Philosophical Speculations

Scott, If you look at the comments below your essay, you will see that I read it and enjoyed it at the time. But I now think that “final participation” is a promissory dream. Even if it’s not, I choose what I perceive or currently experience over what I’m sometimes asked to believe. For instance, I ...

Cleric, the whole point of science is that speculations such as "there may be life on Saturn but we can't see it" are rendered irrelevant, like Bernardo's "there may be a teapot orbiting Saturn, but it is not a useful subject of enquiry". Lorenzop is implying that if life does no...

Cleric said: “It is this new and expanding inner life that becomes the object of our scientific inquiry – its degrees of freedom, how it is resisted or assisted by various feelings, sympathies, antipathies and sensory phenomena. At no point we need to fantasize fluffy thought-critters. It is this co...

Cleric said: "Ben, it's interesting to me that you see the two things above as mutually exclusive. Does this mean that when you speak of 'natural properties' you simply call physical nature 'mind' but without it having any mind-like qualities (in other words, you simply rename the physical worl...

Ash, I think you do BK a disservice by saying he hasn't oriented towards a phenomenological approach. He said in the discussion that he shared many of Rupert's intuitions but that he deliberately takes an analytic approach to reach an audience with a literalist materialist mindset (the rational mind...

Ashvin, A semi-autonomous complex in the Universal Mind would be something on its way to being an egoic being, but which hasn’t got there. The egoic beings we normally experience on Earth can be recognised by independent and often unpredictable activity – they don’t seem to follow laws that can be r...

Lou said: "I dunno about 'final resolutions'." Perhaps "reconciliation" is a more appropriate term? The two geniuses were mostly reconciled. One difference was that Rupert thinks stars have independent agency, whereas Bernardo sees them more as semi-autonomous (semi-dissociated) ...

Thanks, Lou. Super!

Cosmin said: "If this is what Ben meant by "unnatural effort" indeed it seems there are 2 ways in which forms are produced, effortlessly and with effort. In this case, my model doesn't account for them, but clearly I will keep thinking about these matters." Yes, thank you. What c...

"So taking also precognitions into account, can the case for a theory of higher human purpose still be made ?" Cosmin, if Time is a feature of form, than from the perspective of the Formless, all enacted possibilities are already known and delivered. Presumably no unnatural effort is requi...