Philosophical Speculations

He is saying everything which is logically reasoned, like the arguments in the essay, is also hallucination of the self-deceiving mind. If this is true, then you may ask, why does he still write the essay? That's a good question and what I pointed to in the first post. These sorts of abstract posit...

That's a great image, Lou. Yes, self-deception is, unfortunately, vital to self-knowledge. Greater self-knowledge leads to greater understanding of the world- seeing it with new eyes. From the article: the metaphorical language of the deeper, transpersonal layers of the obfuscated mind, forever busy...

Unlike with evolution, it takes no responsibility or effort to dissolve and devolve. We just have to wait for it to happen while, in the meantime, we enjoy all the short-term comforts of life. Very convenient for us, but not so much for the planet Earth or the Cosmos at large. I guess you're talkin...

entirely spiritually superb God of monotheistic religions The God who tested Job, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah....?! Regarding BK, I would suggest that although the transcendent God is instinctive, that we, as God's dissociated alters, are more. We tend to forget that we are (at least capable of be...

That Borges quote is very insightful, Eugene! According to TC, decreasing entropy without self-deception involves overcoming fear. The problem here is that fear is part of evolutionary necessity. Looking out at my garden now, there are no rats or mice visible in the daylight. That's because they sen...

So is this instinctive recognition itself an excitation in itself, or does it precede excitation?

Adolescent self-excitation, in advance of "And God created Woman"?

He is positing something outside of consciousness that conscious 'jumps' into. This is a good way of putting it. But thinking about it a bit more, he would say that the evolving VR is itself still a form of consciousness, just "partitioned off" from the rest. Or, in more usual Idealistic ...

Further thoughts: In many ways, TC's computer game metaphor is bizarre. He said a Virtual Reality works by setting up initial conditions, then pushing the "run" button. In due course, life evolves. But since consciousness has to "log on" to avatars, there is an implicit assumptio...

Thanks for this, Dana (and pleased you're back after your hiatus!). There was more agreement than I expected, but they come from such different places, the gaps will be hard to bridge. As BK said, TC's view of Free Will is not standard. That choices are made does not mean they are not determined by ...

Idealists cannot overcome the hard problem by simply declaring that they have overcome it ("everything is mind"), and likewise they can't avoid solipsism by declaring hard boundaries around themselves and/or declaring themselves to be illusions (which is reminiscent of Dan Dennett declari...