Sure - ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. But what makes such cases 'extraordinary'? It's because, as I said, they go against the ...
actually that quotation you’ve provided on buddhanature does come close to heterodoxy from a Buddhist p.o.v. That’s because the Buddha always denied a...
If you mean, do I think there is in principle an explanation for scientific laws, the answer is: I don't think there is. As I said, given that there a...
Cuts both ways, you know. I'm not proselytizing although I don't share the same distrust of anything religious that you habitually exhibit. Actually, ...
Yes, but bear in mind (and this is getting way off topic), the 'philosophy of experience' in Buddhism (which is the subject of the texts known as abhi...
I think that is based on a common misinterpretation of the Kalama Sutta: So, experience plays a part, but also, the goal of the path is not generally ...
I think that's a very disappointing and rather prejudiced response on your part, although I do understand the prejudices that invariably attend this t...
Stevenson accumulated case information from the early 1980's until his death in 2007. Ultimately he collated around 2,700 cases where children were in...
It’s not spin. He was generally ignored and often maligned. Reincarnation is a cultural taboo in Western culture, as a matter of fact. It goes against...
I got one of his books out of the library once, and read some of it. One of the things he said in the article I linked was ‘the will not to believe is...
The point simply is, a lot of people will say ‘well what possible evidence could there be....’ when, thanks to Stevenson - generally ignored or malign...
The main researcher was a Professor Ian Stevenson, who held a privately-endowed chair at the University of Virginia (died 2007). He described more tha...
I see the issue as this - given scientific laws/regularities/order, then science can do an awful lot of work. But it doesn't explain those laws; it do...
As far as evidence is concerned - evidence concerning 'rebirth' or 'previous lives' is about the only kind of post-death evidence that is possible to ...
I wonder where/how maths fits in this ensemble? It’s only because of ‘observable regularities’ that science can even do its work. In a totally unorder...
A footnote on ‘creationism’ - it forms no part of the official doctrines of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodox communions. It is main...
Right! The original intent of 'the secular state' is to provide a framework within which you are free to practice any religion or none. However, this ...
Just to re-focus: the discussion about whether only particular things are real, or whether universals are also real, is not an empirical question, bec...
as soon as you argue about ‘what kinds of things exist’ then you’re no longer talking empiricism but philosophy. How many species of X there are, how ...
First - your argument is not empirical, but metaphysical. It is not an argument about any state of affairs in the world, but a statement about the way...
The issue here is this: the mind itself, what is that 'makes humans conscious', whilst it may or may not be 'supernatural', it is not an object of cog...
But, you haven't given any argument for it. You've simply said 'Because of nominalism, it can't be true'. Whereas I'm actually making an argument! And...
The Parmenides is arguably the very beginning of philosophy proper. As Whitehead said that Western philosophy is 'footnotes to Plato', Plato saw himse...
One way to argue against that, is to say that such capacities as rational inference and abstract thought are of a different order to anything disclose...
Indeed they do. The key word is 'reducible to'. Another way of putting it is that such things as consciousness, ideas, thoughts, and so on, supersede ...
I accept there is a border and immigration crisis in the US, but I don't understand why anyone would think that this most inept and mendacious of pres...
There’s a basic principle which I think defeats ‘brain-mind identity’ theory. This is that symbolic representation and abstraction literally cannot be...
James Comey’s May Day OP is a must read. Regarding the Border Wall: let’s remember the H.L. Mencken saying - ‘for every complex problem there is a sol...
I'm very suspicious of those brain-scan studies. Sure, once you build up a big enough database then you can infer meaning from the data, but what is t...
Well, he's going to get away with what was reported by Mueller. Again, he will succeed in lowering the standard of the office such that things that an...
That's a really interesting passage, isn't it? You can almost see Schopenhauer struggling with the implications of this "better consciousness", which ...
That’s what I’m getting at. A certain kind of suffering - actually, very many kinds - can be managed through medicine - but I don’t know if that is ap...
Completely agree. The only observation I would make is that, left to their own devices, people won’t generally do this. It doesn’t come naturally. So ...
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