Philosophical Speculations

Actually, on second thought; I'm with Jim; ITP is only a part of Hoffman's chain of reasoning. ITP by itself does not require consciousness being fundamental. Instead, ITP it part of what ALLOWS for consciousness being fundamental. I did not claim ITP "requires consciousness being fundamental&...

perception the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses . That wouldn't normally encompass the "inner world". Nevertheless, your argument still is beside the point. Naïve realism believes we can become directly aware of objects in the external world through th...

Ashvin, Great stuff, thank you! This one is definitely being given to a relative who is struggling and will be familiar with most of the characters referenced in your essay. In an interaction last night, I was striving the find the words and could only mumble "incomplete", "woefully ...

Please, when you read what is written below, resist the first sentiment which pops into your mind. It will be - " this guy is an arrogant idealist making bold claims against my worldview, so I will assume he is wrong before reading what he writes and then find ways to support my assumption &quo...

Right. Again, he was making an argument against qualitative materialism, or what is commonly called naïve realism. I guess we actually agree. But this is a straw man argument because few materialists are naïve realists. Also, I am not sure calling this "qualitative materialism" is even co...

A different aspect of knowing is that it's never absolute. YOU (the knower) decides whether to treat a specific concept "the concept of there being a cat in the box" as true or not. There's always probability that you're wrong; but for practical purposes , In order to get anywhere in life...

https://i.ibb.co/6w0yq0q/DE02-October2017-SRSC.jpg “The only true Wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” ― Socrates. The above quote is only understood if we follow its logic through carefully. We know nothing, as Socrates keenly observed. We don't even know the full extent of the ten words in his...

Morgentraum, There is no reason why the ancient Wisdom traditions you mention, which indeed ask us to take a higher perspective on all dualities of experience, such as good-evil, cannot also encompass the intuitively known ethics you reference. The issue with traditonal theism, as it is held abstra...

In traditional theism one does not have this problem, because God is defined as morally perfect and good. Evil does not have its own ontological category, and is instead simply considered to be the absence of goodness. In Christian theology the fallen angels were not created evil, but by their own ...

in a twist of tragic irony, undermine all objective ethics. Awesome! That has been my intuition for a long time. Then again, it all boils down to what you mean with "objective" and "ethics", but I'll stop being annoying for now. By that I mean a stable and objectively verifiable...