Category: Consciousness
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What is (or are) Real?
Since this is so counter-intuitive, and goes against ‘common-sense’, let’s have another go at asking the question, what is real at the most fundamental level? What can we say about the most basic building blocks of all that exists? This doesn’t seem like an unimportant question, because I’m part of whatever it is that’s real.…
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NOW you see it ! NO you don’t ! (ii)
The difference between appearance and reality is counter-intuitive, and hard to grasp. If we value integrity, authenticity and actuality – the facts about how things are – we must have the courage to follow Alice down the rabbit hole, and discover how mind-bendingly full of wonders is fundamental reality. We need to let our imaginations…
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Let me tell you where I am (ii)
Borrowing from ‘Dragons’ Den’ tradition, in my previous post I decided that “I’m out” as far as the phrase “Intelligent Design” is concerned if it’s implying that, at the source of all that is, there’s a ‘Personal Designer’. ‘God’, for me, is more like an evolving trail and error ‘process’. It can’t be a ‘once…
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Let me tell you where I am
To borrow the oft-repeated, regulation ‘death blow’ verdict from ‘Dragons’ Den’, “I’m out” as far as the phrase “Intelligent Design” is concerned. It’s too tied-in to fundamentalist and, in my view, obscurantist religious views. “I’m in”, however, as far as the phrase “intelligence and design” is concerned. To me, “Intelligent Design” (especially with capital letters)…
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Was the Bishop a Complete Idiot? (ii)
The previous post was about how Bishop Berkeley was right (if properly understood) when he said that whatever is not being perceived does not exist. There indeed is a sense in which what we call the Moon is not ‘there’, when no one is looking at it – when no human mind is converting the…
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Was the Bishop a Complete Idiot?
The Bishop was George Berkeley (1685-1753), and he could be blamed for the following question that’s sometimes asked – ‘Does the Moon still exist when no one is looking at it?’ This is usually dismissed as a piece of obvious nonsense – a joke rather than a serious question. Bishop Berkeley, knowing his Latin, put…
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Let’s get ‘Real’ (ii) ‘The Lord of the Dance’
My previous post was about Materialism, which the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter”. My point was that Materialism, arguably, ‘doesn’t have very much in it’, since matter is made up of atoms that are 99.99% ‘empty space’! The truth of the matter (!) is that…
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Let’s get ‘Real’
Assuming we’re not hostile to Science for religious or other reasons, we really ought to take on board some of its newest findings, however strange or disturbing some of them might seem to be, especially if we’re at all interested in being ‘real’. Imagine you’re sitting at a table. It has a flat top, and…
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The Search for Meaning (ii)
As a follow-on from the previous post, let’s consider how our universe began with a bang to end all bangs, a cataclysmic origin that might suggest that any resulting universe should be extremely disorderly, if not completely chaotic. Surprise, surprise! Ours is developing in accordance with ‘laws’ which we can mathematically formulate and experimentally verify.…
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