Wayfarer

Not quite the beginning, as I understand it - just a moment after. And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars...

It would have been far preferable if in fact 'the atom' was discovered as this would have dispensed with 'the problems of metaphysics'. Then, existenc...

Brain scans are terrific for diagnosis of injury or illness, but they’ve got little to do with plumbing the answers to those kinds of questions. Have ...

I dare not ask how......

It is nevertheless the case that without the knowledge of Newtonian physics, and later Einstein's theory of relativity, that satellites could not be m...

I first studied philosophy about then, too. I enrolled as an adult entrant, in philosophy, anthropology, comparative religion, psychology and history....

You could make the case that Trump is unwittingly a puppet in some greater strategy to weaken liberal democracy in general, and the US in particular. ...

Intelligent post. I can only hazard a couple of points as duty calls. One point is that the specifically Aristotelian nature of 'metaphysics' ought no...

What prompted this thread was one of my frequent criticisms of what I refer to as 'Darwinian rationalism' - that is on of the 'anti-science screed' yo...

Fair enough. Although one wonders what kind of analysis might yield information that validates, or falsifies, the hypothesis that ‘the propensity for ...

So would you be inclined to agree that the below is an example of this kind of misunderstanding? Because, if so, I perfectly agree with you. However, ...

You can't justify 'logical primitives', that is, the basic operations of logical laws; they are what ground justification. So appealing to experience ...

That is the sense in which the world is a 'construction'. The task of the mind/brain is to generate that construction. The German idealists, particula...

I've been exploring the connection between objectivity and morality for some time. I recall a conversation on the old Forum from years ago, when I ven...

One thing that's forgotten in many debates about this point, is that scientific scepticism is not the same as scepticism in the philosophical sense. W...

Well, Buddhism doesn’t see it in those terms. I think the underlying tension owes a lot to the insistence by Protestantism on ‘salvation by faith alon...

Note to self: I should stop being such a wuss. I need to acknowledge that if I push buttons then I am also subject to having it happen to me.

The problem is that there is a gap between the apparently-purposeless processes of evolution - which are, as we've established, simply a byproduct of ...

Well, it was a response to: 'load of damaging guff' did seem to me a hostile type of response. Wasn't it? There's also the fact that it's connected wi...

It's a pity that whenever certain subjects are broached, your attitude becomes so hostile. But as I said, it was worthwhile trying to explain it, even...

The point of the quote is that Nirvana is not a 'state of quiescent nothingness' (as to what it is, I don't think it has any analogy in science.) Well...

It's a mischaracterisation. 'Sutra of neither increase nor decrease' But this 'holistic metaphysics' only serves to emulate or simulate the processes ...

Trump couldn’t even be bothered responding. He was too busy having a twitter war with Alex Baldwin. If it’s Ego vs. Something that Might be Important,...

As we have discussed many times, physics currently has very large gaps in its accounts of the nature of the Universe. It is being held together and si...

I’ve been an admirer of JMG’s blog for a while. I notice one of the books is titled ‘Collapse Now, and Avoid the Rush’. I do contemplate the idea of a...

That is such a large and open-ended question that I really ought not to respond. But anyway....I recently heard an account of a Mah?y?na scripture, wh...

My point is that it does, although the fact you can’t see it speaks volumes. ;-)

My point being, that calculating the energy consumption doesn’t say anything meaningful about who they really are. Given that, as living beings, we al...

And it wouldn’t make the least difference, regardless of whether I was a philosopher or a physicist.

Beats the hell out of being a heat sink. ;-)

That's because you're NOT looking at it 'from the viewpoint of wisdom'. It is the very thing you're lacking.

thanks, BC. I’ll look out for Kunstler’s books, even though I know they’ll probably depress me.

It is indeed, but it's also of historically recent provenance - notice in that article you link to, that it says '"Objectivity" is an aspect of philos...

Naturalism as a philosophy is generally pretty clear about what kinds of causal differences it is willing to contemplate, and they're generally object...

In order to pursue the question, it has to be meaningful, but if you’re sure at the outset that it can’t be, then indeed it will not be. That is the r...

The one that means something to you. And none of them do, then the answer is ‘none’.

Humans have free will. They can create weapons of mass destruction and destroy the entire earth. I've never believed in the kind of 'God' that appears...

Fair enough. To try and re-state it - my point is that the criterion of objectivity is not necessarily applicable to mathematics (or logic for that ma...

Something like Pascal’s Wager (although not quite the same).

Depending on whether it's a good bet, or not.

Well, you see, I think this is ultimately a nihilistic attitude, regrettably, and that it comes from limiting the understanding to only what is physic...

Agree with your observations on the limits of determinism, however: In terms of purpose, the only biological purpose is survival and reproduction, but...

It's not the lack of oil that is going to be the problem, it's the intersection of environmental disaster, over-population and resource depletion, and...

I believed in ‘peak oil’ back then, but i think the predictions have been shown to be false; the world is not going to run short of oil, but the envir...

Fair point. New York Times review: I suppose that's not surprising; he is after all a convinced materialist.

Yes - but then you’re in engineering, not philosophy as such. You’re still concerned with instrumental utility. I’m not trying to hijack the meaning o...

Worth reading this. My dear, departed father was an eminent man, a world-renowned professor of obstetric medicine and a vocal advocate for birth contr...

I would have thought ‘and’ more accurate than ‘or’ (but I’ll let it go.) Actually I want to say something in defence of Pinker. I basically agree with...

That is true, but I still think ‘objectivity’ has epistemological or metaphysical implications which are unwarranted in the context. I’m not just pick...

Meanwhile, Trump has just come out in favour of the gun laws that Obama tried to establish after the Sandy Hook atrocity. He even contradicted his VP ...