I dislike parts of both. Good answer. For good reasons. I think both systems are missing a fundamental view of matter (as a matter of culturally inherited assumptions) that impacts our ability to properly characterize the nature of materially based and expressed information. In other words, we need...

People can have "Spiritual" experiences without supernatural belief of any kind. Absolutely true. My life is full of it. I have synaesthesia and epilepsy. The pair together seems to have created a royal road to mystical experience and has been doing so since my earliest childhood. I am al...

like Jaws on steroids. all i have to say to that is - gack - not my cup of tea i'm afraid Evolutionary biology just interests me, its like the logical alternative to Genesis, I was raised Catholic and learning about evolution is like a breath of fresh air. I knew a man that gravitated to biology af...

hey JustinL87 - what a great intro to yourself. Why Alten instead of some other writer in that genre? And your interest in evolutionary biology is cool. What have you read in that area and what are some of your key thoughts about it?

I believe every piece of information in our brains is an abstraction. Even if the referent is something concrete, the stored data of that object must be an abstraction of it, a compressed idealized form. I suppose whether I consider this a viable hypothesis depends on what you mean by "abstrac...

I find a number of books disturbing but in different ways. Olivia, I guess I want to know why you find each of the books you mentioned disturbing. (Feel free to ignore the request if you don't feel like answering.) For me, when a book, study or paper is intellectually disturbing is because it has up...

How about a poem from The Vogon Poets Society? http://vogon-poets.livejournal.com/ Here's one of my favourites from over there: (dated Tuesday March 24 2009, by Rob T Firefly) - maybe not quite as gruesome as an actual Vogon poet might make it but not at all bad for a earthling. Tuesday I sit in a c...

Zowee Robert. I'm going to be at this all night if I try to answer all the interesting things you say! I take it you're a Hegel/Heidegger fan. Forgive me if I just address what I think is a central difference between the way we understand "experience". Your example of grasping illustrates ...

I'm not sure that newborns grasp the idea of object permanence, though they acquire it before they acquire speech. Perhaps not in-built as you say, but not reliant on language either. I could be wrong, however. I'm enjoying reading this conversation, keep it up. Hey Interbane. Glad you're still aro...

I like your interpretation, that the name suggests relationships. I was on a somewhat different thread, trying to link the Heart of Gold ship to god somehow ... a sort of perverse analogy, tongue in cheek, where, like the all-seeing, all knowing god, the 'heart of gold' spaceship is everywhere and ...