I think one practical step that even the NRA deviants could agree to would be that the name and image of mass shooters will never be circulated in mas...
It might contain information, but until an observer is informed by it, nothing is ‘blue’. ‘A thermometer’s registration cannot be considered an act of...
It trivialises it a bit. I think you have to inject a bit of existentialism into it - like, what does it mean? I mean, you’ve been arguing about ‘the ...
There’s a current academic I’m reading, Katja Vogt, who has some interesting things to say about this idea, in a book called Belief and Truth: A Skept...
Russia indictments present new reality for Trump crying ‘hoax’ Trump doesn’t seem to have understood that the story has never been about him directly ...
Wonderful! I’ll frame that for the Trophy Room. X-) On a more serious note - it’s not far removed from the main point of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmo...
It is definitely an error. Actually there are canonical statements to this effect: http://www.sutrasmantras.info/sutra14.html But nihilism is neverthe...
I’m not arguing for ‘a grand desinger’, a super-agent. The mere fact of intentional action, of agents who act for purposes, is what is not accounted f...
There seems to me a pretty large assumption in what we are prepared to say that animals do 'out of instinct' - as if this is something obvious. Here's...
Well, I often wonder why it’s said that evolution doesn’t display any sense of either progress or purpose. But part of the dogma of evolutionary biolo...
That's the biggest just-so story in the whole history of science, in my view. It is one area where I much prefer Bergson. It's simply because nothing ...
I think you’re in a good place! I also question my own relationship to Buddhism; there are many things said and done by Buddhists that I don’t necessa...
Some comments on Bergson by Edward Conze, Buddhologist, in his essay Spurious Parallels between Buddhist and European Philosophy: Bergson, like Kant, ...
OK, I will try again. My argument is that, when it comes to something like the Pythagorean Theorem, which Einstein comments on - even though it’s not ...
It's not a matter of being 'stupid', nor is what I am saying obvious. The point you make about 'understanding the nature of intelligibility' is not th...
Right! Concerning Wittgenstein - his approach was actually apophatic, which is expressed in his aphorism, 'that of which we cannot speak...' Also, his...
Well, I have been endeavouring to practice meditation consistently for quite some time - actually about 35 years now, although with some lapses (altho...
Well, that's a pity. The other point about the AR-15 style weapons is that they were originally designed as armaments, i.e. their purpose is the killi...
Another thing I might add is actually a little counter-factual to this OP - which is that by many measures, 2017 was actually the best year in human h...
A lot of really good ideas there. One possible source that springs to mind is the (now quite old) book by E F Schumacher called Small is Beautiful. Th...
I have now gone back and listened to the lecture in the OP. Interesting talk. Also interesting to note how completely Bergson has vanished from the pu...
It’s more than ‘a policy failure’ - it’s a breakdown of civil order. Hey, I wasn't arguing against what you're saying - I think it's a very sensible a...
Well, those are called ‘background checks’, and the NRA has fiercely resisted their expansion for years. Besides: Salon Also: So - don’t hold your bre...
This latest shooting was the 19th school shooting in the USA for 2018, and the year is six weeks old. Many of the other shootings didn’t get a lot of ...
I just don’t have the same contempt for science that you continually express. Sure, I don’t accept the role of science as ‘umpire of reality’ either. ...
You think nobody has realised this before? If you actually study the Greeks, you would see that they were utterly dedicated to understanding the quest...
Einstein was a scientific realist. Obviously a genius, basically the byword for genius - but would he have understood Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution in...
It's a bit off-topic, but relevant to the post I was responding to. More relevant to the topic at hand, there's an essay from about a year ago on NPR ...
Whereas, I think what you are describing is ‘fear of religion’. Thomas Nagel described it in his essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religio...
This phrase is obviously pejorative, i.e. return to an atavistic or ‘primitive’ attitude. However, intuition is essential to anyone - even scientists ...
Andrew Ferguson, The Heretic. I could probably write something here that could really annoy you. Maybe even, scare you. Then a pathologist could come ...
Everywhere, it is described as a wave, and the whole interference pattern phenomenon is based on what waves do. The equation is described as 'a wave e...
Sure! Apart from anything else, it is preferable to be told that I’m right, than that I’m speaking gobbledegook ;-). And also, I thank you for the luc...
The differences between species are a matter for biology. The meaning of the word ‘ontology’ is ‘the nature or meaning of being’. Materialists say tha...
Then the ontological difference is: ability to ask such questions. ‘Ontological’ means ‘pertaining to the nature of being’. And humans are language-us...
Because they're 'philosophical materialists; Crick is a notable one, being a Nobel Prize winner, and co-discoverer of DNA. And the narrative is that s...
Only kidding! Have a look at the threads that I linked to in the OP. As I say in both threads on physics forums, I’m not physics-literate. The questio...
I wasn't upset by it in the least. It was instructive. You can see, I didn't push it, but I got the distinct impression that I had crossed a line. I l...
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