Right! That helps a lot. I noticed your impassioned response against my purported ‘subjectivism’ in one of our recent exchanges. But I stand by it. Mi...
I did try to draw a parallel between Wittgenstein’s apophatic silence, and Buddhism, in an earlier post - I’m curious as to why this elicited no comme...
what's infinitely depressing are the lawyers and politicians who continue to support Trump, and the voters who still believe him, even after all this....
well that’s the whole point - conviction requires a super-majority, which means in this house, 17 Republicans voting to convict (in addition to the De...
Agree. Mind you I don’t want to fall for sloppy relativism either. In Buddhism there are plenty of rules, it’s not at all ‘anything goes’. But that is...
Of course it does. The whole point about physical determinism, is that the rules which govern the motions of atoms govern all else. It is a lineage th...
No, the State branches, the Republican Party organisation right across the country. Nothing to do with that Pillow idiot. Trump IS the defacto leader ...
He has many minions throughout the party organisation who will happily kneecap anyone who speaks against him. I agree with you that he’s finished, but...
Even though the evidence against Trump is utterly irrefutable, smoking-gun, no possibility of misinterpretation, it seems like the Republican Senators...
I find there are generally two kinds of reactions to the suggestion of anything supernatural: shocked rejection, on the one hand (the most common reac...
When being immolated, there is some period of time, perhaps many seconds, of continued awareness and presumably awareness of pain. The fact that this ...
Sure. But I still don’t see why the possibility of cessation is a consideration. Descartes never set out to prove the immortality of the soul, only an...
As I said, there are passages in the early Buddhist texts where the Buddha specifically forbids any monk from using such powers for profit or gain, wh...
Of course, no argument from me there. But the picture of the monk self-immolating was hardly 'frivilous', I'm sure you would agree. That was the conte...
As I said to Gnomon, it cuts against the grain. Sensible folks don’t believe in magic. But Buddhism has been rife with magic from the outset, and bear...
From time to time, a comparision is made between Wittgenstein's aphorism of the ladder - that his philosophy is something you can discard when you hav...
Of course. It is a cultural taboo, and such purported powers are obviously ripe for explotiation. In fact there's a rule in Buddhist orders right back...
the point is, they’re the same for all who think, and they can be used to encode ideas which are universally applicable. So, they’re real. But they do...
Hey there’s a really good current essay on this subject....quick google....here, I’ve been meaning to start a thread on it, perhaps I will, it’s a bit...
There’s a pattern here. Recall the other day, you were arguing that hot and cold are on a continuum, and so couldn’t really be considered opposites. H...
Fair enough, and of course I agree, but the point was that there is no need to prove such simple facts. And I’m a Platonic realist about numbers, so I...
do you know the meaning of 'siddhi'? They are the super-normal powers which yogis are supposed to attain through the perfection of dhyana. (I suppose ...
Yes, Einstein took into account observations, and relied heavily on thought experiments. But he had no data for many of the predictions that were made...
It really doesn’t have any bearing on the discussion. Einstein relied wholly and solely on reason to establish principles which couldn’t even be verif...
Not at all facetious, but the point is, it's true in principle. How could a world hold together where less was greater than more? Empiricism has its l...
A distinction can still be made between necesssary and contingent, without referring to the "divine". Arithmetical proofs, for example, are true in al...
Modern people sometimes say that the Buddha acted selfishly by abandoning his home and family. I think the response to that is that, first, his family...
I don't know about that. Descartes was well aware of the concept of necessary truths, or a priori truths. Typical amongst these are the truths of reas...
I see. Of course that is true, but I'm still failing to see its relevance to what Descartes sought to demonstrate. He wasn't attempting to argue for t...
Perhaps you might say a few more words about ‘contingency’. You say that Descartes should have said, ‘I must be thinking contingently.’ Contingent upo...
However, with the 'complete cessation' - presumably either death, or perhaps through entering a trance, or perhaps anaesthesia - then indeed there is ...
Nirv??a does mean something like 'extinction' but a more philosophically sensitive intepretation is the 'extinction of suffering'. This also implies o...
Naturalism excludes God as a matter of principle. The mistake is to then believe that science has disproved the substance of such a belief, when in pr...
Maybe entertaining, or edifying, but doesn’t count for knowledge, though. I think here there’s a lesson lurking under the surface, but I’ve done all I...
Whoa. (And welcome). Very sketchy introduction. But what I make of it is that the word 'final' is key. 'Final' means 'something which all must agree o...
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