Philosophical Speculations

Cleric, I enjoyed your posts and fully agree, thank you. Once we introduce the concept of "qualia" (which is itself nothing else than a meaning of a thought and a product of meta cognition of out perceptions and thoughts), we can say that meanings are qualia of thoughts, just like visual e...

Absolutely, same with out-of-body experiences and veridical perception during NDEs. Those "mere anecdotes" (as naysayers typically call them) are still data that need to be taken into account when assigning the provenance of consciousness. Speaking of NDEs, here's an interesting panel dis...

The highpoint occurred for me when he pointed out that both "dualism" and "non-dualism" are myths. "Some seek nonduality, others duality. They do not know the Truth, which is the same at all times and everywhere, which is devoid of both duality and nonduality." Avadhut...

I don't know much about Harris and his views, but based on his comments in this conversation he equates the "reality at large" with "physics of things" which is physicalism. No wonder they could not agree. But I like how Rupert phrased it: "most materialist scientists no not...

No baby - no confusion ... even if we never find out what the baby can grow into There is a baby, but it's not a "doer", "entity", "choice maker" etc. This baby - our soul, individuated consciousness, it simply a semi-autonomous mental activity in the universal Conscio...

Similar to freedom having nothing to do with determinism, it also has nothing to do with doership and reality of self. It's a misconception that for there to be freedom, there must be a "doer" or "self" who exercises such freedom. If freedom is understood as an ability of conscio...

Most of the confusion comes from not distinguishing freedom from indeterminism. Of course it all depends on how we define and interpret freedom. IMO freedom is a measure of a degree of conditioning or autonomy of choices and decisions. The functioning of our minds is typically strongly conditioned b...

Why doesn't God just create omniscient subjects that don't require expensive, tedious learning? One NDE experiencer asked this question there and the answer was: "For the entertainment of the spirit". Which means that this is a game, something like a virtual reality one. But it can only b...

Actually an overwhelming amount of NDE accounts report remembering the pre-existence of the soul before being born into human and many of them also report remembering previous lives/incarnations, which confirms the Origen's views.

I don’t think we can ever fully understand the whys and the hows, but Julian of Norwich was told something that completely matches what I had come to believe when I first read it: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall...