Wayfarer

People in Olden Times, that being before about last week, generally believed that the Universe was animated by reason. Philosophers even went so far a...

Doesn't big bang cosmology and the ever-expanding universe somewhat undercut this? Aren't the natural sciences largely engaged in trying to identify c...

Fair call in my view.

One more question. I don’t really understand that mass-energy-information paper you linked to. What do you think the point of it is?

I think there's a lot of confusion and equivocation going on in this OP between information theory (from electronic engineering and information techno...

This is another digression, but the idea of 'neural correlates' is a misunderstanding of the nature of representation. Representation and meaning is t...

:up:

this question was the subject of a previous thread.

Yes, I was given some of Alain Du Bouton's books as gifts. I like him, he's a original thinker and very good writer. Jules Evans is another contempora...

I don't accept that ideas or sentences or the like are 'brain states' or can be understood in those terms. I think pain, and suchlike, might be useful...

What you mean is, to put it in terms you can picture.

As was I.

Or encode the same information in completely different material forms. I had a monster thread on that some time back.

That is from his book, Cybernetics, and is often quoted. The duality of signs and substance is basic to this question. The OP wanted to say that 'ever...

Yes well that definitely seals it. I can't lay my hands on Isaacon's book right at the moment, although Whewell and Babbage were contemporaries, and I...

Hadn't encountered Whewell before, but discovered that he's a pretty major figure in English philosophy: (This is similar to a point I often make in t...

Cartesian dualism is only one form of dualism. It’s quite different to hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. And there are others.

I wonder if they're allied with Animal Liberation. They seem intensely misanthropic. Review goes on to acknowledge that they make many valid points, b...

To my knowledge, the question of whether the Universe was ordered was never put to the Buddha. It was not one of questions he declined to answer, beca...

Buddhists don't worship a creator God, but they have no trouble acknowledging there's an order to nature. They also believe there is karma, the result...

:up: Glad you see it like that.

That article is accurate, but the alternative to lockdowns - 'letting it rip' - would surely generate many thousands more infections, hospitalisations...

There is also such a thing as lack of imagination.

Augustine was plainly struggling to interpret the meaning of the Creation myth of Genesis. As that quote showed, he realised that creation really coul...

As I understand it, such unanswerable questions or conundrums are intrinsic to the Platonic dialogues. Often they are regarded as 'purgative' (i.e. in...

As I think has been discussed throughout these threads, in dealing with such matters, there's a mixture of myth, conjecture, suggestion and argument. ...

The issue is, a thorough-going secular philosophy has no imaginative domain which corresponds with 'the mystical'. In a secular system, 'the mystical'...

'Dead' is also a metaphorical expression. From an essay on the Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper: Don't you think it's also revealing that you wish t...

Time to mention the 'forgotten wisdom' thesis again. See Huston Smith's 1976 book, Forgotten Truth. He proposes that there is an hierarchy of being, t...

Yeah, well, you have to be interested in it otherwise I agree it's pointless.

There's a author and teacher in the US, Pierre Grimes, who used to offer a class he called 'philosophical midwifery', which was a form of therapy base...

Who do you have in mind when you say 'our own experience'? Why is it not possible for 'us' to have such experiences? What prevents it?

I encountered that passage in an online article about the subject of literal interpretation of scripture and how today's Biblical fundamentalists woul...

Wouldn’t the literal meaning be straightforward?

worth reading that Augustine quote again. I’ve never read the whole book, but that passage speaks volumes.

In original Christianity, those who heard that were never expected to understand it. They were expected to believe it. There was no question of ‘inter...

It’s too late for that. That is what has just played out.

Well, in that case, we disagree. 'Literalism' - reading mythological accounts as literal re-tellings - is one of the banes of the modern world. And yo...

:up: 'Hermeneutics (noun): the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts.' Reading the Bible has n...

I think that you assign to ‘information’ the role that is assigned to ‘citta’ in Indian religions. It’s like you’ve had an ‘aha!’ experience - not say...

It’s terrible that Biden has fucked this up so badly, but also unmistakeably true. Yes, all those before him laid the trap, but he should have anticip...

To be honest, same here, but I think just the ability to recognise that is worth something.

It's doing it rigorously, that's challenging, but I think that was the original intent of philosophy.

He’s the son of a writer called William Irwin Thompson, who’s a kind of ‘counter-cultural intellectual’. I had a fascinating book by him in the early ...

They certainly do, you're making yourself perfectly clear. You were arguing for the inherent reality of things, independently of any observer. I point...

This is obviously a big question and we’re wading into deep waters here, but consider the origins of Western philosophy, specifically the questions ra...

Are you familiar with Kant's controversial expression, the 'thing in itself' (ding an sich)? That observation is relevant here. Kant's philosophy is t...

you’re not wrong. It’s all over the news that the Taliban have won.