Philosophical Speculations

The hard problem of Materialism, the combination problem of Panpsychism, and the decomposition problem of Idealism are not the same problem. Each one is specific to its corresponding theory. In essence, they are necessary assumptions within the theories that require substantiation and explanation. ...

Simply put, it is all symbolic of spiritual reality proper. Our normal conceptual life is not that spiritual reality, but the outer manifestation of it, like sensory appearances are the outer manifestation of the conceptual/imaginative life. At some point we must leave the conceptual behind (and ev...

I am having a hard time following the logic here. Surely our geometric concepts don't arrive within our consciousness from a lawless void. Right. We learn mathematics from sensory-conceptual thinking. But at some point the student leaves the sensory behind, and mathematics becomes purely conceptual...

With "content", I am basically referring to anything that belongs to the realm of phenomenal appearances, including anything we can conceive. Our entire conceptual life, including our entire sense of 'me', is a phenomenal appearance in this way, and should be taken as a symbol for unfamil...

I would say that organic thinking could be partially understood (not completely defined) as continually thinking through the World Content, when all that Content is approached in its symbolic nature. All content should be understood as symbols for nested layers of spiritual activity, similar to wha...

Timely post (for me, anyway), as I've been doing a fair amount of thinking about thinking lately. With the constant worry that I'm in danger of being overly systematic. But it could be that one can't be, as long as thinking is that which is being thought about. A couple of quotes are, I think releva...

Robert, What I am puzzled at is why you think, as the title of the thread says, that the Boltzmann Principle undermines idealism. Idealism, you say, is "the philosophy that holds that nothing exists except thought". Ok (though a lot has to be added to explain how feeling, sense perception,...

There seem to be a few variations on the theme of Idealism. From what I have read on this site and elsewhere, they have in common the centrality of our conscious perception. That perception is, according to what I have read, our only sure and certain knowledge. The Boltzmann Brain thought experimen...

This 2. Idealism is the philosophy that holds that nothing exists except thought. It says that the only reality of which we can be certain is the reality of our perception. We know that we perceive. “I think, therefore I am.” We perceive physical reality, but all we can know of it is that we perceiv...

I would like to ask everyone who is familiar with this lecture: do you think humanity has passed the fork Steiner speaks of? I think it's clear that those 'baleful doings' he references are spreading in modern culture. I can only imagine what Steiner would lecture today in the era of internet porno...