Philosophical Speculations

Oh boy. I think we're hitting the center of the dispute here finally. Right at this moment, I can't put nearly the amount of care that I'd like to into responding, but if I could sketch a rough outline of what I think we might most fundamentally disagree on (a "low-resolution" sketch, to ...

Might also want to take a look at Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. When resources get low, things can get violent. https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Warfare-among-Hunter-Gatherers-Allen/dp/161132940X Oh absolutely, and that's also worth a mention. I'm not arguing things were perfect and t...

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:24 am

Sorry for the empty quote box, but I suspect I'd been writing my last (short) post as you were writing yours and I wanted to draw your attention to it in case you'd overlooked it, and I figured that way you'd get a notification.

Oh boy. I think we're hitting the center of the dispute here finally. Right at this moment, I can't put nearly the amount of care that I'd like to into responding, but if I could sketch a rough outline of what I think we might most fundamentally disagree on (a "low-resolution" sketch, to b...

Yes! Also, several hunter-gatherer societies would reshape the land through the controlled use of fire so it would grow food better. In Australia, for instance, European settlers were amazed at how lush the landscape was because they thought it got that way without any human intervention, because th...

So you could just say, "fine, then dogs and cats are engaged in Thinking and therefore have purpose." Certainly that is the implication of DS' comment that the cat is "conceptualizing what she wants before seeking it out". But there is a hesitance to say the animals are Thinking...

I have to get ready for work soon so I won't be able to write a whole essay here in response, but I thought I would touch on what I can get through pretty quickly: So I say BK's MAL is useful when contrasting with materialism-dualism, but apart from that is so low resolution that it is pretty much u...

Idealism doesn't actually predict anything different than materialism in terms of what we'd expect to see going on in the brain. Rather, it explains the connection between the observed brain activity and the internal experience in a different way. For an idealist, and particularly one of Kastrup's f...

Nice quote, Justin. It might be useful if we all saw things differently, and with complementary functions. Thus if a slug saw a lettuce as a beautiful but temporary object of contemplation, there would be no competition with me seeing it as food...(note to MAL for the next universe). The image of a...

In animistic experience our relations are very much intuitive and based on the Ground of phenomenal empathy, whether we relate as human and dog or human and human. Again, the humanist argument that non-humans are categorically different and function only based on mechanized instincts and reaction, ...