Consider the Simulation Hypothesis. How many people are contemptuously dismissive of "Creation Theory," while at the same time credibly entertain The Simulation Hypothesis? It occurs to me that the Simulation Hypothesis boils down to the idea that we are all just playthings or figments of the imagination of God or gods, given a technological ( Read more... )

Is there a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for deciding to engage in a sexual relationship? How do I know when that set of conditions is met?

I was rolling around the subject of my sexual ethics and I believe that I have obtained a better handle on identifying my moral premises on the topic:
Ethical statemeent: I will only engage in a ( Read more... )

Observation: It is difficult to write about the things which are extremely important in a timely fashion. Also, I have to change some privacy settings on some entries I have made here. I promised Laurel that I would do this, because she wants me to do so, but I have not attended to this yet. I feel guilty about this, but I have not put the time and ( Read more... )

We keep getting stuck here all the time...

I've been thinking about the problem of circles and cycles in thought and action. I may lament them, but the real question is do they have purpose. Cyclic processes are intrinsic to nature. Feedback systems, iterative processes, successive approximation, fuzzy-logic, the OODA loop, all of these are ( Read more... )

Without self-knowledge and self-confrontation philosophy is a farcical exercise in context-dropping and categorization error.
The further on I go, oh the less I know ( Read more... )

I went to see a movie last night called "The Age of Adeline." It's kind of a science-fantasy movie about a woman who was born in 1908 and stopped aging sometime around the time she was thirty. She meets a man in the modern day and their relationship is seemingly doomed by the problem that she doesn't age and cannot tell anyone about it. It was ( Read more... )

"Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world ( Read more... )

Love and sex are two distinctly different things which must be consciously integrated by act of will in order for a person to be psychologically and philosophically healthy. Why is this so? It is because while sex and love are not the same and are distinctly different, human beings are integrated, mind and body, flesh and spirit, by nature. We are ( Read more... )

In Brené Brown's video, she discusses the difference between sympathy and empathy. She breaks empathy down into four components, as I have documented in another entry. Brown distinguishes sympathy from empathy. She does this according to characteristic behaviors and effects associated with sympathy vs. empathy, but Brown does not identify the ( Read more... )

OK, I miss her. It hit me this morning. It will probably start doing that at odd times. This is the typical pattern for loss with me - distress and weeping punctuating periods of numbness where feelings have been closed off behind a water-tight hatch. Nevertheless, if I were really interested in evading my feelings then obviously, listening to ( Read more... )