BothAndBlog Forum

We’re the only ‘tiny fraction of the cosmos’ who know what that means . It’s amusing in the extreme that objective science, which is a cognitive mode only available to h. Sapiens, then declares its authors insignificant in the ‘grand scheme’ - a grand scheme that is their own mental creation! (I ha...

Buddhism, for one example, has had this creed of " no origin " for a few millennia now. — javra Buddhism actually has a rather strange and not very well known creation story . — Wayfarer I'm no expert on Buddhist beliefs, but a quick Google indicates that there is no single dogma on the topic of Ev...

When you read that, I don't see any reference to any open ended question rather than perhaps the difficulty of knowing "all forces that set nature in motion" and obviously "all positions of all items of which nature is composed". — ssu Your quote is exactly the "open-ended question" I referred to. ...

I'm not a deist, but I don't see that the position that something created the universe any more or any less problematic than to say that the universe was uncaused . The deist needn't posit anything to do with intent or purpose either. He need only say the universe was caused by some cause. As to wh...

But Laplace really missed the point that a forecast of the future can have an effect on the future, the subjectivity of this entity — ssu I don't know that Laplace "missed the point". Perhaps, in order to keep his metaphor simple, he avoided getting into the open-ended question : "is foreknowledge ...

Would you agree that an omniscient entity is preternatural? — Gnomon Omniscient? You can turn that other way: anything part of the university cannot be omniscient . — ssu Yes. That's why Laplace postulated a preternatural "demon" instead of a natural scientist , to keep track of all positions and m...

By definition a metaphorical demon is not part of the real world, hence super-natural . It "interacts" only in hypothetical worlds. — Gnomon I'm not sure that Laplace himself thought so. His idea was this kind of idea of extrapolation to the extreme, if an entity would have all the information at h...

OFF-TOPIC : non-random evolution ↪Wayfarer Orthogenesis , on the other hand, is an evolutionary hypothesis suggesting that life has an inherent tendency to evolve in a unilinear direction towards some kind of predetermined goal or ideal form. This concept implies that evolution is guided by an inter...

It's not even predictable to the demon, if the demon is part of the world itself and has to interact with it. — ssu By definition a metaphorical demon is not part of the real world , hence super-natural. It "interacts" only in hypothetical worlds. Hence, its predictions would be true only in the co...

Those "Other Minds" may filter information about True Reality through their own private or communal prejudices. — Gnomon Kastrup's ' dissociated alters '. — Wayfarer Actually, the "other minds" I referred to are the perspectives of physically & mentally different people , who presumably have their o...