Wayfarer

ecstasy - ex outside of; stasis - ‘business as usual’.

I agree. But it’s a naturally contentious subject, better to steer clear of it IMO.

It doesn't have to be a miracle to be something more than just a language. But you have to deflate it otherwise it's inconvenient for your thesis. Any...

I'm a Buddhist convert. Strictly speaking Buddhism doesn't have a dog in the fight. But Buddhism sees modern scientific materialism as nihilism, that ...

Nothing much further to discuss, really. If Dennett means what he says - well, he actually can’t. His model is ‘unconscious competence’ - that your bi...

See Ethan Seigel’s post for why ‘energy is not conserved in an expanding Universe.’

What if there are psychic or mental 'fields'? The point is, physical fields are detectable by physical instruments, as they cause measurable, physical...

He writes for the public, and you're a member, a very intelligent one, at that. Oughtn't be that hard to see through his schtick. Anyway, enough with ...

My second-ever book, I think, was Politics of Esctacy. Don't think it has stood the test of time well, but it's got some scintillating ideas in it. (A...

Pardon me, but tosh. Dennett literally says humans are essentially mindless robots in service of the selfish gene, and that life is a kind of runaway ...

Fair enough. I rather like 'entheogens' but nobody knows what it means. I'm always impressed that Albert Hoffman, who sythesized it, lived until 104. ...

I noticed this morsel from the blog post @"jgill" linked: 'Weinstein regards the conventional requirement of writing a paper to be flawed, since he qu...

I too think that Nagel might ultimately convert, but elsewhere he states plainly that he has no 'sensus divinatus'. That essay is really a precursor t...

I would recommend Thomas Nagel's essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion as a good starting point (.pdf shared via Google Drive).

The argument is about evaluating truth statements. Every surviving species, other than h. sapiens, manages to survive and procreate without any such a...

Apropos of this thread generally, just discovered a Wiki thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_approaches_to_mysticism They can be utterly ge...

However, apart from that, it is also predictive of outcomes that one would not be able to ascertain without it. So it's not simply circular, it's also...

That’s not what Chalmers says, so maybe you don’t ‘get it’. But, hey, you’re in good company - Daniel Dennett doesn’t ‘get it’, either.

I think I'm familiar with that essay. It's the one where Chomsky says we have no coherent conception of a body, right? (It's Sunday morning here I'm o...

'Emergence' doesn't help. If a brown bear emerges from a cave, then I will presume it went in there some time previously, or was born in there. Whatev...

Arithmetical proofs, and logical arguments, and many of the other aspects of mental operations, are not phenomena, phenomena being 'appearance'. I rea...

Note the original essay by David Chalmers was Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. At issue is the nature of first-person experience, which...

What would be the instrument that does that, if it is not psyche?

One question that casually comes to my mind is whether fields are only electro-magnetic. I mean, electromagnetic fields were discovered specifically t...

Excerpt from an anonymous, first-person account provided to Richard Bucke and published in his 1901 book, Cosmic Consciousness. It concerns the mystic...

I suspect that you think 'information processing' and 'intelligence' are the same thing. Whether computers really are intelligent is a contested quest...

They musn't have been any good at it. :rofl:

Of course, there’s always going to be an exception. But I stand by the point. If computers became self-programming, why would they have any reason to ...

looks an absolutely beautiful book. :sparkle:

I had Hofstader too but I must confess I never read it. Zen Flesh was shorter :smile: Anyway Ernest don’t feel too down-hearted. Biden won, and I’m su...

No, I found it in Zen Flesh Zen Bones. It's about attachment. I suppose the gist is, in the context, you can abandon hope without leaving.

Is there such a case? I am following the various Dominion and Smarmatec lawsuits with some interest. I’d love to see Rudy ‘Dyeface’ Giuliani and Sidne...

. What I meant was for someone who has nothing further to say on it, you have plenty to say :-)

Hi Ernest - you find yourself in a state of global umbrage. Hey, I sympathise, I spent a lot of the Trump presidency shouting at the television. There...

I don't believe this. Humans write software. Computers execute it. That's because computers have no idea of the kinds of problems which unwritten soft...

I'm reflecting back to you the remark you made, that I quoted twice. 'It wants to move into the house where it doesn't belong', which is where 'we sha...

So, has no place in the 'public square', right?

You should be able to figure it out. You're the one who compared computers to children. Children are sentient beings, computers are devices. If that i...

Oh, I'm sure. There's so much going on this space. Sure, some of it is bogus, and there are some very impressive fakes, but as I said before, 'there w...

Very difficult question. In my youth I had the missapprehension that the 'enlightenment experience' was within reach - I did have momentary but profou...

Seems to me that many of the accounts are of a sudden awareness. Sometimes the individuals concerned were already enrolled in some form of training. I...

'suddeness' or 'abruptness' is often associated with mysticism. One of the mystical classics par excellence, the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch...

:up:

Many of the examples start with 'belief that....'. The point about mysticism is that it is purported to provide an insight or realisation which is not...

If I dropped my computer into a pool of water and destroyed it, I would have committed no crime.