Most scientists and philosophers of mind accept some version of what I'll call "substrate flexibility" (alternatively "substrate independence" or "multiple realizability") about mental states, including consciousness. Consciousness is substrate flexible if it can be instantiated in different types of physical system -- for example in a squishy neurons like ours, in the silicon chips of a futuristic robot, or in some weird alien architecture, carbon based or not.| The Splintered Mind
Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on…| Love of All Wisdom
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • We begin our monthly selection with excerpts from a major biographical work, Titus Burckhardt: Sufism Between East and West, full of insights into the extraordinary life, character and works of one of the best known and most beloved traditional authorities of recent times. In face of the efficaciousness| The Matheson Trust
Editor’s Note: The following review appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Eikon. Michele Schumacher. Metaphysics and Gender: The Normative Art of Nature and Its Human Limitations. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2023. In Metaphysics and Gender: The Normative Art of Nature and Its Human Limitations, Michele Schumacher provides readers with theological and philosophical tools for evaluating and […]| CBMW
To help make ends meet and help you become a better philosopher, and thus a better citizen and thinker, every season I’ll post three books from my long-standing recommendations list, and review and discuss their value. And here’s how you can help: I am an Amazon Associate. So if you click through the sales link […] The post My Monthly Recommendation: Understanding Physicalism as a Philosophy appeared first on Richard Carrier Blogs.| Richard Carrier Blogs
Christopher Hitchens rightly said the argument from fine tuning is the best argument theists have, but only because it requires thought to figure out why it’s bullshit (whereas most Christian apologetics is obvious bullshit from the first moment you hear it). Because it is actually a really bad argument. Here I will explain this and […] The post The Utter Destruction of the Fine Tuning Argument appeared first on Richard Carrier Blogs.| Richard Carrier Blogs
In a rare online appearance, Helen is interviewed on Mind Chat by Philip Goff and Keith Frankish about her book-in-progress, The View From Everywhere: Realist Idealism Without God.| Philosophy, et cetera
Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • Our first library selection this month is an excerpt from our soon to be published Hermes Trismegistus: The Way of Wisdom, by Algis Uzdavinys. In this prolonged and erudite meditation, the concept, image and influence of Hermes and the Hermetica through the centuries are analysed and put in| The Matheson Trust
АНАЛИ 73–2-ЧЛАНЦИ| АНАЛИ
David J. Blacker’s recent Deeper Learning with Psychedelics is a valuable attempt to think through the implications of psychedelics for philosophy and education. One passage in particular cau…| Love of All Wisdom
Explore the profound relationship between the Soul, intuition, and knowledge in this insightful discourse on spirituality and ethics.| Traversing Tradition
I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promise…| Love of All Wisdom
The “hard problem” of consciousness is the hard problem of justifying social inequality in disguise.| 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗫𝗜𝗦𝗠
by Jeremy Pober and Eric Schwitzgebel| The Splintered Mind
Call a theory of consciousness nonlocal if two entities that are molecule-for-molecule perfectly similar in their physical structure could nonetheless differ in their conscious experiences. My thought today is: Nonlocal theories of consciousness face an unattractive dilemma between (a.) allowing for physically implausible means of knowledge or (b.) allowing for the in-principle introspective inaccessibility of consciousness.| The Splintered Mind
Vagueness and mass nouns have been unconquerable land for the logic founded by Aristotle, mathematized by Boole, and developed by Frege and others since the end of the nineteenth century—a logic I …| Blue Labyrinths
Reductive physicalism undermines itself and cannot explain how interaction happens at all. The post The Problem of Physical Interaction appeared first on Steve Patterson.| Steve Patterson
High Desert, Arizona on the border with Mexico, one of the book's main territories| Charlotte Du Cann
Last week the upcoming Dark Mountain: Issue 14 on place and belonging went to Bracketpress to be typeset and designed. After months of forging its pages and the new sparkly website, I am finally posting an essay I wrote for the spring journal, set in the Wyre Forest in the depths of the winter solstice (in very different weather!).| Charlotte Du Cann
Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. • We open our monthly selection with a page on St Francis of Assisi’s 13th-century “Canticle of the Creatures” (Laudes Creaturarum), also known as “Canticle of Brother Sun,” including a bilingual text, an audio reading of the original and an interpretative essay. This beautiful and brief poem has been| The Matheson Trust
Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with an article about “African Traditional Religion” reflecting on the essential convergence, the unanimity of the many native African religious paths and practices, allowing us to see beyond reductionist and trite labels like animism or pantheism. The Ewe-speaking people speak of Him as| The Matheson Trust
Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear readers, Our first new library item is an introduction to “the most famous of early modern litanies”, the Litany of Loreto. We present some recordings of sung versions of this originally Latin prayer, the ritual recitation of Divine and Marian epithets, which is rooted in ancient and late antique| The Matheson Trust
Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, Our first new library highlight this month is an excerpt from Sonorous Desert, a book about how the sounds of the desert—sounds like wind, water, thunder, animals, and even humans—shaped the development of Christian monasticism in the Middle East. Reasons for choosing a monastic life naturally varied from person| The Matheson Trust
Humans are lazy when thinking about infinity. Usually it doesn’t matter, but sometimes, our imprecision comes with big philosophical implications.| Steve Patterson
I’m working through the implications of discrete space and am starting to build some intriguing intuitions. I am trying to reduce the physical world down to a bunch of geometric atoms changing state—essentially, to a grid of voxels. I don’t claim the following is true, only that it’s a coherent way to explain a bunch …| Steve Patterson
An introduction to the philosophy of pain: is pain physical or mental? What is the role of the pain system? And, is pain always unpleasant? These questions are the focus of this essay.| An introduction to the philosophy of pain: is pain physical or mental? What i...
Today I am going to offer a naturalist theory of qualia—the particulars of “what it is like” of conscious experience, like the redness of red or the floweriness of a flower’s scent or the twanginess of a guitar, or even what love or fear, or deliciousness or pain, “feel” like. My model can’t be tested […]| Richard Carrier Blogs
Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with an article presenting a choice of ginans, hymns of wisdom (from the Sanskrit jnana) from the Nizari Ismaili tradition. These songs, often recited along ritual prayer, are accorded a near scriptural status, and regarded as conveying in the vernacular the inner meaning| The Matheson Trust
Justin Remhof is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University and the author of Nietzsche’s Constructivism: A Metaphysics of Material Objects. His new book, Nietzsche as Metaphysician, examines aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that have received little attention in the literature, including his view of what makes metaphysics possible; his metaphysics of science; his…| Blog of the APA
The spiritual domain heavily overlaps the informational domain—the world of patterns. I don’t think there’s a complete reduction of one domain to the other, but there is considerable overlap. Consider a few spiritual ideas: “Telling the truth is of spiritual importance. Lies destroy, while the truth heals.” This is not a claim about atoms or …| Steve Patterson
Change is logically possible because reality opposes itself.| 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗫𝗜𝗦𝗠
Change is logically possible because reality opposes itself.| 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗫𝗜𝗦𝗠
Is the identity of thought and being true or false?| 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗫𝗜𝗦𝗠
It is common to just assume God is timeless and spaceless. But I aver that’s logically impossible. You Have to Exist Somewhere to Exist at All If God has no location, then by definition there is no location at which God exists. And if there is no location at which God exists, then by definition […]| Richard Carrier Blogs
We are excited to have our author, Michael Gorman, discuss his book A Contemporary Introduction to Thomistic Metaphysics on our blog. Michael Gorman is ordinary professor of philosophy at The Catholic... READ MORE| Catholic University of America Press
I recently did an interview with Bob Murphy on our attempted resolutions the mind-body problem. You might enjoy it. Years ago, I wrote an article explaining my own theory of indirect interaction. For some silly reason, I never created any visuals to go along with the article, though they would have helped immensely. So that was corrected in …| Steve Patterson
The personification of nature and inanimate objects is age-old, something we humans have done as far back as we remember. It may be an elemental part of who we are, to see something of ourselves in…| Deborah J. Brasket
The great cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett passed away this year. And shortly after, Cameron Bertuzzi interviewed a Christian apologist, Bob Stewart, on his channel Capturing Christianity, regarding “Daniel Dennett’s Philosophical Legacy,” titling the show “Wrong in Creative Ways.” In which they almost never discuss Daniel Dennett’s philosophical legacy, or ever show that he […]| Richard Carrier Blogs
Although Neo-Confucianism was not monolithic, what separated the new Confucian school from the classical Confucian writers was the belief in ultimate moral metaphysical truths. These were represented by the terms ‘heaven’ (tian), ‘principle’ (li), ‘the great ultimate’ (taiji), the basic element or energy (qi), and the way of things (dao), which explained the unfolding reality-principle […]| The Confucian Weekly Bulletin
What are minds? And what (if anything) is the relationship of the mind to the body/brain—or to anything in nature? These questions constitute the so-called “mind-body problem.” This essay introduces some of the most influential answers to these questions.| What are minds? And what (if anything) is the relationship of the mind to the...
Countless thinkers for the past two thousand years have appealed to Euclidean geometry as an example of rock-solid reasoning. The proofs in Euclid’s Elements are beautiful deductive structures. One proof builds on the next, and by accepting the starting axioms, you are compelled to agree with the final conclusions. The geometric objects within Euclid have properties which …| Steve Patterson
While perhaps an uncomfortable concept for many evangelicals, the concept of “union” with God is certainly an intriguing one. In …| Ex Vitæ Verborum
‘Simulation Theory’ is popular lately so I am building a new summary piece on it. The following article repeats material elsewhere on my site but in scattered places, and with some new and connecting material, to provide a thorough and current treatment of the question. -:- Are we and the universe just a giant computer […]| Richard Carrier Blogs
It’s been nine months since GPT4 was released. I’m still trying to make sense of things. There’s a dearth of level-headed analysis out there. Most people’s analysis seems to be framed by science fiction novels, or they are still using frameworks inherited from the pre-GPT world, which did not anticipate the success of LLMs. Even […]| Steve Patterson
There’s an ongoing quest to reduce everything to mathematics. It’s part of the reason we’re in a dark age. Seems like a good time to ask the question: is everything quantifiable? Were the Pythagoreans correct in saying that “All is number”? Consider three statements: 1 Alice is taller than Bob. This claim is easy to quantify. […]| Steve Patterson
Consultants like me are sometimes engaged by clients on a very short-term basis, and sometimes embedded inside organisations for much longer periods of [...]| ambiguiti.es
Follow the science. But which science, whose science, today’s science or tomorrow’s? The SARS-COV-2 pandemic turned virologists and epidemiologists into unwilling oracles, pressed by politicians, press, and public alike to provide stable guidance in unstable times. How did the virus spread, did masks work, were children at risk, was it safe to hug, did taking ibuprofen make symptoms better or worse, how many people would die, when would it all end?| The Marginalia Review of Books
In the lecture series given in Cambridge in 1951 that formed the basis of his book Science & Humanism, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger observed...| The Marginalia Review of Books
Others and myself watch, while in trance, the Armageddon wars in the Inner Worlds. The last few weeks there has been a war against the UFOs. They are dragons with claws that can fly and they morph into various technological shapes to con humans they are from a superior race. A Grey appeared in my room, close to my bed. I went through its eye with the force of my attention, my will, say. It didn’t expect that, behind it was a dragon-like reptile.| www.stuartwilde.com
I typically define theism in company with those who, under the enduring influence of St. Anselm, follow him in affirming that God is that than which nothing greater could be conceived. To update th…| Tyler Journeaux
An interesting thought occurred to me recently while I was reading through the early pages of Bas C. van Fraassen’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space. I would not be surprised if …| Tyler Journeaux
