Olivier5

There is no inherent contradiction in trying to understand reason with reason. The difficulty is in explaining reason together with its efficacy, its ...

Sure, some mental activity is unconscious, but I am not sure one would call that "thinking" in plain English. Also, the question is asked in the conte...

What Descartes means when saying "I think therefore I am" is: I am conscious of my own thoughts, and thus I cannot doubt my own existence." A computer...

But their software is also ‘mechanical’ in that it is totally deterministic and unable to reform itself. No spreadsheet ever told me: “I’m tired with ...

And yet, when people act mechanically and end up making a mistake they often say: “sorry, I wasn’t thinking”, as pointed by forgottenticket.

No, and that's what I am saying. Without some reflexivity, it's not true thinking, it's just mechanical. A true thinker can challenge his/her own thou...

It's all a matter of definition. You can chose whichever you'd like of course but for me your definition is too broad. Life too can be defined as some...

... and knowing that you do. Otherwise a computer can think.

Nobody can tell if animals are self-aware or not but I would think the ones nearest to us philogenetically probably have some form of consciousness.

I would venture that the two minds, though originally identical, have lived since the botched dematerialization through different experiences on diffe...

I suppose there may be other forms of materialism / naturalism that do not rule out the emergence of complex, new phenomena at higher levels of organi...

the OP understands reductionism as materialist reductionism, and that people generally mean by the term. That’s certainly how I use it.

Oh I know what they mean: an amalgamation of El, Yahweh, Jesus, the Holy Ghost and what else... Like a guy who would have read the Three Musketeers a ...

Not really. It is to criticize the traditional materialist conceptual toolbox for explaining things as being made of just one single tool. It’s not en...

If A has causal efficacy, why can’t something from level A affect something from level B?

Wiki: Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, mainly in France and Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussur...

Nope. Checked his Wikipedia entry and I'm interested. I like this idea of "a field of information as the substance of the cosmos", the "Akashic field"...

More to system thinking and structuralism.

Though there are many gods in the Bible: El, Yahweh and Jesus' pop in particular, who are very different. It's a mistake to amalgamate them into one g...

Why rule out other options? Like two or three gods, or one-and-a-half god? Pi gods, anyone?

It's what I call naive materialism. The belief in the primacy of "matter" (whatever that means) over anything else. But as we have known since what? A...

I think Saussure's idea of negative differences between concepts and their absence of clear-cut ontological value is fundamental to understand natural...

"You can't push against nothing." Exactly. The same law of action-reaction applies to the mind-body problem. The body has an evident impact on the min...

It's been more than two months for me now (Italy).

The fundamental error of reductionism is to believe that that 'small things' (e.g. atoms) always and totally determine big things (e.g. human beings),...

It's not a matter of vulgarity, because "annoyed"is not vulgar. The fact that you are annoyed is a psychological fact, a fact about you as a person, n...