between Plato and Democritus: Atomism however enjoyed a resurgence in th...
where is the domain of natural numbers? It doesn’t exist anywhere, but it includes some numbers, and excludes others. The square root of minus one is ...
Just for those who haven't caught on yet, Dennett's 'philosophy' can be summed up in a few paragraphs. This is neither straw man, nor caricature, nor ...
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