Wayfarer

Apart from 'honest', also 'rational'. The problem is that modernism and post-modernism have thrown standards of rationality into question. The idea th...

The wave-function collapse is the single greatest philosophical/metaphysical issue arising out of modern physics. Ironic, considering how strongly pos...

But it also takes many abstractions and transformations to see it as a photograph. I mean, show a photograph to a dog (whether on a screen or hardcopy...

Well - what about mental arithmetic? Irrational numbers? I should say, I was terrible at school maths and boast no intellectual prowess in the subject...

Numbers and geometrical forms, laws of grammars, and logical relationships, can all be instantiated in physical forms, but they're essentially intelle...

Because it means the long-term goal is non-existence. And hihilism means literally 'nothing-ism'. It is one of the lurking maladies of the day (as Nie...

Still struggling with how this is not simply nihilism, but I'll keep reading...... Nevertheless, I think any information whatsover must mean something...

You have to allow for at least some statement to be true, to even say anything. Otherwise you're facing the dilemma of universal scepticism - that if ...

But consider the context. Until that discovery was made, the atom was assumed to be the fundamental ground of physical reality. Not everyone assumed t...

Of course! If only the label is 'true', but the statement itself doesn't have 'the property of truth', then the label is not true, because the stateme...

In other words, the label would be false!

Hint: it's an analogy.

Remember LaPlace's Daemon? I think this kind of thinking has had a disproportiantely large influence on post-Enlightenment thought. A lot of people st...

Thanks, Erik, and welcome to the Forum. I think Maslow's ideas tended to meld with other aspects of the human potential movement - as I mentioned, the...

Numbers are also only real for a mind capable of counting. There are no numbers 'in the world', but science could barely get out of bed without number...

This is a statement, right.? You claim that it's 'cohesive and consistent' in the service of making a point - which is trying to persuade others that ...

Paramahansa Yogananda was one of the first Indian gurus or spiritual teachers to set up shop in America. His book, Autobiography of a Yogi, has been c...

A similar argument has also been advanced by an 'innovative dualist'" (note the reference to Churchland, who is a convinced physicalist) What is it Li...

How many violins can you build out of a pile of bricks? Does it depend on the size of the pile? The quality of the bricks? Brick technology? Some yet-...

Indeteminism is a property of matter, as Heisenberg showed when he discovered the uncertainty principle. Nothing anywhere is fully determined or deter...

If that is true of your statement, then why I am expected to believe it? How can you make an argument? You're just creating strings of characters, rig...

Self-actualisation was a term coined by psychologist Abraham Maslow, but is also very much a part of the 'human potential movement'. It has roots goin...

It was ironic, but it makes a serious point. Dennett denies that consciousness is real. That has been his fundamental argument all throughout his care...

How do you feel about that?

The first is simply a restatement of the law of identity, A=A Second is an arithmetical truth. Third and fourth, matters of definition. But they're al...

New Zealand River granted Legal Rights as Person

Essence means 'what something is'. Hard to get to a definition without it.

The scope of what is considered to constitute an organism.

Platonic epistemology doesn't terminate with the knowledge of numbers and geometrical forms. According to The Analogy of the Divided Line, that is the...

Thoroughly materiallist, says that consciousness is an attribute of matter - coins the term 'perceptronium' - then vanishes into a cloud of quantum ab...

I don't think so. A virus couldn't replicate outside a host, in that sense is dependent on there being host organisms in order to replicate.

So, Jacalyn Duffin was one such scientist, the case she reported on intrigued her, so she wrote a book on the basis of the Vatican archives, comprisin...

Oh, I definitely agree with you there.

Of course I can see it. They are saying 'look here, there's something that science can't explain happening here.' They get scientists to come in and l...

This is truly pathetic. They would not seek to publish evidence of such cures in scientific journals because they're supernatural. Can't you see how w...

I think the appropriate question is, could viruses replicate sans life? As far as I know the answer to that is 'no'. They might exist, like the Androm...

The point of this entire discussion was this: could there be 'evidence for the supernatural'? And that's a question to which most people - yourself co...

So - what is more true than the truth? Is that what you're asking? That seems to me what you're asking throughout this thread. Like A J Ayer, who is, ...

Isn't one of the glaringly obvious points, however, that all machines (and computers) are built artefacts? Every single one, there is no exception. So...

wrong gods, according to the later Romans ;-)

In this case the committee decided the evidence favoured a medical explanation. In other cases they decided the other way. I mentioned it to demonstra...

As a nihilist, wouldn't you expect to be empty handed?

Right - which is why the Church contacted Jacalyn Duffin, a haemotologist. They weren't interested in her religous views, but her scientific opinion. ...

OK then. So 'spiritual experiences' are not allowed to include miraculous cures. Your definition of spirituality is always carefully circumscribed so ...

In this case, I am inclined to give credence in what Jacalyn Duffin observed. Furthermore, I think you're illustrating what I describe as 'scientism' ...

I think you've lost sight of the issue. The Vatican calls in scientific expertise to help make its judgements about what is or is not a miraculous cur...

Fair enough but I am not at all disposed to evolutionary explanations of higher-level understanding. It reduces everything to survival.

So the Catholic Church ought to submit its evidence to Nature for validation?

Well - there's that entire corpus of documentation that I have referred to - all of the literally thousands of cases that have been subject to examina...

You did notice that I later posted that the particular case that I was commenting on, was later declared by the Vatican, to have a natural or scientif...