Balls don't know how to roll downhill. If there's a hill, balls will roll down it. It's not as if they can do anything else. Your comment more or less...
The key paragraph from Anything but Human While it's certainly true that religions embrace mythology, folklore, and also many forms of superseded know...
Today's Post Truth installment: NY Times. Same modus operandi - anyone who calls out the bluff and bluster of the current White House is deprecated, d...
Bodhi (the Buddhist term for awakening, the term which was originally translated by Buddhologists as 'enlightenment'). There's a lot of maintenance, h...
Trouble with that theory, is the javalinas are from South America. More likely it's just a poor depiction of a pig. ;-) Hey I'd never heard that inter...
It's not my claim that 'it must be false'. Dennett's claim is that anything that amounts to 'a philosophy' in the traditional sense is one of the thin...
Actually I have had the thought that there is a traditional bit of iconography in Buddhist cultures, comprising a pig, snake and rooster, pursuing eac...
Totally agree BC I didn't want to imply that their discomfort was anything other than richly deserved. The whole 'Obamascare' campaign was a crock fro...
Incidentally same day I wrote the above, a published philosopher, Roger Scruton, penned an OP on the theme of human exceptionalism in the NY Times. Re...
Trump's not a conservative in any traditional sense. He's an opportunist, who was able to exploit conservatism to his ends, but many of his stated pos...
Sometimes, but I don't think this is the time. Even the internal critics of the US secret services, say this is dangerous disclosure. Assange is not a...
That is why I enquired as to whether you had sought instruction in meditation. (And actually, the Buddhist word is not 'meditation' at all, but dhyana...
If Assange hadn't published it, it wouldn't even be up for discussion. Look, the CIA and NSA and the various US spook agencies, get up to a lot of nef...
Today's news: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/09/epa-scott-pruitt-carbon-dioxide-global-warming-climate-change This statement is fact...
It's not at all being 'reduced to nothing', it's simply seeing through your own stuff. It's also related to a sense of 'oneness with others' in the ve...
Well, 'completelly failing to understand something' is not an argument against it. Bacteria can exhibit learning behaviour. There's an observable diff...
There's a lot of truth in that. As I remarked to Arkady before, I have often thought that the Christian church in some ways appropriated the best of w...
That is indeed a Kantian maxim, and a good one. However it certainly doesn't follow that: because 'having a purpose' is not the same as 'being used fo...
Snowden is in Russia. If Assange wasn't holed up in an Embassy he'd be there too, I'm sure. Putin is running rings around the West and they're aiding ...
Very nicely written post. I don't think anyone here disputes that. The point about panpsychism is that it says electrons have some form of consciousne...
Have you ever sought instruction in meditation? Do you recall which noted maverick 20th Century spiritual teacher used to say 'the known must cease fo...
Indeed he was, and I am one who thinks that he succeeded to a large extent - more so than generally acknowledged, and certainly more so than usually u...
Thanks. (I don't know why Jackson changed his argument, but I suspect it was due to the unpopularity of defending a non-materialist point of view, esp...
Those who say there is a reason to believe it, will argue that materialism can't or won't acknowledge the fundamental issue at stake, which is the exp...
Computers can't store experiences. They store data in binary code. It's one of the fixations of the technological society that computers have or are m...
The page I linked to was a sarcastic comment on a serious article published in a peer-reviewed journal. Gee I'm glad I'm not a database programmer at ...
Fair point, although I think that which one you ended up with, depended a great deal on the personality of the particular teacher and institution you ...
I can't see anything good about it, exposing corruption is one thing, but simply publishing all this stuff because it's secret is something else altog...
Well, on a zoological, gender-choice theme, you might find Zoos are Polluting our Children's Minds with Dangerous Gender Stereotypes of interest. Just...
Gender activists challenge the idea that gender is biologically determined, when according to them it's actually a 'social construct' and therefore a ...
A lot of the heat around the issue of transgender and identity, is caused by the insistence by rights activists that one's gender identity is a matter...
The problem has always been that beliefs are ultimately very personal things. Once you start to regiment them and dictate them the institutionalisatio...
Right! That is similar to the point I was labouring to make about 'objectification' and the futility of trying to 'objectify' the mind (although you p...
Criticism is not complaint. Please don't trivialise the issue. I have Pinker's book The Blank Slate and think it's a terrific book, and there are thin...
I would have thought that to belleve in the soul is to believe it is what you are, not something you have. I agree however that animals are not ration...
It's more that intentionality and thought are impossible to accomodate within standard scientific materialism, which after all wants to eliminate just...
When I say the JC tradition, I just don't mean Christianity or the Church, but the Western cannon in the broader sense. The way scientific materialism...
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