Site-Wide Activity

Linked from John Naughton, the Observer/Guardian I’ll only say it’s worthy of a read.   Mortal thoughts   ‘Doc Searls, one of the elders of the web, has posted the striking Death Is a Feature on his eponymous blo […]

Michael100 #66, Yes, I think we have a propensity to think in comparative categories, and to create arbitrary binary opposites. We have to learn, be trained how to think clearly, more approximating reality.

Zeuglodon Beta #63, #64, #65, Might I give myself some credit for inducing you to compose those posts? I think your accounts for how we can get into deep trance meditation, or self-hypnosis are very plausible, […]

regarding dualism: In Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, chapter 12, the section called The Battle of Good and Evil, the author talks about religions based on the existence of two opposing powers — good and evil.  Exam […]

I don’t know if machines will ever be truly conscious.   Reasoning by anthropocentric analogy, I think a key part of it is at what point a mere computer model (which is mostly a model only because our minds do […]

Strato, at #61 (different topic):   But in these yoga schools, there is the presupposition that the mind is separate from, and must be liberated from the body and its anchorage to this gross material plane, and […]

Strato, at #61:   Maybe the capability to enter sustained deep trance meditation is vestigial, from an ability to hibernate, in our primate, or mammalian ancestors during the last ice age, or Gondwana. That’s ju […]

On my daily walk on the path through the coastal heath, I fell to musing on Eastern dualism. Hindu and its offspring Buddhist philosophy is necessarily internally contradictory in the dual concept and received […]

RichardMann #52,   I infer that the the Eastern conceit of negation of the self, of the ‘ego’, and all the centuries of exposition on non-duality, of Oneness, or ’emptiness’, in philosopher-expositor Chandrakirti […]

Continuing my #51 In an introduction to Ulf Danielsson’s The World Itself, Carlos Fiolhais, Professor of Physics at the University of Coimbra, wrote   “Descartes separated the body from the soul, but we know […]

Hi Richard, when my post to you emerges from moderation (it should be #56), I want to add to it the observation that psychology has long held that cognition is both embodied and situated and that a “self” would […]

RichardMann #52 Welcome also. Starting at your end. I think it is a more western idea that there is a good/bad duality. I think it is the more so the further west and closer to Disney you go. In the east, moving […]

RichardMann, anther book you might want to consider reading is Douglass Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop.  Hofstadter, by the way translated Sturmark’s book from the Swedish into English.

RichardMann #52.  Welcome to the site.  Have you read Christer Sturmark’s To Light the Flame of Reason?  You might find that helpful.