Janus

Of course you can dissect whatever is presented. If you criticize ideas for not being rationally justifiable, however, when they were not presented as...

A mere tautology? Assuming this is correct, do you think their notion of 'use' is equivalent to yours? Is personal transformation or even mere pleasur...

That people have different motivations for presenting their ideas. The points you make are based on a narrow conception of both people's motivations f...

Of course you will find many who feel compelled to argue that their beliefs, although neither logically entailed by anything, or empirically evidenced...

Only if they wish to convince others that their beliefs are true.

But it is an impoverished naturalism that is not replete with meaning. Not sure what "inherent meaning" would be implying since meaning is a function ...

Well, the point is that we do philosophy regardless, and we take ourselves to be making sense. How do we know that is not compatible with our intellec...

Presuming that our convictions are nothing more than instinctive responses, the idea of questioning the morality of a purported higher authority reall...

:up: Nature looks horrible when the assumption is that it has been intelligently designed. Then individual disapprobation does not look absurd because...

I agree and hence the caveat "self-motivated atrocities", which was meant to make the distinction from being sucked into mob thinking or performing an...

I didn't mean morally wrong. I meant wrong in the sense of disordered.

We all have intellects, but by no means all of us have a capacity for atrocities; at least not self-motivated atrocities. Do chimps murder others of t...

Other options? Perhaps, since we don't see other social animals murdering their fellows, there is also, at least in regard to murder, an instinctive a...

The fact that it is, at the very least, a radically antisocial act? Would you not consider it wrong if any social animal killed its fellows?

I see efficient cause as being both a necessary and sufficient (given the presence of the other necessary conditions) condition for any event. The thr...

:up:

I could equally say that nothing is truly determined and caused, and that a claim that it is is also a relative judgement.

Sure I understand that, but even if we could establish initial conditions, if some events are truly uncaused and random, then the unfolding would neve...

Can't see why that would be so, given Quantum indeterminism.

Indeed it can; try it and see.

It all depends on the situation, and on who knows what about what. I'm not saying what the US has done in contributing to the oppression, suffering an...

Financing shows a vested interest in the outcome. Selling arms show opportunism. It's a distinction with a difference, ethically speaking.

A bit of an underestimate, I'd say... :razz:

No, it follows that people want security. It's totally wrong-headed, I know, but as long as there are countries who continue to develop arms and incre...

All the empty smart-arse rhetoric from the Putin apologists in this thread, and yet that is indeed what it comes down to.

I wouldn't say the meaning of that mark 'I' is in our minds, rather the range of possible meanings is dependent on its culturally embedded association...

Or saying "there's no organic compounds there, just a bunch of bosons, leptons and quarks.

Right, I probably framed that backwards. When I am not calm (stressed) the mind is racing. But that is not the characteristic state which tends more t...

Hey no worries, man; I didn't take it as being rude, anyway; more as just an expression of exasperation. By the way that should have been "perennially...

Now this I can agree with.

My experience is that when I am calm the mind is not "racing". For me it is the difference between a raging torrent and a gently meandering stream. Bu...

I'm certainly no longer interested in heroic doses. :smile:

:smile: Cheers, I'll check those out.

Thanks ZZZ, I've had plenty of experience with Psilocybe cubensis (but not for about 8 years and then it was "heroic doses", not microdoses); they gro...

I haven't tried microdosing; do you find it different/ more interesting than cannabis?

I'd be interested to take a look at he works you recommend. It's always good to start with recommendations, f you name them I can search for them. :co...

I don't think it is pretentious bullshit, and I don't claim that sustaining those states is impossible (LSD works well for that for many hours at leas...

I wasn't making any theoretical claims about the relation between mind and world or that there is a mental theatre. I know from experience that I perc...

OK, I've not tried lucid dreaming much. Except I remember many years ago when I read the "don Juan" books by Castaneda, the instruction Don Juan gave ...

I also meditated for about 18 years, and my experience was that "stillness" consists in resisting the movement of thoughts; in not following them. I a...

It's not so. I acknowledge that a sense of self is relational. It's the relation between any experience whatsoever and the sense of me experiencing. I...

The way I would attempt to explain it is by using a couple of Zen analogies. The "ordinary" mind is like a pond into which a stone has been thrown; it...

I would have said it could be either a first person view; I feel me, and I take it for granted that you feel you, even though I cannot feel you. I als...

Thanks, I hope you don't drink and smoke dope all day. All I'm really saying is that religious or mystical experiences or intuitions can be evidence f...

I don't disagree that phenomenology is socially constructed. Of course how we talk about the division is culturally constructed; but the division is a...

The premises conclude? It's obvious you can't drink and smoke dope all day without being physically affected. I haven't claimed that I have evidence t...

I'm not running away. I didn't require a lesson on the difference between induction and deduction, I'm already clear on that. It seems to me you are t...

It's obvious; we intuit and imagine differently. I cannot feel your intuitions and vice versa. They thus cannot be evidence in the public sense you ar...

You would not recognize non-physical evidence. The only such evidence is that of the intuitive or imaginative faculties. But such evidence cannot be i...

There is no evidence either way as to whether consciousness "exists on some plane beyond the physical", because all our (intersubjectively corroborabl...