Philosophical Speculations

Hi Paul, I hear a lot of people make this sharp distinction between a dissociated alter in the 'material' realm and completely non dissociated Mind at large which we seemingly dissolve into at death. I still think the jury is out on that. For instance in eastern religion there is a subtle realm bet...

Hi Paul, I hear a lot of people make this sharp distinction between a dissociated alter in the 'material' realm and completely non dissociated Mind at large which we seemingly dissolve into at death. I still think the jury is out on that. For instance in eastern religion there is a subtle realm betw...

Funnily enough, in the very next page (I am reading the book live), Bernardo uses that exact same example - that of a supercomputer - and yet maintains the claim that: "the very notion of understanding resides eminently in conscious experience" Aren't we confusing qualia, what it feels to...

Totally get your argument. I think of it as him setting up his stall - counteracting a very dogmatic environment in which clunky dualism or anabolism are poisoning the culture. In the modern world we filter information by getting someones 'angle' other wise they would be drowned in a sea of voices. ...

Hi. If you take a materialist stance you are forced into preposterous nihilism (ala Dennet) or some form of crude dualism. Bernardos model has two huge benefits - it bypasses both those problems, and it is directly pointing at the transcendent (the Tao that cannot be spoken of). Bernardo addresses t...

Since I am skating on thin ice, I may as well add this. The movie the Wizard of Oz is much like the story of the Prodigal Son. Dorothy enters a trance state and has all her incredible adventures in Oz, and finally wakes up in her true home. I wonder if the alter-consciousness is actually the meta-t...

Fascinating subject. At a fundamental level I believe we have an inertial tendency towards what is pleasant or comfortable. People dissociate throughout the day from what is unpleasant. The flip side of that is that the dissociated state is some how considered more pleasant even if that entails it i...

Hi Robert, Bernardo's latest public YouTube interview (check his Twitter timeline) touches on meaning. He references Viktor Frankl and the therapy he was giving inside concentration camps, which, in a nutshell, consists of helping people to find meaning, seemingly any meaning, to get them through t...

Remember, BK ultimately sees time and space as convenient myths that helps us to function while pointing in a poetic way to something ultimately ungraspable in language. Pretty much everything he says will therefore be ambiguous and limited. His only truth claim is there is transcendent truth and th...

Hi Maarten, I think you've got it. 'Space' and 'surrounding' are just terms of analogy pointing to purely mental processes (as there is nothing else). When you dream, the world around appears to surround the avatar, but on awakening the avatar and its environment were just projections of the waker's...