Janus

I say that religion consists in believing in some kind of transcendent reality, because I can't see how a religion could exist which accepted only the...

Interesting point, the Motte and Bailey fallacy could be seen as a kind of reversal insofar as it seems to consist in defending rather than attacking ...

The belief in something transcendent is the essence of religion as I would define it. (Note, I draw a distinction between thinking the transcendental ...

I think the need to believe in something transcendant can only be satisfied by religion, and I think that need is inexplicably there in some people an...

I think the drug analogy is weak. Religion is not an addiction, but a way of life, the need for religion is not like the need for a drug, and a religi...

As long as the need for religion is felt, humanity will not be better off without it. I doubt that need is going to disappear.

:up: Yep, I don't believe religion is going away any time soon. And I also don't hold the view that humanity would be better off without it.

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Control is the basic point of any ideology including religious ideology; and that's why I questioned whether you hold an ideological view that recomme...

Yes, and we have even less intuitive sense of what a field is. I agree, with the caveat that what can be known phenomenologically is not coterminous w...

:up: Thanks for linking this.

I think this is right; we have a commonsense picture of matter, and a scientific notion of its equivalence with energy, and related formulations of in...

Is it a scientific view that makes it look puzzling, or just the commonsense view of matter as being "inanimate", not to mention insentient and insapi...

Well, you could make it illegal I suppose, or brainwash people against religion from childhood. Might not be totally effective, but would no doubt vas...

I wasn't talking about killing people.

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That may be one interpretation: the one I am familiar with is that eternalism posits an immortal self, with nihilism being the idea that there is no s...

What if it won't die? Kill it?

As I understand it, Gautama eschewed identification with what is permanent as much as identification with what passes away. In other words,, he reject...

Right, I first used the word 'blindness' but it was in response to what seemed to be implied in what you refer to above as "popular rejection", as tho...

I agree that there could have been (probably mostly covert) willful rejection of Christian dogma, but I would not call that "blindness" because in my ...

Science cannot solve all the problems inherent in the human condition. Organized religion is an attempt to pacify, if not solve, those kinds of proble...

For me that way of framing it is tendentious. The Christian worldview held sway for a very long time, and its only guarantor was the voice of unimpeac...

:up: Very nicely laid out!

Whether consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes is a different question than whether it or the physical (or neither) is ontologi...

Would you count seeing something as something as a kind of conceptualization? The ball stands out for the dog; it's a gestalt. This is cognition and r...

Yes, I understand that the Tractatus priveleges one usage over another, but that doesn't change the fact that there are different usages. It is an amb...

Interesting post! :up:

As I understand it the term 'fact' refers ambiguously to both actual states of affairs, and statements describing states of affairs. It is in the latt...

Not quite, I'm saying that if a proposition is to be counted as a fact then it is necessarily true. That still sounds a little ambiguous, because it m...

I agree with you that whether or not we ascribe reasoning to animals will depend on how we define 'reasoning'.

You are thinking of 'fact' as equivalent to 'actuality'. In a different sense, the encyclopedia is a compendium of facts, or true propositions and des...

You seem to be pointing out that the fact is concrete whereas the proposition is abstract. The baby crying is a concrete fact. The term 'fact'; is amb...

Thanks for your explanation, unfortunately I don't have the background to properly understand what you're saying, so I cannot form a judgement of its ...

I agree and I wasn't thinking about propositional logic but logic in the broader sense of semantic relations or structure. I'd agree with this, with t...

I know little about computers, but on the face of it seems to me that, even if the CPU maps inputs to outputs in the same way whatever program it is r...

I have no doubt that some kinds of animals have a capacity to reason, and I don't believe that reasoning is necessarily carried out, even by humans, i...

Are you drawing a distinction between being context driven and being context dependent, or are you simply contradicting yourself? I would agree with y...

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So, are you suggesting that there is an additional component to rational thought, a purely semantic aspect, that is enabled by, but is not itself dete...

If you are to ask where these states are located then where else but the body? I mean they are your states, and where else are you but with your body?...

The issue here is that animals also seem to have inductive expectations. So maybe what we think of as inductive reasoning consists in rationalising ou...

I agree, but I don't think inductive reasoning involves any deductive certainty, or necessity.

The kind of expectation that things in the future will be as things have been in the past does seem to be instinctive in animals as well as humans. Th...

Inductive reasoning is really just custom and habitual expectation at work according to Hume.

There is a kind of logic that even (at least some) animals are capable of that is quasi-deductive: for example if something is solid I will not be abl...

In the head (so obvious I couldn't resist) :wink:

If you accept that all those vivid mental states are underpinned by neuronal processes and neuronal processes are in the brain or brain/body, then I g...

Neuronal processes are in the brain, just as digestion is in the body. That said neuronal porcesses are not just in the brain apparently: It doesn't s...

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