Remember the lesson of Socratic humility - 'all I know is that I know nothing'. The whole problem with trying to prove a 'first cause' is that this is...
At issue is, the origin of the order on which life depends. Even for life to begin to evolve spontaneously, there have to have been a sequence of prio...
it might be worth noting that none of the the Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox communions endorse 'intelligent design', which is generally associated w...
Every judgement presumes an order. Without order, science and reasoned inference couldn't even get out of bed. The conceit of science is that it can o...
Hey almost everyone today thinks that life's a lottery, it's a cosmic crapshoot that just happened to turn us out. It is the accepted wisdom that 'if ...
The Bible contains an enormous wealth of stories, historical accounts, mythological accounts, anecdotes, parables, prophecies. So it's not only a matt...
To even read it is an act of interpretation. The idea that it has a monolithic, single meaning is one of the unfortunate characteristics of American f...
the question I would ask, in what other field of scientific endeavour would the argument that 'something happened for no reason' be considered an hypo...
Two interesting facts about nothing. First is, decimal math couldn't have got off the ground without the concept of zero - and this breakthrough was h...
There's a nice Aussie saying, which is that something is, or is not, 'fair dinkum'. Being fair dinkum is being genuine, being the real deal, something...
Fair point. That was the first thought that came to mind - I wasn't really suggesting that the cause of the decline of liberalism, was that people are...
Monkeys can't even type. If you had a 1000 monkeys, and typewriters, I think you would get a whole lot of broken typewriters with shit on them - no ac...
I agree with the OP, but I think the problem is one that is being addressed by quite a few writers under the headline of the retreat of liberalism. Th...
My efforts to understand what Peirce is saying have mostly been prompted by my effort to understand what you are saying. I am not expert in either, bu...
The other point I wanted to come back to is this: I see Peirce as an inheritor of ideas in the Western philosophical tradition, one of which is 'nous'...
The paper I was reading, describes him as an 'objective idealist', i.e the universe is in some sense possessed of awareness. I would have thought it w...
It seems to me, from the reading I have done of Peirce, that what he means by 'mind' (as in matter being effete mind) is something neither physical no...
It's not that - all of the difficulties about mind/body, nature of mind and it's relation to body, and so on. I think the field of mind body medicine,...
I noticed John Searle provided a very convincing demo of mind over matter in one of his video talks. He raised his arm. Now he well knows that this me...
I was given the Eben Alexander book on his lengthy NDE, although I must confess to not finishing it. Pim Von Lommel's work on NDE's also strikes me as...
Peirce's view of science was very expansive - it blended into many aspects of his thinking which would not, I think, be regarded as 'scientific' by ma...
Oh good. Then please explain to me again what the origin of 'downward causation' is - what are the 'final causes' towards which living beings are stri...
The first essay I mentioned, by Guardiano, discusses the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Peirce as depicted in a series of essays in a publication...
Notes on Peirce, Idealism, Mind, and Semiosis From The Intelligibility of Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism, Nicholas Guardiano Department of...
Not the existence of it, but the fact that it works. How DNA came about, what caused it to exist, is what is at issue. By the way, I don't have a 'rel...
Shouldn't use that word, 'created', I'm sorry. Nothing is created by anything, that's either disguised theism, or anthropomorphism. And the other thin...
The point about any living system is that information is encoded in the cells, along with the means ('program') by which the information is transmitte...
Well, enlighten me. The point was to understand how degraded a signal could become, and still convey information, wasn't it? And related to that, was ...
That has nothing whatever to do with Shannon's laws about information transmission. What 'difference' does it make when a star explodes, exactly? When...
you're evading the point, which is crucial to the entire thread. Sure Shannon defined 'information' but as I said that was in the context of signal tr...
it was defined in the context of there being information - a signal - to be sent and received. What is an example of that in a world where there are n...
I agree. 'information' is given as a fundamental explanatory category, in the same sense as 'matter' or 'energy'. But 'information' has many meanings,...
First, on one level, I'm completely on board with the notion that the literal 'genesis event' was a lightning or comet strike. I'm pretty sure that's ...
I'm not trying to upturn your arguments, so much as put a different perspective. Notice that as soon as the mere hint is made that the answers might l...
Right! So, for the purposes of arguing against the lumpen materialist, you can pull the 'representation' card. But when challenged as to what it is th...
The aim of the question I asked Apokrisis, was to ascertain if he really does have a physicalist view of mind, which he claims to have. The view that ...
Very general terms are the hardest to define. All you can do is point to various domains of discourse which use the term in recognisable ways. But to ...
So, question - where does mind enter the scene? Presumably not until very late in the piece, as h. sapiens has only existed for a minute sliver of tim...
The thing is that the principles pursued by 'sacred monks' have nothing to do with the pursuit of pleasure. There are principles at stake which are 't...
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