Wayfarer

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Not being Catholic, the philosophical question that occurs to me is why the fuss about nationality? Surely such a figure transcends nationality.

I think it's nonsense to say that science doesn't require or imply a metaphysic. The metaphysic of early modern science was: no metaphysics. That was ...

You’re welcome - from his book The Goldilocks Enigma (also published as The Cosmic Jackpot). I quoted it in support of my contention that there is no ...

You could just as easily say that this is owed to the fact that Greek philosophy and science laid the basis for the whole development of modern scienc...

Outside the awareness and measurement of duration, there is no time.

I've already gone through in detail the hidden assumptions behind the term 'objective truth', no point doing so again. Thanks for the chat.

Thanks for this thoughtful and open response. I agree that any metaphysical frameworks face limitations, and I appreciate your concession that explain...

I feel your frequent statements of not seeing anything profound or mysterious or needing to be understood indicate a kind of absence of curiosity or i...

He has to be able to express his theory in mathematical terms for it to be credible. Science relies heavily on quantitative analysis. As you say, that...

Mind-independence has two levels of meaning. At the empirical level, of course the world doesn’t depend on my mind or yours for its existence. But at ...

I quite agree, that is what I suspect about Hoffman's book. He does discuss various objections to FBT theory around pages 44-45 in the ebook edition I...

One of the readers comments on that article was, the people who could do anything about it - mainly, Congress - don't give a shit. There are plenty of...

I’d suggest that the nature of the electron is itself still an open question, particularly in light of quantum mechanics. The whole point of wave-part...

Yes, a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron is described by physics. So are sound waves, but that doesn’t explain the experience of hearing music. Describing a syste...

It's not just about complexity, though. Organisms are fantastically complex, on the one hand - the processes of cellular mitosis, reproduction, evolut...

Thanks for the response. But I’d like to press on the key issue: in what sense do universals exist? You claim that universals exist only in particular...

Or when we consider philosophical questions.

But our umwelt is also shaped by our cognitive faculties (which are not preferences, by the way. We don't get to choose them.) Which you will always s...

But in so doing, I'm only appealing to what was universally considered to be the substance of philosophy, up until the advent of the modern period. An...

https://i.postimg.cc/HnBWqPGq/Trump-Crypto.png Well worth reading the rest of that article (via gift link supplied). The blatant corruption of the off...

Most of the materialism on this forum has a simple origin. It begins with Descartes' division of the world into res cogitans (thinking thing) and res ...

That's exactly what it means, and I spelled it out in my response to him. Come on. When you study neuroscience, how much physics are you required to u...

In that case, there's nothing further to discuss. Philosophy begins in wondering about what is usually taken for granted.

Well, sa?s?ra literally means 'cyclic existence'. Liberation from that is the ultimate aim of Indian religious systems (which I why I don't think 'mok...

What is a 'mental object' in the first place? Consider a very basic one, namely equals ('='). Any child with a modicum of education will understand th...

I wouldn't have put it like that, but it is close to what I mean. I find the Greek origins of metaphysics quite intelligible (although not entirely). ...

One elephant-in-the-room question I feel obliged to ask, is, to those for whom political liberalism is the problem, does Donald Trump's form of conser...

Bearing in mind, 'table' in this case is a stand-in for 'the object' or any object whatever. And the origin of the question was, how we know that an o...

Bear in mind that 'falsifiability' is not a be-all and end-all in philosophical terms. It was articulated by Karl Popper as a way to differentiate emp...

I agree that this could sound like equivocation if you assume that existence and reality are synonymous. But again that begs the question of the reali...

I commented on the convergence of cognitive science, phenomenology, and philosophical idealism. What they're converging on, is some form of Kant's 'co...

They don't exist, but they're real. That's the point! In the classical vision the rational soul straddles this realm between the phenomenal and the no...

When I say that philosophy ‘drops you at the border,’ I mean that aspect of philosophy which points beyond the bounds of reason — not into the irratio...

Thanks for your comments. Needless to say, I will take issue. First, I think this begs the question. You assume that to be real is to be an independen...

Perhaps ‘reality itself’ is what Kant means by the ‘in itself’.

Interesting that in Albo’s courtyard media address today, he singled her out as the kind of independent he would call, when he had a question about ve...

Also - it’s super cheesy, but I can’t stop watching: https://youtu.be/KWQzyl9fg1Y?si=Khryk_dzZ_z6eQwv

Speaking of Paganini + guitar, have a listen to Lucas Imbiriba. I love his passion! https://youtu.be/UDxn0J_hhHE?si=7dHfedzRVWpHlh1u

probably right on both counts.

Trump said this morning (Australia time) that he congratulated Albanese whom he regards as 'a friend' - which vindicates Albanese's scrupulous attempt...

So long as it remains notional, it is impotent. It requires an engagement beyond the word-processing department, so to speak.

The other point is that mathematics seems to be ‘true’ in a way that goes beyond the objective. We usually think of ‘objective’ as meaning something i...

Empathy is a sure antidote to solipsism. True, you don't literally experience the other's mind, but it's as close as we can get. The idea that 'consci...

It's actually a very simple idea: that natural numbers (and other such intelligible objects) are real, but not materially existent. Which, of course, ...

A safe assumption, seeing as how we've been able to successfully exploit those principles through the application of mathematics. (I'd say a bit more ...

Very thoughtful observation. In the pre-modern world, philosophy and religion had a kind of common boundary, you might say, and quite a porous one, at...

First, Donald Hoffman - his theory of cognition is given in his book The Case Against Reality: How Evolution hid the Truth from our Eyes. The post of ...

As do I.