Category: other

All posts that do not belong in the categories of buddhism or philosophy goes in here. Please check tags for more details about what the post is about.

The world has a characteristic

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From experience you and I “know” that the world has a characteristic. For example, we play the game of tennis by following the “rules” or laws of physics. Otherwise, the game would not be very fun to play. We share the world which is “out there” from “in here”. And I understand the outside through the senses and the mind. I also understand the inside through the mind and its concepts and knowledge, and accordingly interact through my object, the body.

In this way, I have inducted (not deducted) that there is a world with independent objects and I am one of those objects.

the empty machine

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minds do not emerge
as metaphors
would like them to
the machinery, empty
mysteriously move through
space, time

how are we to know
if any thing exists at all
if this, our greatest illusion
kept up its charade
until the very last
and beyond

i cannot know anything
a god or a self
but only
to have concepts of them
trust them
to be our creations

that the world
out there
is void and full
all at once
from the beginning, and
until the very end

We can only ever be inductive

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Inductive reasoning is reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument is probable, based upon the evidence given.

From Essentials of Logic by Copi, Cohen and Flage.

I do not think we can ever come to a certain truth, because we have only access to the reality through our senses and perception. It must forever be probable. So philosophy will always be an argument of who has got the better probability.

Sooooo happy to be signature103.blog

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Finally, an address I like. 

From today onwards I am signature103.blog. Simple. Elegant. Easy to remember.

Like a well chosen name for your child I feel the blog is now taking shape again to be something like what I had wanted it to be – a personal space of sorts.

And the blog will continue to be ad-free for your reading pleasure.

Not Materialism

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I mentioned to a friend that perhaps there are physical or material things only. He said that is rather naive.

If I were to take the impermanence seriously, then even physical things (like mental things) do not exist as such. What is to say the appearance of things seemingly longer than thought is not as immaterial as thought itself. Just because the length of appearance is longer and seemingly more permanent does not mean it is permanent. So there is justification that things are not real as well.

Let’s start having dialogues again – comments on

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There was a time when I had great conversations with people online. We would argued about finer points of things. I was open to opinions. But that was until I got trolled.

These days I Periscope a lot. And there everything is in real-time, including interaction with your audience as well as trolling. But this also had meant blocking trolls had become real-time as well, which is a good thing. By interacting with viewers who felt trolls a nuisance had meant blocking was no longer a problem I faced alone. To know other people feel the same way as you about trolls had meant that I can now block without feeling I was shutting out perhaps a valid opinion.

At times people disguise their trolling as views, and one must learn to deal with it as much as one does in real life.

So let’s get back to dialogues. Let me build again a good community of readers as I once had had. Let me be free to speak my mind without fear.

No evidence for other universes

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After I wrote this post I did some reading. And, yes, people do think about what is outside our universe, but have found no evidence for other universes interacting with ours. But neither is there evidence for a god-creater (if you ignore secondary evidence such as the Bible) either.

There is nothing like consilience, the convergence of evidence to something.

What is wrong with rationalism?

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This was supposed to be posted here instead of my other blog. 

Warren Tang's avatarghoti

The assumptions.

Rationalism assumes that reason gives us all knowledge. It overrides emotion and belief. It also override the senses as the path to truth. It is directly opposed to empiricism.

Reason takes on a mysticism similar to that of the soul, whereby a body is unnecessary. So it is part of the mind-body problem in Western philosophy, culture and thinking.

Sensory knowledge is not perfect. But neither is rational knowledge. Both should be considered inseparable. And both should be considered necessary to any knowledge.

Rationalism and Empiricism should not opposing ideas. There should be a philosophy of Rational Empiricism or Empirical Rationalism.

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An alternative theory to multiverses (parallel universes)

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Most talk on multiple universes tend to be about parallel universes and are trendily called “multiverses”. But why do universes have to be parallel? Why can they not be independent universes occupying their own patch of space, its light yet to have reached us. 

I call these non-parallel universes. Perhaps beyond our universe’s edge in space is another universe created out of a big bang like our universe had been. Who is to say there has to be only one universe? Perhaps two (or more) universes have come together already and we have not noticed the evidence.