Janus

I missed this response of yours earlier. In your first sentence you seem to suggest that belief is, or at least can be, knowledge. I can see a sense i...

Said the flypaper to the fly. You must take us to be fools! :rofl:

It depends on what you mean by "being certain of my own experience". Perhaps there is no absolute certainty anywhere to be found, but you can be certa...

People can be reliably trained in chemistry and other scientific disciplines, such that things will be evident to them. This is not so in music, art, ...

I am not aware of any competing theories. And as I have already acknowledged scientific theories are never proven; it is always the case that they may...

Humility or no humility, you really are deluded it seems; in that you apparently can't but interpret mere disagreement as outrage.

I think it is fairly clear what is determinate knowledge and what is not. Scientific hypotheses or theories in general are never definitively proven o...

Experiencing altered or heightened states of consciousness is of course possible, and I know that from my own ample stock of such experiences. The poi...

I'd be surprised if most scientists did not believe that the universe existed before humans appeared on the scene.

Convenient cop out...why did you bother to respond to my post in the first place if that's the way you feel? I think you are either trying to deceive ...

"One as consciousness"? One is not consciousness; one is either conscious or not, and one can indeed perceive that one is conscious when one is consci...

Bullshit, more projection, I felt no anger when I wrote it—it simply presented my thoughts on the matter. :lol: It would be laughable if it wasn't so ...

Thought police! A nice case of projection! What a joke; it is you who are saying I am not allowed to argue for what I believe to be the case, so who's...

:up: I have no issue with philosophical poetry; insights do not always come in the form of rational arguments. I think those kinds of poetic philosoph...

I don't think consciousness is outside the range of human perception; you perceive yourself to be conscious, no? Note, I count proprioception, somatos...

I don't understand what you are saying here. My questions were in the post. As to the quote from Plato, It is fragmented and out of context (from Wiki...

I agree and very well said.

:up:

Anything that is beyond human perception and judgement...that is anything purportedly "beyond being" or transcendent...God, rebirth, karma, heaven, he...

I like it!

If there are areas in regard to which humans are necessarily ignorant (which I believe is unarguably true) and there is an inveterate human tendency t...

Cheers, my fellow pyromaniac. Stay :cool:

I think the issue can be raised for many terms that we understand perfectly well until we try to pin down a definition. It is probably nothing more th...

Que? I think the distinction between inside and outside the skin is a useful and valid one. A basic principle of semiotics is the idea that life and e...

We can know nothing whatsoever about whatever might be "beyond being". The idea is nothing more than the dialectical opposite of 'being'. Fools have a...

You seem to be conflating change with difference. The image is static, not changing, but all points in the image are not the same as each other. This ...

This raises an interesting counterpoint. I said a couple posts back I didn't want to say 'minds' because that would be to reduce us to a kind of "dime...

The problem with what you say here as I see it is that the expectations Evolutionary Theory posits are based on the assumption that the evidence for e...

On the assumption that we have no access to the external ('external' here meaning 'external to our bodies') world, what would constitute evidence for ...

I haven't said you or Ligotti claimed "meaninglessness". I believe you both claim that life can be universally characterized as "suffering" which woul...

I have said that value, meaning, purpose is only to be found in the volitions, cognitions and judgements of beings. The value of life as assessed by h...

I haven't said that life has no value for living beings; I have said it has no intrinsic negative or positive value. The value or meaning or purpose l...

It is fine to say that anything that is not logically contradictory is possible provided the provenance of that "possible" is understood to be confine...

The veracity of evolution itself is based on the assumption that we have access to external reality, so your thinking here is in turn reliant on that ...

Exactly! And it is arguable that pessimism and optimism are both basically dispositional, and as I said earlier, even that they are determined by brai...

The more immediate experience is that you sense things, not data. No one prior to the modern scientific era would have thought in terms of sense data,...

What I have been asking is on what basis do you conclude that you have access to sense data? I presume that you, as we all do, experience a world of t...

I'm bemused by what I see as your inability to adequately explain and justify your position, or acknowledge your resultant inconsistency and confusion...

:up:

Since your assumption is based on the assumption or inference that you have access to your sense organs, then why would you not infer that you have ac...

I would want to relive my best moments, which I have generally enjoyed, just as I want to listen to music or poems, view artworks and sometimes books ...

:100:

That's interesting...I. on the other hand, would always choose to do it all again. I've had hard times, but my underlying disposition is one of loving...

So, you can't understand your experience unless you assume that you have access to external objects, and yet you deny that you have access to external...

How do you know we have a brain or any organs of sense if you have no access to an external world?

On what basis do you conclude that we have sense-data?

You misunderstand. I'm not denying that new areas of study can result in profound changes to human life. Many, if not most, of those changes are on ac...

That interesting...I enjoy the language in BM. The only other book of his I have read, many years ago now, is The Road. Over the last couple years I h...

Newtonian mechanics never purported to deal with the microphysical, so they are not really bets understood as different paradigms, but as different ar...

I picked up a secondhand hardback copy in mint condition at a beachside book shop when travelling a few weeks ago and I've been reading it...a most po...