There's only one way known for humans to actually 'create another being', and that is by reproduction. Computers are devices, by definition. They're m...
One of the intriguing articles I learned about on forums was that bacteria exhibit learning behaviour - something about navigating pathways towards nu...
Interesting question and I voted ‘yes’ but here I have to qualify that. To start with, anything alive is conscious in some sense - that goes for the m...
I had the idea that in all of the main Christian denominations, ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ existed as a pair - in that God is both transcendent a...
That assumes that the natural state, or rather the ordinary state that humans predominantly exemplify, is normal. Certainly, experiences with psychoac...
Nothing. It's true that addiction and hedonism are destructive behaviours, but there's also a sense in which society taboos such substance because it ...
When I came of age in the sixties, cannabis was hugely fashionable, so too LSD. But my perspective on them was, it wasn’t simply about cheap thrills a...
The broader question is the nature of intention or intentionality, altogether. When the 'accidental' nature of the universe was first mooted, which re...
There's many points we do agree on. I don't agree with that form of dualism either, but it is very much part of the background of the debate. But anyw...
Which included Alfred Russel Wallace. incidentally the remainder of the review of Nagel's book, in a Buddhist journal that I copied that quote from, f...
I think at issue is indeed the notion of 'intentionality'. I mean, it is an accepted dogma that evolution itself is not 'intentional' - to say that it...
In Buddhist philosophy, 'seeing things as they are', is one of the attributes of the Buddha. Actually, there is a reference very familiar to the beat ...
If indeed a peace treaty or disarmament is agreed to in the Korean Penisular - big 'if' - then indeed it would be a great thing, no ifs or buts. But i...
Thank you for the recommendation. As it happens I am awaiting Amazon delivery of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tr...
Well, what interests me is the rationalist argument against materialism. It's not simply 'mystical' or 'religious' but it is continually treated as su...
Because science is purportedly in the business of finding reasons. The positing of chance as cause doesn't seem to me to amount to either an hypothesi...
It’s really an argument against the notion that ‘chance’ amounts to a reason or cause. Think back to Bertrand Russell’s famous essay, ‘A Free Man’s Wo...
No, that’s not quite right. The anthropic principle grew out of various observations that showed that in order for there to be stars, matter, and life...
That’s not how I read it. The ratios being talked about represent the fundamental conditions and physical relatioships - the constraints - that must e...
Not guilty, your honor. I was simply commenting on the fragment I quoted from. I never said nor implied that he meant ‘eternal stuff’ - there is liter...
I thought I had explained that. It is 'reactive' in the sense that it's a reaction against the previous accepted order - something like the dialectic ...
One intuitive observation is that there is nothing that is known that is its own cause. What would it mean to say that something ‘is its own cause?’ I...
But in all electronic devices, energy is flowing through matter, yet your fridge, clock, and television aren't conscious. So, as you say, your model w...
I quite agree with your analysis. I've been reading a similar critique by the 20th Century French neo-Thomist, Jacques Maritain, which pretty well agr...
‘Reasons for success’ don’t equate to biological traits. Free will or intellect or rationality are something more than simply adaptions and to try and...
I don't think there's a lot of point in trying to isolate the evolutionary causes of such human traits as the exercise of will. I mean, there might be...
I don't think it amounts to something philosophically meaningful. What I think it is, is the most high-level, general cause which is recognised by the...
That is simple relativism. The problem that presents itself in today's culture, is that the only arbiter of reality is science - but science doesn't d...
I don’t know if I can accept the underlying rationale behind that terminology, and I have always objected to the way that it’s been used to enforce au...
I think, in line with philosophers such as John Hicks, that there are many divergent accounts of humanity's 'encounter with the numinous'. So - I don'...
The key word is 'discovered', right? Uncovered, made manifest, realised. They're not the product of evolution, nor the product of the brain. Indeed if...
The capacity for reason - indeed it does. And also the capacity for language. But the 'furniture of reason' - such fundamental operations as 'the law ...
And how can you know anything about the physical structure, without the capacity for abstract reasoning, whichi is required at the outset? You can’t s...
I try to, but it is never understood. As far as you're concerned, all such matters are personal. We invariably arrive at this point. The article I cit...
Not philosophy - modern philosophy, which is something of an oxymoron, because it has no conception of higher truth - which, remember, doesn't exist, ...
Right. So the question was: I had tried to answer that Buddhism - for one example - stresses 'be a light unto yourself, work out your own salvation wi...
It's not a 'subservient handmaiden'. The argument is, empirical claims rest on rational foundations, not all of which are themselves explained by scie...
Because rightly or wrongly, it was considered an act of war and not murder. And furthermore, he was acting in pursuance of Government policy, and not ...
I really do try and explain. Never seems to work, though. Funnily enough, I make a living as a tech writer, so I’m usually pretty good at explaining t...
Peirce wrote a number of essays for The Monist which are plainly idealist, in the Hegelian, Kantian and Berkeleyian sense and also heavily indebted to...
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