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Wayfarer

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When I criticise reductionism, I’m not denying biological continuity or evolution, neuroscientific correlation, or the legitimacy of physical explanat...
January 03, 2026 at 03:46
Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emergi...
January 03, 2026 at 03:12
The rules of 'matter in motion' are those of physics. To reduce a phenomenon to physics or chemistry, it is necessary to show that this phenomenon in ...
January 03, 2026 at 03:02
And also a blistering NY Times editorial leading up to the fifth anniversary of the Day of Infamy, Jan 6th 2021 (gift link.)
January 03, 2026 at 02:43
Yeah probably a better word. All I’m trying to avoid is the taken-for-grantedness that seems to inhere in ‘that’s just how we do it.’
January 03, 2026 at 00:11
Right, I could probably go along with that, provided we maintain the appropriate sense of wonderment ;-)
January 03, 2026 at 00:09
I don’t think intelligibility is the sort of thing that calls for explanation in the way empirical relations do. The intelligible relations within the...
January 02, 2026 at 23:53
What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms...
January 02, 2026 at 23:42
As a matter of fact, I agree that the world (the sensory domain) is intelligible in some fundamental sense. In the classical tradition, the 'necessary...
January 02, 2026 at 23:38
A significant report: CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump's War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance (.pdf flle).
January 02, 2026 at 21:51
Something I've gone to write in this thread, but haven't, is that the very wording of 'necessary things' is a problem to begin with. In my understandi...
January 02, 2026 at 21:47
What is the roadmap a roadmap to? What is the goal? In Buddhism it is nibbana (in the Pali) - the cessation of suffering and the ending of repeated bi...
January 02, 2026 at 21:43
But here, you're singling out one layer in this complex and dynamic whole, and claiming that 'everything' is derived from that layer. That is, after a...
January 02, 2026 at 20:52
It’s not a matter of time, or more research. Consider this passage you yourself posted in another conversation: A materialist explanation of a work of...
January 02, 2026 at 20:38
Do your own research and draw your conclusions.
January 02, 2026 at 11:10
See this book by a Buddhist monk of German origin, which reviews both the traditional beliefs on re-birth and also current research. As I said - the b...
January 02, 2026 at 09:04
Let me ask you, if a subject presents to a doctor complaining of a pain, how does the doctor measure the intensity of that pain? To my knowledge, ther...
January 02, 2026 at 06:08
It starts with: Which is the target of Nagel’s criticism. But I guess if you don’t see that, there’s no point repeating it.
January 02, 2026 at 03:25
Well said. I suppose I could add that one of the themes I've been exploring was suggested by John Vervaeke, with his 'participatory ontology'. That is...
January 02, 2026 at 00:07
If you're asking 'is Buddhism is a religion', then the answer is definitely 'yes'. But the deeper point is, the cultural background and underlying bel...
January 01, 2026 at 22:53
Actually, it occured to me after spending a few hours on Collingwood's Essay in Metaphysics yesterday, that I might fairly be accused of what he criti...
January 01, 2026 at 22:28
It seems to me that @"Philosophim"'s analysis is implicitly Darwinian in character in assuming that the ground for the faculty of reason is successful...
January 01, 2026 at 22:07
Yes. Rather a beautiful piece, for a hymn. (Incidentally, Acane Sandwich was banned after a brief but frenetic membership around a year ago.)
January 01, 2026 at 20:41
Another gem from Collingwood (p46)
January 01, 2026 at 04:20
As a defender of phenomenology and/or idealism, one point I have to continually re-state is that I don't think this means 'the world is all in the min...
January 01, 2026 at 03:49
No, I think we're operating in different registers. What you're saying is quite true about domains of discourse. But I'm extending that to a further a...
January 01, 2026 at 01:29
The point is, it's a glaring contradiction: We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans. The universe consists entirely of physica...
January 01, 2026 at 01:03
Yes, I found it pretty hard to watch. I've tried to take a bit of what Maudlin says, but he's not my favourite in that space. I prefer Philip Ball. As...
January 01, 2026 at 00:58
Not in formal logic. But surely the many fervent disagreements sorrounding the ontological status of numbers and scientific laws indicate that there i...
January 01, 2026 at 00:47
:clap: Exemplary piece of philosophical analysis.
January 01, 2026 at 00:37
I haven't said that, either. I will deal with any cogent disagreements, but not those which betray a failure to grasp the point at issue. (If you woul...
January 01, 2026 at 00:31
If I had believed that the criticisms you offered had truly understood what was being proposed, I might be inclined to so believe. But, no. Meanwhile ...
January 01, 2026 at 00:23
It is what Banno thinks that Wayfarer thinks he is doing, which he is not doing, but which conviction no amount of patient explanation will ever suffi...
December 31, 2025 at 23:49
In idealism East and West, there is the idea that the sense of separateness is intrinsic to the human condition. And that overcoming that sense is in ...
December 31, 2025 at 23:24
Yes! That will show us that we have a clear and distinct idea of 4% of the Universe.
December 31, 2025 at 23:05
Rödl’s ‘science uberhaupt’ comes to mind. And, Happy New Year
December 31, 2025 at 07:38
In this case, the problem is more of a categorial one. It is the missapplication of objective methods to a subject which evades objective specificatio...
December 31, 2025 at 06:34
Happy New Year, regardless. :party:
December 31, 2025 at 06:26
Whereas yours is more of a clenched fist :lol:
December 31, 2025 at 05:12
Numbers are ideas, and ideas are not physical. Yet without math science couldn’t even get started.
December 31, 2025 at 02:46
Well that covers all the bases, doesn’t it ;-)
December 31, 2025 at 02:42
Why is to be explained? By what is it to be explained? As it happens, I wrote a Medium essay on precisely this topic, explaining how Buddhist philosop...
December 30, 2025 at 22:43
Incidentally, in respect of neurological modelling of first-person experience, take a look at The Neural Binding Problem, specifically The Subjective ...
December 30, 2025 at 22:39
Really this is one of the central points of E A Burtt's book, although he tends to imply it rather than state it in such bald terms. There's a hidden ...
December 30, 2025 at 22:34
The discussion was the emergence of consciousness as the 'self-other' distinction basic to the emergence of organic life. It is also a basic theme in ...
December 30, 2025 at 21:20
Nothing so exotic as that. Any mathematical expression of natural laws will serve as an example. F=ma for instance. If you measure the behaviour of ma...
December 30, 2025 at 20:20
‘The promissory notes of materialism’
December 30, 2025 at 10:12
not to be confused with the Nag Hammadi 'Gospel of Thomas'.
December 30, 2025 at 09:01
The question that jumps out at me is: are the mathematical laws themselves physical, and, if so, how? I don’t expect an answer to that, as there isn’t...
December 30, 2025 at 07:26
Plato would be right.
December 30, 2025 at 06:17