If the mind is a function of the physical em-brained body or embodied brain then mental and physical processes and activities will require different k...
I'm fine with astrology being a science insofar as it makes falsifiable claims. However if most of its claims are falsified, then it's not a very effe...
Many years ago I devised an argument that the mind could not be identical with the brain. It went something like this: If both true and false proposit...
The practice of science, insofar as it involves unfalsifiable speculations or propositions cannot be differentiated from other practices by method alo...
Why should unfalsifiable propositions be considered to be true, as opposed to possibly true or false, or neither true nor false? I'm not seeing the re...
The interesting thing is that Popper argued that metaphysical speculations or propositions play an ineliminable role in science. Even though they are ...
I can't see any alternative account there. All I see are objections to physicalism based on what I think are fairly simplistic misunderstandings of wh...
What are you talking about? I haven't said there that animals are capable of symbolic thought. It is your presumption that reason requires the capacit...
What other terms could they be explicable in? How else could you explain mind other than as a function of the brain? You don't need to give a detailed...
No one is arguing that animals are capable of symbolic thought. Sure it makes a difference; it means we can have an awareness of history, plan for the...
It's not a matter of "which is it". Logically they could be independent, but I believe that psychologically they are interdependent. I can't prove tha...
The evidence for me is that I have never met anyone I could say was free of attachment. The accounts of the lives of so-called gurus I have read attes...
They are two possible views of time that McTaggart could imagine. It's not one or the other but either or both from different perspectives. For us the...
You're saying that if the world is such that all moments exist eternally, then we cannot see it as it is because we see only the present moment, or th...
Association of things with other things is the beginning of intelligence. It's by no means "simple" given the neural complexity of even a dog's brain....
Nonsense, all animals are different, including us. We are the self-reflective animal (well, potentially anyway) so we can do things others animals can...
Obviously dogs can't assert that anything is the case ( in spoken or written language). But they can certainly think things are the case; thinking whi...
As I see it it is only a matter of degree, and the advent of symbolism which was enabled by language. I believe animals are capable of basic rational ...
It would help if you could explain how you see them differing. Who claims that animals cannot, within the limits of their cognitive capacities, unders...
If it isn't possible then it wouldn't seem to matter whether it has "downsides". If it isn't desirable that would be because it has downsides. Of cour...
If you desire something it must matter to you to some degree. Some people are better at letting things go than others, if they don't get what they wan...
That's a silly comment. As I said even if there were a "cosmic purpose' it could never be demonstrable. People cannot universally agree even on what i...
The problem with this is that there is no "larger purpose or cosmic sense". Even if there were, it would not be obvious to everyone, and hence could n...
I have been talking about the practice, which is all that matters from a pragmatic perspective. The point is that Buddhism is as much a form of attach...
:up: Right, and the value of the present life is assuredly not the focus of Buddhism, which explicitly works to increase good karma in order to attain...
You are supposed to attach yourself to the eightfold path and the community, and given the fact that people mostly always become emotionally attached ...
You don't rely on it for your emotional, indeed existential, well-being as someone who relies on their religious faith does. It's not a cynical, but a...
I agree that is the ideal, but I think it is an ideal never realized. The sages are typically portrayed as being and feeling the same towards all. For...
As far as I can parse the notion: 'being able to see the world as it is', if not taken in a naive realist sense, could only be taken to mean that ther...
"Finding refuge"; if you find refuge in something you rely on it and/or care about it, no? To rely on something or to care about it is to be attached ...
The problem with this is that, if we cannot see the world as it is, which includes mot being able to see ourselves as we really are, then we can never...
Seeing something as desirable and desiring something are not necessarily the same. So, I might see discipline as desirable because it is the path to a...
Emotional attachment to things is obviously normal and, I think, desirable. As the English writer Orage (one of Gurdjieff's students) said, referring ...
Yes, it seems that our perceptual processes are largely eliminative; the significant aspects of the "buzzing, blooming confusion" are retained and the...
Did you read the section on the 'New Metaphysics'? There are plenty of philosophers working in that area. My saying that ancient and medieval metaphys...
It's a misunderstanding to think that metaphysics has been eliminated from philosophy. The discipline has merely been transformed from being an exerci...
Science deals with what enters into relation with what and how. And science itself grows out of our relation with things. Everything is relational is ...
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