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Wayfarer

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You're welcome. Have a nice life!
April 15, 2025 at 07:11
April 15, 2025 at 03:57
A poignant illustration of the way in which popular Darwinism has given us something to live down to.
April 15, 2025 at 03:52
Yeah I know. It makes it even worse. And Trump now says he's going he wants to send American citizens who have been convicted of crimes there, removin...
April 15, 2025 at 01:55
The other major Trump story of the day - there are always so many - is the conflict with Harvard University. Basically, Trump has written to Harvard, ...
April 15, 2025 at 01:36
Isn't there a tension between liberalism and classical philosophy, in that classical philosophy is concerned with the pursuit and cultivation of wisdo...
April 15, 2025 at 01:24
The contradiction was your agreement with two contradictory statements about the same matter. You agree with both X and Not-X. That's the contradictio...
April 14, 2025 at 23:46
Here is an analysis yesterday of the state of play concerning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. A major point is that the Department of Justice originally...
April 14, 2025 at 23:44
Why are home prices so expensive in Australia? Consider that the four major banks make a large part of their income from mortgages. Therefore to maxim...
April 14, 2025 at 23:36
He's testing whether he can defy the Supreme Court and not be held to account. The Supreme Court are hardly going to issue an arrest warrant for POTUS...
April 14, 2025 at 23:18
Nothing human-centric whatever about that.
April 14, 2025 at 23:14
The constitutional crisis which has long been forecast, where MAGA defies the Supreme Court, has arrived. It is the case of the illegal deportation of...
April 14, 2025 at 22:26
Welcome to the Forum. Ambitious opening post. Evolution has no aim other than to survive and the propogation of the genome. That is why Richard Dawkin...
April 14, 2025 at 22:20
There are two issues here. First, the contradiction. You said: I then presented a passage from Thomas Nagel, which says the opposite: To which you res...
April 14, 2025 at 21:48
I once wrote a user guide for an information recovery utility. It could retrieve information from drives that had been accidentally formatted or the f...
April 14, 2025 at 08:58
Agree with the drift, but that is a misleading metaphor. It’s true that information does not exist as a substance, in the same way that mind or metabo...
April 14, 2025 at 08:47
On which basis, I would argue that primitive organisms are feasibly subjects of experience in a way that atomic particle cannot be.
April 14, 2025 at 07:17
This is central to 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' which has been discussed many times on this forum. The key paragraphs are: So Chalmer's...
April 14, 2025 at 06:26
Right. Maybe collectivism wasn't the word I was looking for. I was saying that by criticising liberal individualism, I didn't mean to endorse societie...
April 14, 2025 at 06:09
I had in mind China and the CCP, but it's not a point I wish to press. And the saying 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.'
April 14, 2025 at 05:53
I’ve often remarked that the tacit slogan of liberalism is ‘nihil ultra ego’ - nothing beyond self. The individual conscience the sole arbiter of valu...
April 14, 2025 at 04:37
If you can't see the contradictions in what you're writing, there's no point in continuing.
April 14, 2025 at 03:47
As far as encounters with the numinous are concerned, many of these are described in William James' classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. Ano...
April 13, 2025 at 23:51
Bodies and organisms comprise the same materials as inorganic matter, but there's obviously a profound difference in kind between them. As far as thei...
April 13, 2025 at 23:25
Those questions are not answerable - at least, there is no consensus view as to an answer. That is where you enter the field of interpretations of qua...
April 13, 2025 at 22:10
*
April 13, 2025 at 05:37
But the attributes of particles can easily be separated. Particles can have an identical mass and a different charge. And a corpse can easily be diffe...
April 12, 2025 at 21:26
What is physical? Charles Pinter says in Mind and the Cosmic Order that 'what we regard as the physical world is “physical” to us precisely in the sen...
April 12, 2025 at 05:11
On a personal note - after many years studying Buddhism and attempting to practice meditation along Buddhist lines, I started attending Japanese Pure ...
April 12, 2025 at 04:24
There have been articles on that, too - how Chalmers is a natural successor to Albo, but the only possibility they can see for the Libs is Angus Taylo...
April 12, 2025 at 04:21
The consensus in the Australian media I follow is that Albanese is streets ahead of Dutton, who has tried and failed to play the fear-monger card. His...
April 12, 2025 at 03:11
It might interest you to know of a pubic figure who’s come to prominence in this regard in the last five years or so. That is John Vervaeke, who is pr...
April 11, 2025 at 22:15
‘Theistic personalism’ is another fraught topic in theology, as I understand it. It is different from classical theism, in that it views deity in some...
April 11, 2025 at 22:07
Not ‘it’. That is what the (regrettably gender-specific) ‘He’ is intended to convey. I wonder if the quest for (or fantasy of) interstellar travel is ...
April 11, 2025 at 21:32
I’ve been arguing that this is based on a principle that something can be understood solely in terms of constituent parts. This is why I’m saying you’...
April 11, 2025 at 21:04
You’re not seeing the point of the article. It’s not a matter which can be assessed objectively.
April 11, 2025 at 20:41
Of course. Those kinds of exercises are stock-in-trade for cognitive science. But, says Chalmers, those are easy problems. They are not the hard probl...
April 11, 2025 at 11:01
Bearing mind that both Du Chardin and Peirce were believers. Peirce obviously not of a conventional type, but makes it clear often enough that he has ...
April 11, 2025 at 08:09
I generally do.
April 11, 2025 at 08:04
not to mention the many great aspects of Spanish culture, like Flamenco. https://youtu.be/xpRgR-tZEpk?si=nrJ1jTTYizQPWzXE (OK he’s Brazilian but the m...
April 11, 2025 at 07:29
There are people who have been trying to ‘stop Trump’ since the first day of his calamitous rule. But as he’s won a democratic vote, there’s no obviou...
April 11, 2025 at 07:25
I don’t hear much about Spanish politics, other than that people were furious over the flood responses, and that the Spanish PM appears a charismatic ...
April 11, 2025 at 06:18
That’s pretty right. Australians generally have a pretty low tolerance for bullshit (which is why we have a lot of trouble understanding how Trump got...
April 11, 2025 at 05:34
Please re-phrase that. I don’t understand it.
April 11, 2025 at 04:23
Yes, Miles Taylor too. He's utterly on-point in that analysis, given a year ago :yikes:
April 11, 2025 at 03:55
In a distant galaxy, a long, long time ago, I was drawn into the mysterious realm of internet forums by reading a review of Richard Dawkins' The God D...
April 11, 2025 at 03:48
Can you give it a name? That was something played up in Sir Arthur Eddington’s ‘Two Tables’.
April 11, 2025 at 02:34
On to the next scandal. As always with Trump, just when you think it can't get worse, it gets worse. Yesterday saw the publication of an Executive Ord...
April 11, 2025 at 01:35
OpenAI mentioned this morning that now ChatGPT remembers dialogues. I asked it what it recalls about my discussions, to which it replied: Aww, shucks....
April 11, 2025 at 01:13
But they're not. You acknowledge, on the one hand, that currently known physics doesn't or cannot capture the nature of first-person experience, per t...
April 11, 2025 at 00:54