Janus

Perhaps it is neurologically impossible to believe something without what is thought to be evidence. Different people have very different ideas about ...

It's true that people do make such sacrifices when the need is staring them in the face. People don't seem to be very good at genuinely, viscerally ac...

Yes, but I don't see how it will be possible to bring the poorer countries to greater prosperity without diminishing the general prosperity of the ric...

I think of groups of objects of any number as kinds of patterns regardless of their precise configurations. So a group of three objects is a kind of r...

I wasn't questioning whether religious experiences are real. Of course they are real. It is the interpretation of their significance and the commonly ...

And yet: https://core.ac.uk/reader/224990548 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1422405

I haven't read that, but I get what you mean by "sterility or humorlessness about the enterprise". Some, like Dawkins and the so-called "Four Horsemen...

Sure, but do you really want to valorize a wickedness that may not merely be "wicked" (in the sense of a wicked sense of humour) but truly wicked in t...

Maybe, but you could never demonstrate that you have, so the possibility that it could be an illusion remains. We should be open to such numinous and ...

I do know that because it is true. And it is not an absolute truth, so there is no contradiction or inconsistency. It is a contextual truth; humans be...

No, you're dead wrong and actually have it backwards: I am concerned with arguing that religion/ spirituality cannot be done on the terms of science o...

No one can ever know that they have access to truth in any absolute sense. We can know things are true within certain contexts, but that is a differen...

It's not only that; it's the vested interest of the average person in their accustomed prosperity, convenience and lifestyle, which means they won't v...

The only people who seemed to be concerned with "doing religion/ spirituality on the terms of science or philosophy" seem to be those who consider the...

Yes, and one can certainly be deluded about the quality of one's mind or spirit or disposition or whatever you want to call it. In regard to self-know...

In relation to this particular discussion I'm not concerned with anything other than clarifying the distinction between faith and knowledge. I don't k...

I don't disagree with anything you say there. But it doesn't seem to have any bearing on what I've been arguing. which is that there is something temp...

How would you be able to tell the difference? I have known highly intelligent people who thought Osho was the real deal (including the eminent German ...

And how does Apollodorus know what he says is true? Is he enlightened? He certainly doesn't act like he is, judging by his own standard:

I was referring to neuroscience, not evangelical christianity. That said, any immersion in aspects of culture; whether science, the arts, sports, drug...

I'm not perplexed; I just outlined the possibilities. It is you who seem to be perplexed on this point. So you're claiming the universe did not exist ...

We don't know for sure whether the entities that science describes and every day perception encounters are mind-independently real. And it also depend...

Of course your imagination of an empty universe is a mental construction, that is a tautological truism; but the empty universe itself (if it exists) ...

I answered this before, and my answer has been deleted. So here it is again: It is a poor analogy because a series of 7 can be instantiated (in the se...

I don't see it that way at all: I see it as knowing yourself better with the added benefit of others' experience. Any knowledge which is reliably tran...

That sounds fair enough...

I agree to take your word for it, because I imagine that if I were more mathematically literate I would agree with you. In any case that was never som...

I am not opposed to the idea of infinite sets. I can even accept that some infinite sets are larger than others. Logically I see convergence to a limi...

OK, thanks, I'm not familiar with the mathematics specific use of 'instantiate'. I haven't claimed that the limit of an infinite series is not rigorou...

You just don't want to admit the distinction I pointed to, so you default to patronising mode instead. I understand the concept of "1,2,3,..." denotin...

Yes, but the other point is that if you added .9, .09, .009, .0009. .00009, and so on forever the sum of what you had written could never equal !, and...

I can meet you halfway and say that I can see that for formal purposes, the conceptualized infinite series of fractions we are discussing equals 1. Bu...

The interesting thing about that Escher image is that unlike orthographic projections, that would be impossible to construct, this building with its s...

Are you going to make a cogent argument as to how a series that is approaching 1 and could do so forever without actually reaching it is the "very sam...

Yeah, it approaches 1, but it never quite does become 1, though, does it?

Fair enough, although you make it sound as if Wittgenstein wanted to invite as many contradictions as possible. If there are contradictions to be disc...

Thanks for providing these quotes Josh. For the sake of simplicity I'll just address the parts that seem salient to me one at a time. If we had "a com...

I get that the world of objects perceived in common is a relational, interactive world. But I don't think the commonality of the different organisms c...

OK, thanks; I guess I misunderstood.

OK, what you said you thought I meant is correct, but as for the proof, my math is not very sophisticated, so I'll have to take your word for it. So, ...

:up:

Yes, I saw that myself when I realized that 0.333333333 is no more equal to one third than 0.9999999 is equal to 1, so I deleted it, probably while yo...

And yet I can't see that there could be, on account of there being some inconsistencies or paradoxes in certain areas of math, any reason for them to ...

If there were no "physical organism-independent basis for this commonality" then what would explain the commonality? A universal mind? The rejection o...

Sorry for being pedantic, but it's Los Estados Unidos. otherwise it'd be el estado unido: the united state or. in other words, consciousness. :wink:

I have Carpet Pythons on my property. They get into my chook tractor and wait in the nesting compartment for rats. They can only get in because spaces...

You say some ridiculous things sometimes! Do you deny that it seems obvious that there are temporally persistent objects? Is the door always where you...

Well, sure if structural engineers started entering random numbers into their equations there those equations would not yield workable results.

It seems obvious there are temporally persistent stable objects both for us and animals. My dog sees his food bowl where I see it. I see him going to ...

I'm not sure what your question is. Are you asking whether our ability to have such experiences points to the existence of a spiritual realm or someth...