Philosophical Speculations

There is one trait almost unique to humans, which is especially appealing to me personally (I think it is the main reason I incarnated into a human, otherwise I would not bother). And this trait is creativity. Another key one is the sense of beauty and aesthetics, but one can argue that it might be ...

Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?

Here is the Wikipedia explanation, but it would be interesting to find the actual quotes form Plato stating that "matter is real" to prove it Platonism and neoplatonism Plato's theory of forms or "ideas" describes ideal forms (for example the platonic solids in geometry or abstra...

I agree and you can offer the reviewer two options: - either include idealism into the title of the section, for example "Idealism, panpsychism and neutral monism" - or split idealism into a separate section I can contribute but I'm am amateur couch philosopher :) so I don't know if I woul...

Simon, I think what you wrote is pretty good and we can get around the reviewer's objections: "As per the MOS, we should cover all majority and SIGNIFICANT minority view points. This only cites Kastrup, who is not prominent within the field despite his online following. Idealism could perhaps b...

Here is a good TED Talks presentation on dolphins vs. humans, it's in Russian but you can turn on English subtitles

That's why I am wondering why you claimed we can study the phenomenon of conscious experience "objectively and impersonally". We are always entangling our consciousness with the appearances when we study them. Surely science cannot be done in a no-self trance state. Ashvin, I think you mi...

Are you not implying a duality if you can study an aspect of Nature without influencing it? Which is not to say we should stop studying Nature, of course, but that we should become aware of our participatory role in constructing the appearances of Nature when we study them. Study without influencin...

It seems to me that one of the main factors hampering the imagination of science for the last few hundred years has been the illusion that subjects can remain detached from the objects of their study. Exactly, subject-object detachment is a hallmark of dualistic science. And since science over the ...

This is good, but to me this approach is still very personal and religiously biased. I personally found a different way of dealing with these issues. A while ago when I was a religious person I was struggling with these things - forgiveness, acceptance, personal judgements, blame, guilt, sin, evil e...