I often felt so, but it's a bit of a pat explanation. But young Joey Alexander, an Indonesian child, burst onto the world jazz scene back in 2015. htt...
There was an opinion piece published in Scientific American, by physicist (and physicalist!) Sean Carroll, called Physics and the Immortality of the S...
I grew up in a house where there were nearly always filled cigarette boxes on the coffee table and filled decanters on the side-board. Everyone used t...
How do you think computers work? But as you well know, I am not a materialist, and I don't think the human mind is a kind of computer. Where the analo...
One contemporary analogy would be that persons instantiate information. So 'the flesh' is roughly equivalent to the silicon, metal, etc, and the mind ...
Well, mood-altering or mind-altering substances. I was a cannabis user all through my 20's and early 30's. I used to love getting high and listening t...
The devil did come to mind, but I thought better of it. (Y) Indeed, I used to smoke too. In fact I have quite an addictive personality, but I've manag...
A lovely post, and welcome to the Forum. More Stoic readings are definitely on my list, but one book I gave to a dear friend, and which was very well ...
Because it's not real. We're relying on artificially altering your experience, because we can't face it straight up. Surely Our Lady Sophia would say ...
Getting inebriated is not comparable to playing a musical instrument or other cultural pursuits. Sure, anything can be 'escapism' but alcohol changes ...
But what 'the soul' actually means, is still an open question. As you say above, the standard reading of Buddhism is that 'Buddhism rejects the idea o...
I'm reading a few items relating to what is called 'radical orthodoxy'. This is a movement started by John Millbank and Catherine Pickstock which focu...
The article I referred to earlier was a blog post in Scientific American. There are quite a few books by Stevenson on Amazon - but no need to bother r...
Research on 'children who claim to remember a previous life', is a different topic to 'people who claim to talk to God or Satan'. This is because such...
Have you read anything about this research? Of are you saying that, purely because you know it's impossible that such research could reveal anything, ...
What would 'evidence' consist of? As mentioned previously, there is a large amount of documentation comprising interviews with children who claim to r...
Lizards and fish survive just fine. Honestly, asking 'what's the point of having a mind' is one of those questions that makes you wonder whether the p...
Maybe the kinds of problems which the theory of evolution is not equipped to tackle. 'If the only tool you have is a hammer then the only problems you...
What are we talking about? If it's 'something' that is indestructible, unchangeable, immortal, beyond time and space, then how do we demonstrate the e...
It's very simple: because of the deliberate obfuscation on the part of the fossil-fuel industry and their lackeys in democratic political systems thro...
An underlying issue in all this, is the degree to which the theory of evolution can be said to account for human attributes and capabilities, includin...
Probably also a member of the Church Invisible. I like that: anonymous members of an invisible church, known only to God. Sounds like my kind of relig...
I don't think so. Culture evolves, doesn't it? Evolutionary psychology and related disciplines make use of an evolutionary perspective. And more to th...
Not 'anything you say' - the specific thing you said. Namely, that 'the search for meaning' is an evolved trait. Don't make statements like:' What if ...
That's exactly the kind of thinking that is at issue. It is the attempt to 'explain' the history of philosophy and religion in terms of adaptive neces...
The doctrinal Buddhist answer (although some of what follows is contested) revolves around a concept with the distinctly Woodstock-sounding name of th...
Only in the sense that she appeared to remember the previous life. (Stevenson himself, as noted, documented many such cases, but never claim that they...
The point of the 'extraordinary evidence' argument is that it is infinitely flexible; no matter what evidence is found, you can dismiss it as being 'n...
By way of footnote, the cosmological theory popularly referred to as 'big bang theory' comes awfully close to a literal 'creation ex nihilo'. When it ...
You might enjoy this review. (The author, Anthony Gottlieb, is no slouch.) I would like to agree, but I think there is plenty of oppobrium to go aroun...
On the more general topic of reincarnation - I have previously mentioned up the subject of the research of the late Ian Stevenson, a very sober-lookin...
Indeed we do - but what I'm talking about is looking to science to provide a normative basis for values, which is often beyond it's legitimate scope. ...
That is true, and technically Buddhism doesn't teach reincarnation - but that should be interpreted carefully. The earliest known version of the tale ...
If you ask Buddhists about this question, the general answer will be: 'are you the same person now as you were when you were seven?' (The question sup...
Buddhist philosophy emphatically states that you're NOT the same person. Wos has it about right but it will help to have some more formal references w...
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