Wayfarer

We're a heathen culture. With technology.

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Good subject for a term paper! It might be of relevance that the origin of the term 'ontology' is derived the first person declension of the Greek ver...

No, because it's not a theory at all. It is, as Descartes said it was, apodictic. The point of materialist theories of mind, is that 'mind is what bra...

Not at all. Solipsism is dissolved by empathy. I don't think materialists would acknowledge that. And by asking these questions, you're already outsid...

Freedom of the will is never absolute, but it is not less real for it. Most attempts to deny free will strike me as rooted in what Eric Fromm describe...

If you think that 'knowing you're alive' is a matter of faith then there's something the matter with your logic. :wink:

How can it NOT include epistemology? It concerns something fundamental to the nature of knowledge. As most people would instinctively say, our cogniti...

something with some spiritual depth would be beneficial. I mean, NA basically defined itself on what is isn't. But what does it have to put in its pla...

Demons haven’t been eliminated at all. They’ve just morphed into mass shooters and terrorists and crack dealers. Their medieval depiction simply refle...

:up: My view also.

Of course, I agree. Here is a snippet from Thomas Nagel's review of Dennett's most recent book. I think the interesting question is: why is this taken...

I don't see 'the forms' as temporally prior - before in time - but ontologically prior, i.e. the form is something that is 'realised' to a greater or ...

Sure I have. I think your interpretation is mistaken. It’s got nothing to do with ‘meglomania’. The name ‘Buddha’ means ‘knowing’ or ‘awakened’, which...

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The point of the classical 'story of the Buddha' was that he was a prince that renounced his kingdom. From that time forward, he possessed nothing but...

You have an intriguing jumble of ideas, some of them might be fruitful. As a working, practicing, Western-secular practitioner of Buddhist meditation,...

You might have to allow for the fact that science is not all-knowing, either.

Ask yourself this question - what does eliminative materialism eliminate? Unless you want to beat around the bush, the answer is one word: mind. The w...

Rick Hanson might have some answers.

If you ran into one, do you think you would owe it an apology?

Someone once asked some modern pundit if he knew something that the Buddha didn't. 'Yeah', he said, 'how to drive a jeep'. Of course it was a tongue i...

But I think their communicative abilities can be understood in terms of behaviourism, stimulus and response. Certainly animals signal each other, bee ...

Right - so basically a Darwinian account, that mind is the product of an evolved brain, and the brain a product of the evolutionary process. That is w...

:up: The whole point about Platonic idealism, and even Aristotelian realism, is that there is a sense in which ideas are real in their own right. They...

It might be useful to spell out where the word ‘enlightenment’ comes from. It was the term chosen to translate the Buddhist word ‘bodhi’ (Sanskrit: ??...

On the contrary, the depiction of the Buddha’s awakening in the early Buddhist texts is crystal clear, although nobody here seems to have read any of ...

I think it would really help to study this question in terms of history rather than philosophy - or rather, through the perspective of the history of ...

But then, they don't claim to be philosophically important. They're what we have in common with all animals. Dennett is quite happy to grant us animal...

This is close to the idea of the perennial philosophy. (It's also highly reminiscent of Hua Yen Buddhism.) They are marvellous ideas, but how characte...

There have been some books discussed here over the last few years, One here. It grows out of the need for some account of final cause especially in bi...

Eyeing retirement to Tasmania in an energy-self-sufficient house with space for a vegetable garden. My dear departed father was actually a world-renow...

A watershed moment in modern thinking was when the Aristotelian 'four causes' model was abandoned in favor of Galileo's new science of motion. It's be...

I don't think that the ideal of objectivity was well established before early modern science and was strongly associated with the Galilean science of ...

:yikes: Didn’t notice you’d already referenced Wallace! Only responded to the post above my reply.

Actually I want to comment on one phrase from the SEP quote I provide: I think it would be rather better to paraphrase it like this: that as all origi...

There's a strong element of mysticism in German idealism, particularly Hegel, Schelling and Fichte, and to a lesser extent Kant and Schopenhauer. Now,...

.... otherwise known as 'common sense' or 'understandable trepidation'

Well, we're called 'beings', and computers are not. I say there's a reason for that, although it's very hard to articulate Corpses are not aware. That...

It might not come up - depending on the school. It's not mainstream. There's a book by an art historian, name of Thomas McEvilly, called the Shape of ...

Here is one source. Google 'pyrrho and Buddhism' for many more.

so you think it's simply a given that the Darwinian principles of natural selection will apply to computer systems? How does that work? And I'd questi...

I'm sure there are many things that can be criticized about Buddhism as a cultural phenomenon. But it is originally based on a critical philosophy.. T...

No, it exists in relationship.

It's a matter of fact. The Buddha never recognised castes or discriminated on the basis of caste. He adopted the term 'brahmin', which means for Hindu...

Sure, in the context. There is not a single thing that exists independently or in isolation from everything else.

Buddhism rejects the caste system. It is one of the main reasons Buddhism died out in India.

The jealous god dies hard. :smile:

Eliminative materialists are firmly grounded in what has been described as 'neo-Darwinian materialism'. The mind can be understood solely in neurologi...

I say that, because one of the purported benefits of the 1 Country 2 System solution is that HK respects the rule of law in a way that the PRC does no...