Philosophical Speculations

Hi Ben, "You could start with a hammock. But eventually, I think you'd need to move on to something less obviously a product of love: a medieval rack, perhaps; or maybe something humans had no obvious part in, like the smallpox virus or a tapeworm." Yes, indeed. Starting with a medieval ra...

"Right, so the "next step" in your ontology is that "percept" and "concept" do not need to be "put back together" because they never exist separately? Do you mean that in essence they do not exist separately, or even in our normal experience of the world ...

Thinking a pencil, if it is actually thought, means thinking God's love. A debate as to who captures this understanding in the more accurate terms is already a lost cause. But the degree to which that debate points towards the understanding itself is the degree to which the debate is functioning acc...

Beyond the intellectual distinctions that necessarily fall out from these kinds of examinations, we can notice that when an act of thinking is intuited, we know that there is no difference between what some call God's will and the essence of our being. The intuition is the recognition. Some people's...

"So are you now denying that happens and saying even the illusion of that occurring does not occur?" If a person in the desert thinks they are looking at a giant bucket of water that isn't really there, that is a mirage. If a person says that they can tell when the Christ inside a person's...

"First, you have already said there is a movement of perceptual experience from one or two basic concepts to more and more concepts which 'fill out' the meaning of the experience." I'm trying not to mirror your "you-are-making-no-sense" game by constantly finding sense in what yo...

No, as long as you acknowledge that we have no need to imagine or conceptualize a so-called pure percept-- something we actually encounter that has not yetbhad thining attach its concept to it-- we are just fine to actually begin. However so far you've not made a single objection to that abstraction.

"For example, you say that the indeterminate rumble is being tested against concepts until the right one is selected." No, I wouldn't want to make that division. I would say that my focus on the rumble (already cognitive) allows for relevant other experience to emerge. This may be a rumble...

"I won't go through all your points but I must say that PoF is all about the spiritually transformed experience." So you think I'm wrong and Steiner is wrong to say that he intentionally wrote PoF so that any careful reader could grasp his starting point without having yet transformed thei...

In our normal and abnormal experiences there is always a "suchness" that defines the experiencing, even if that suchness involes mystery, confusion, or deep questioning. The experience of perception is different than that of thought, feeling, movement, emotion, but they are all always an i...