Philosophical Speculations

It has a design but no designer.

One problem with this is that, under the premises of materialism, phenomenal consciousness cannot—by definition—have a function. This is a typical argument I've heard. It's a strawman argument because some materialists believe consciousness does not have a function, many do believe it has a functio...

Take a look at small world networks. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Small-world_network Closely related to six degrees of separation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation Closely related to how the brain is organized. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014...

Perhaps if I offer a specific example of the numerous occasions of meaningful happenstance that seem to regularly pop up in this dreamtime I call my 'real' life, it can serve as a spring board for a meaningful discussion about how idealism can account for it, beyond just writing it off as due to ra...

Haven't read Ecological Approach to Visual Perception? It does look interesting, but yikes not cheap on Amazon. Published in 1979. I might try to track down a copy anyway. He showed quite clearly and with much detail that "what we find through senses from external world" is more meaning ju...

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 ...

Connectivity is not activity. Connectivity is synonymous with entropy, random patterns of activity. How this could give rise to rich, coherent experiences such as that of the psychedelic state is something the physicalist has to deal with. Maybe connectivity has some specific meaning in brainy scie...

This becomes much more simple when we acknowledge that there is nothing we perceive in the world which is not directly connected to our 'inner' qualities of experience.

I can agree mostly with that but that applies to everything not just synchronicity.

Of course, it really isn't a question of randomness or causality. I think Jung thought of synchronicity as something acausal. It is two or more events occurring - one usually in thought - that are in some way in sync with each other. For example, the cat food commercial occurring shortly after someo...