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Wayfarer

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Incidentally, if you don't know Donald Hoffman is, here's a TED talk where he lays out his basic idea, Do We See Reality as it Is?
May 04, 2025 at 09:53
That's the debate between Aristotle and Plato in a nutshell: Plato has it that the ideas are real quite apart from any instance of them, Aristotle tha...
May 04, 2025 at 09:51
If you were to see the world as it is, independently of any mind - what would you see?
May 04, 2025 at 09:46
Lame counter. Cockroaches are barely sentient let alone rational. H.Sapiens alone can bring this fact into rational reflection.
May 04, 2025 at 09:13
The principle exists in the NT, ‘as you sow’ - but in Christian doctrine I think it is defrayed by Christ’s atonement. But it’s a very deep question.
May 04, 2025 at 09:04
That's a really excellent question, and a topic that is near to my heart. I've debated it up hill and down dale for years, but I'll try and sketch out...
May 04, 2025 at 08:53
The problem is that 'realm' is a metaphorical or allegorical description. It is not some place or ghostly ethereal realm. Here's a book called Thinkin...
May 04, 2025 at 08:44
Karma is really a kind of watershed between Eastern and Semitic religions. It must entail one or another kind of reincarnation or rebirth, if karma is...
May 04, 2025 at 08:30
How does that sit against Donald Hoffman's 'conscious realism', and his claim that we don't see reality as it is, but only as evolution has shaped us ...
May 04, 2025 at 03:38
Not in the least. You ask 'what is reality', my answer is intended to convey that it has to be meaningful as a lived reality, not as an abstraction or...
May 04, 2025 at 03:18
I completely understand your concern. My off-the-cuff answer is that reality is lived. That response is more in keeping with European philosophy, and ...
May 03, 2025 at 23:35
As an advocate for idealist philosophy, I hoped that Hoffman would provide grist for that particular mill. I've purchased and read parts of his The Ca...
May 03, 2025 at 22:50
Donald Hoffman. His book.
May 03, 2025 at 22:19
Looks like Dutton (opposition leader) has lost his seat! If so I would think it likely that his political career is over. Won’t be missed, by me, anyw...
May 03, 2025 at 10:43
Yeah they're calling it already. Damn it'll be an early night.
May 03, 2025 at 10:31
Choices made a long time ago. Also known as karma.
May 03, 2025 at 09:24
Yes, according to Chat: There’s no officially recognized or widely used clinical term specifically for a phobia of vote-counting. However, one could c...
May 03, 2025 at 08:55
There's always a fire hydrant of Trump news stories, but this one is major: a judge has struck down his executive order aimed at punishing the law fir...
May 03, 2025 at 06:50
Right! Most election nights, I've been with family and friends, pizza, drinks, and much conversation, till about midnight. Tonight, though, it will be...
May 03, 2025 at 06:36
You do wonder when what the media is euphemistically describing as Trump’s radical downsizing of Federal agencies and departments will be seen for wha...
May 03, 2025 at 03:04
As if one isn’t enough ;-)
May 03, 2025 at 02:14
Jung’s view seems quite realistic to me, although I suppose if you think life ought to be free of suffering then it probably wouldn’t.
May 03, 2025 at 00:18
In Jungian psychology, voluntary suffering refers to the conscious acceptance of life’s inevitable pain as a means of psychological growth and individ...
May 03, 2025 at 00:08
Surely you can understand how unknown planets and unknown universes are on a different ontological plane? The universe being ‘the totality of what exi...
May 02, 2025 at 23:36
Surely one of the issues that animates this—and many other—conversations about religion is the disconnect between religious and mythological imagery a...
May 02, 2025 at 22:50
The Sydney Morning Herald came out with an endorsement for Labor today. It was hardly ringing, saying that Albanese was a small-target, cautious polit...
May 02, 2025 at 08:24
Didn’t notice it. But then, Albo gave him more or less a red-carpet welcome when he was released// having also worked very hard for it// it would have...
May 02, 2025 at 06:42
One thing I've said before, is that it's bad that exploring the option of nuclear energy became a partisan political issue. I don't believe Australia ...
May 02, 2025 at 05:50
True. Fined for not turning up. I don't want to say anything about 'foregone conclusion' but it seems awfully like Labor will win another term. I don'...
May 02, 2025 at 05:40
We received electoral commission mail with fines for my adult son for not voting, for a few years after he moved to the US. He eventually had to fill ...
May 02, 2025 at 05:19
Not at all. Election Nights are better than regular programming :smile:
May 02, 2025 at 05:10
Might it not be along the lines that necessary truths don’t have further explanation? The epistemological buck has to stop somewhere. (I'm not at all ...
May 02, 2025 at 03:33
We have had personal tragedies in my immediate and extended family, but I’ve never felt that it was something God did. The question ‘how could God let...
May 01, 2025 at 22:42
Plato certainly did not believe that the Good was a human invention. That was more the view of Protagoras, 'man is the measure of all things', the anc...
May 01, 2025 at 10:19
In which case, they're completely irrelevant in any sense other than providing rhetorical elbow-room in which any claim whatever can be accomodated. I...
May 01, 2025 at 03:42
But of course! Dear Leader can literally do no wrong - whenever anything wrong happens, it's always someone else. Like with the poll numbers. Pollster...
May 01, 2025 at 01:24
I can see that. But I still feel that what we experience as divine indifference is understandable in the Augustinian framework of the privation (or de...
May 01, 2025 at 01:18
Well, Phase One of the Musk Plutocracy is apparently at an end. Musk has put down the chainsaw, although I have no confidence that the damage that was...
May 01, 2025 at 00:18
I was rather struck by the William Butler Yeats quote, 'man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it', written days before his death in a letter to...
May 01, 2025 at 00:03
I'm interested in the truth of the matter, not 'what people say'. It's obvious that a lot of what goes on in the name of religions is a complete trave...
April 30, 2025 at 23:28
But again this predicated on the expectation that existence ought to be a state of perfection, or a state of being where there is no suffering, predat...
April 30, 2025 at 23:19
So, 'salvation' is an empty word, a cruel hoax on mankind. There has never been such a state, the whole thing is a monstrous lie, foisted on mankind b...
April 30, 2025 at 23:05
As always, the Donald is immune to reason. He's besotted with 'strong man' Putin, that explains practically all there is to know. And he lacks the ins...
April 30, 2025 at 23:04
‘Beware the Dark Side Luke’ :scream:
April 30, 2025 at 10:31
Maybe. I confess I only ever read one Lovecraft book, but the idea of entering other realms of being through dreams really struck me.
April 30, 2025 at 08:18
Poll results show that most Americans see Trump as a "dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy" (52%) co...
April 30, 2025 at 02:52
Atheists complaining about the God they don't believe in doing things they don't believe God ought to do. :roll:
April 30, 2025 at 02:01
Not at all, but there is no evidence of such. I mean ‘rational intelligence’. And there’s also no grounds to entertain the idea of a universe with ‘di...
April 29, 2025 at 21:40
But the point about integers remains. I'm sure a better-educated Platonist physicist than myself could make something profound out of it. Re nihilism,...
April 29, 2025 at 10:18
Anyone who pays attention to Sky is a lost cause already. They don’t have the clout here that Fox does in the US anyway,
April 28, 2025 at 06:19