It was occurring to me last night, while watching The Seventh Seal at the Castro in the wake of reading Orson Scott Card's "Ender Quartet", that free will is an illusion in the same way the Buddhists describe phenomenal existence as an illusion-not that it doesn't exist, but more that it doesn't exist the way that we think it does. In the end, ( Read more... )

A take on the Book of Genesis which I had not previously considered.
It has often been argued, in fact, that mankind lost the happiness characteristic of his fellow-animals when he acquired self-consciousness. This is in fact the meaning of the legend of "The Fall." We have become as gods, knowing good and evil, and the price is that we live by ( Read more... )

In other of my philosophical writings I have endeavoured to show that the ratiocinative faculty was in its nature unable to solve any single problem of the universe.

Its reductio ad absurdum is clear enough in the gorgeous first section of Herbert Spencer's First Principles. Kant demonstrated the Dualism and inherent Self-contradiction well enough ( Read more... )