Wayfarer

Of course, I knew that. Your philosophy is not at all concerned with providing a kind of value system as such - it's about understanding the processes...

You don't show a lot of interest in the subject yourself. Thanks, I really enjoy your jibes.

So why bother turning up here? What is there to discuss? There’s nothing that needs to be learned, right? It’s just empty verbiage, and a waste of tim...

Also, in relation to authorities, religious and philosophical - the last words of the Buddha are reputed to have been, ‘be lamps unto yourselves. Work...

I'm not proscribing, but describing. I genuinely do think there is a 'higher' and a 'lower' - otherwise, what basis for the discussion of the domain o...

We have our spaceship - Spaceship Earth - and we have to maintain it. We have to learn to live within our (planetary) means, to treat life as sacred, ...

In one sense, you're quite correct in saying that each of us has to find our own way, and that this results a plurality of forms and views. That is wh...

But there, you fallen straight into subjectivism/relativism - something is true, because it's true for me. I get that. You know the term 'samskara'? W...

Well - this is a whole other can of worms. But, right at the moment, there is an immense debate going on in the Physics community, about whether strin...

Sorry, an idle thought. I struck it out.

There was no substance in your counter-arguments. Honestly and seriously. You're one of the better writers to join this forum, and you explain yoursel...

What is especially egregious is that while Trump is unambiguously asserting that he is above the law, his representatives are denying that this is the...

And that's because such a conception is false. It comes from the mind's almost irresistible tendency to 'objectify' or re-ify. That is why so many wil...

Well, that’s where I think your philosophy tends towards nihilism. To say that it must be a scientific matter, locates the issue in the phenomenal dom...

Google 'negentropy'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo

You say you accept a ‘four-causes’ cosmology - material, efficient, formal and final - but here the ‘ultimate Heat Death’ represents ‘the final cause’...

Q: What do you call a Greek Skydiver? A: Con Descending ;-)

Right! I mean, the idea that your statements 'correspond to reality' seems intuitively obvious, but when you actually consider what such 'corresponden...

I don't think it's that simple; actually I think it's an overlooked question. After all, Kant himself said that one main impetus behind the Critique o...

That's possibly the original intent of philosophy itself. Sociology was devised by Auguste Comte, and is an important aspect of the European Enlighten...

A big question in its own right. There are many possible responses, but the Mah?y?na Buddhist analysis is instructive in this regard. N?g?rjuna says t...

Had an experience with ‘edibles’ yesterday. My, it’s been a long time. Anyway, was engaged in the most mundane of activities, assisting someone moving...

Not in the least. The mind doesn't ultimately stand apart from the world - the mind and the world are not finally able to be separated. We receive a c...

Right! You seem to have made your decision, so there's nothing to discuss.

I'll try again. Take 'some item of information' - I gave two examples. That information can be reproduced exactly, down to the last detail, in complet...

Because of the 'postulate of objectivity' that is basic in natural philosophy. This says something like that knowledge can only be obtained of mind-in...

No, I don't think so. The point about the synthetic a priori, is that allows you to make predictions based on logic and mathematical reasoning, which ...

That is a good paper - but here is why I wouldn't agree that it amounts to a refutation. At issue is the fact that all of the arguments in such a pape...

So I will just rehearse the basic 'argument from reason' approach to the question of materialism once more. I contend that number, logical laws, and s...

A ‘physical mental state’ is a contradiction in terms. You’ve simply adopted a belief as a consequence of the culture in which you’re situated. This b...

What about 'synthetic a priori' statements? I think they're central to science.

However, such accomplishments appear to me to be examples of what Kant categorised as 'synthetic a priori reasoning' - in logic, a proposition the pre...

I am inclined to agree. I recall the famous Time magazine cover in 66, ‘Is God Dead?’ which canvassed this very question. I had grown up in a non-reli...

Evil in our midst. It's insidious, might even be the kid next door.

Hey it’s ‘the internet’. Anyone can join, and anyone can post, provided they don’t break the Terms of Service - and these kinds of pejoratives come cl...

There are many of the 'religious left', including many Catholic social democrats and intellectuals. Jacques Maritain, neo-Thomist philosopher, and Rai...

If you're going to post on public forums, you have to learn to roll with the punches. (And it is also a good idea to use a 'handle' - I *think* this f...

I have simply pointed out that 'computation' (and software for that matter) are strained analogies for what the mind is and does, because whereas the ...

Descartes' dualism is definitely not traditional. My first undergraduate philosophy unit was Descartes: The First Modern. Indeed, it was the combinati...

Which is basically what materialism says.

Emphatically not. Animals are sentient, but not rational - they are not capable of philosophy or science because they don't possess the faculty of rea...

I also have to add, that there’s an underlying issue in many of these debates as to the meaning of ‘substance’. The word has a very different meaning ...

Agree, George, and also welcome. As one of the resident anti-materialists it's great to see your posts. However, I probably would go further than your...

That's because he was a nominalist. It's the worst thing about him. Interesting fact: C S Peirce thought very highly of Berkeley, but thought his nomi...

Actually, it does, and secondly, it has nothing to do with what I'm saying, but long experience tells me this is the end of the discussion.

Indeed. I said nothing about 'inductive inference'. What I said was: Questions about the nature of scientific laws, and the nature of numbers, and whe...

I think your basic problem is that 'objectivity' is too narrow a criterion for the establishment of ethical claims. Objectivity is a very useful crite...

I had drafted an answer, but as I'm not a medievalist, I thought better of posting it. (There aren't many here, by the way, jkg's tip might be of more...

When I said that: Aren't 'natural laws and regularities' among the very 'patterns' you're referring to here, but which you then proceed to dismiss as ...