Philosophical Speculations

Brian, This is a really valid point factually. But to try to use this to explain synchronicity actually demonstrates, I think, the opposite of your intent. We do live in our own inner worlds but we are constantly testing the predictions of our inner world against what we find through senses from th...

...there is nothing we perceive in the world which is not directly connected to our 'inner' qualities of experience. This is bolstered by the neuroscience reported by Rovelli himself in "Helgoland." He admits his shock in discovering research that shows visual information is processed in ...

Interesting critique. Like a Dennett "assume a can opener?" More clever? I'm not sure what you mean, but I got the phrase from the joke that takes a jab at economists: A physicist, chemist, and economist are stranded on an island with only canned food available and no can opener. The phys...

He honestly struck me as something like a panexperientialist. At any rate, there's a bit of a trick here with how he approaches the Hard Problem: First, he deconstructs the naive materialist understanding of matter altogether. Then he reconstructs matter as a network of relations with the first-per...

OK then, if Rovelli's not an illusionist, perhaps he's a closet animist. As David Abram says, animism is "a participatory way of perceiving that simply defies any sharp distinction between things that are animate and things that are inanimate. To the animate sensibility, everything is animate ...

These events are taking place independently from our inner resonance. It is the connection seeking brain that makes them seem meaningful. It will try to find meaning even when there is none. It is on a larger scale what goes on in conspiracy thinking. Statistics keeps the overloading of meaning and...

...it does all center around completely ignoring the participatory role of Thinking Not ignoring. Reducing. Rovelli writes extensively about thinking in "Helgoland." He just reduces it to interactions which are "the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in other mirrors, wi...

...Perhaps he's also an Illusionist. I don't know how to categorize Rovelli as he stands in "Helgoland." If you read the Stanford Encyclopedia article on RQM, it seems "interactions" are his ontological primitive. I believe this is the Rovelli that BK originally supported. But i...

Cat food commercials are fairly frequent on television so the odds are good if you mention the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment a commercial for cat food could follow. You need to look at the Law of Truly Large Numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_truly_large_numbers But isn't Jung's c...

I am not sure why you disliked DJM so much but, as Dana pointed out, you won't get a better analysis of the MAL-idealism connection with Jung's synchronicity concept than what BK wrote there. I thought DJM was very approachable for people well-versed in Jung and those new to him alike. Great footno...