Philosophical Speculations

Thanks for your understanding and experience of this, Ash. Interesting! I confess my sympathies still lie with the imperfect and ignorant who are suffering (probably because I too am imperfect and ignorant)! It's really a matter of perspective. I do believe we gain insights from our everyday lives b...

Ashvin said: "But if this is even conceivable as a possibility, would it at all influence your thinking about the 'Thinker-of-Reality' and its nature? Could such a possibility nudge your philosophical focus at all in a different direction, perhaps towards learning what it is within you, and wit...

Ashvin, in fairness, you asked whether I had any thoughts directly relating to this thread. My thoughts on death are that it is nothing to fear. However, I think that dying slowly and painfully is fearful and would be a disgrace if the Thinker-of-Reality were metacognitive and moral.

"Indeed, the various aspects of our soul-life that we call "me" are living elementals, playing off of each other in the most varied ways. What else could they be, dead abstractions? Carl Jung was another great phenomenologist who verified this." Ashvin, I send out hundreds of tho...

Lorenzop, I think you might fairly say that Ashvin wants his cake and eats it. When he talks about such ideas as thoughts being living elementals or the immorality of using solar power, he is not building “a gradual gradient of experience”. He has already decided on the nature of reality – how it wo...

Thanks for your insights, Eugene! On the subject of top-down, bottom-up, I guess there may be a way round it: Top down has minimal "understanding" so goes with simple structures it evolves (almost by chance or by repeated iterations trying to make sense out of chaos), then builds these up ...

Stranger said: “Interesting insight at 32-35 min on how higher-order conscious agents are formed by "fusion" of lower-order agents where the new qualia of the higher-order ones are being created from the qualia of the lower-order agents but are not reducible to them. This is a possible sol...

Jonathan said: "Look, Ashvin, you have posted 5249 messages. Are you lonely and afraid to face your loneliness, so you distract yourself by out-of-proportion writing and posting on this forum?" Ashvin is on a mission, and if a response is not to his liking, his naturally adversarial daimon...

Federica said: “Redemption means to find and inhabit the force of life that can brighten up the darkness of death through us. Redemption doesn't mean to wander to exhaustion through the valley of death letting our blood be preyed on by ever-thirstier, shinier and plumpier networks of thought-replica...

I was intrigued by Chat GPT and noticed there was a thread here. I was deeply unimpressed by the bot - it admitted that it's first two answers were in error (all done within a minute)! The final answer was also highly dubious, but I'd seen enough by then: It literally doesn't know what it's talking ...