Tom Storm

Voting is more like harm minimization these days. At least try to keep the least bad motherfuckers from getting in. Hopelessness and catastrophizing o...

I don't disagree but I need to see this in action for it to be useful.

True. But scientific criteria features intersubjective agreement and predictability, while emotions can be messy and in conflict with other's emotions...

Agree. There are lots of good and terrible attributes which seem to be hard wired in humans. 'Deviant' behaviour is also a part of our heritage. The p...

Tradition being 'accepted and discussed' over time means very little. Hinduism is 4000 years old and has 900 million followers. It is accepted and dis...

Not really. It was mainly driven by fear. Fear of being held responsible and of being put on display and fear of reprisals. Some Nazi's even killed al...

Perhaps a more realistic option of this idea is all men should have vasectomies unless planning to have children. The reality is people don't always p...

That's close to what I've already said. Perhaps - 'I believe physicalism is the most likely reality, but I can't know this for certain.' I'm not sure ...

Is it ‘misplaced’ or ‘might be misplaced’?

No question. We all live in a shadow land of presuppositions, A common question. The way I generally hear it expressed is this - 'atheism' goes to bel...

Indeed, there's a whole cosmos of subjectivism built into every aspect of religious life.

Religion is just people's opinion regarding what god/s want. So it is the best and worst of us, just like secular morality. Both secular ethics and re...

Sure, but this debate can go on endlessly, right? My experience of living in the world sufficiently demonstrates the existence of physicalism (this ma...

This may not be premium philosophical reasoning, but I guess you would say that there's no good evidence of anything supernatural or non-physical. The...

Well, for me it is not a lot different to atheists who claim there is no good reason to believe in god but they do not say there is no god. That would...

Isn't it the case that many physicalists subscribe to methodological naturalism, not philosophical naturalism? They don't say there is no supernatural...

Chickens coming home to roost on lying cunt Boris.

This is the old, traditional explanation atheists have used to explain the purpose of god. God as white lie. So?

Nice primer. Thanks.

I don't know what it was like in the USA, but here 30-40 years ago there was often a puerile romanticism around suicide, especially amongst nascent-Em...

It's an intriguing idea. Do you believe that ideas like 'goodness' and 'beauty' are part of our cognitive heritage and how would this differ to them b...

I don't have time to read the book, but does he speculate at the nature of those gestalts? Are they arbitrarily built into the evolutionary process, o...

You'll need to read Kastrup more closely to get a better explanation that I can provide. I'm neither an idealist, nor a philosopher, so for me all thi...

Thanks for your considered answers. I think his idea may be more nuanced that this. He says experiences of individual consciousness are dissociated al...

Nice summary. Teasing out the disparate strands of thinkers in brief like this is helpful. Marvellous quote.

:up:

Sure. I mention the Nazi's just as an example of egregious stupidity in judgement. But I find there are a lot of people who dislike any art they don't...

I see how you might argue this and I am not saying you are wrong. I just feel uneasy about saying what is and what is not art - it's a thin line from ...

Yes - if it's put on display and exhibited as such. Imagine the throngs who would clog up a gallery to sneek a glimpse of Picasso poo. The real questi...

:rofl:

Yeah... I think this is the issue. People don't seem to follow the argument. I think they fight it rather than go with the flow. IMO one doesn't have ...

Cool. I'll go look.

I believe this matter and the nature of the physical has been answered several times already. I think @"Bartricks" has a very succinct definition of i...

That's not really an issue for some idealists. They postulate that consciousness - something like a universal mind - preexists all. We regard it as ps...

Of course it's odd. An idealist might argue that we have centuries of thinking that the material world is a pure representation of reality.

As I said, I am not an idealist, but - the point being that everything humans experience is simply mind when viewed from a particular perspective. Che...

I work closely with psychiatry departments in our big city hospitals. In a clinical setting, suicide is understood as an individual's response (albeit...

That's my intended point. :wink: A digression - Where do you sit on the notion that true art criticism/aesthetics should rest on identifying transcend...

Idealists have interesting answers for all these questions. Nothing is 'just an idea' it seems. Idealism seems to maintain that all we have access to ...

Interesting point.

Nice and charitable interpretation.

Goodness, I need to watch the words I use! Not my intended meaning. By 'unique' I just meant people have individual conscious experiences that don't s...

Very nicely put and reasoned.

May well do. It's interesting how this is one of those rhetorical tricks which can so easily be turned on the trickster. Have you ever had any sympath...

Yes, that's what I was getting at with the question. Would I be correct in assuming that for you God is the universal mind in idealism?

Thank you for your considered responses. It is interesting how often idealism is understood as solipsism. My words were probably unclear. I wasn't imp...

Kastrup (a different idealist thinker) simply argues that all we experience is real - it just isn't physical. So signs and fossils and DNA and an onco...

Thanks for the clarification. I hear you.

Can you say a little more? Why do you find Kastrup's Analytic Idealism less than convincing? I ask out of interest, and am personally not invested in ...

You'll have to help me. I got this.