If you live in an urban environment, or work in an indoor setting, chances are you may be experiencing symptoms of ‘nature deficit disorder. Nature deficit disorder can come in many forms, from a sense of disconnection, depression, stress, ADD, high blood pressure, just to name few.
Throughout time, human beings have communed with nature and seen it as a magical source of spirituality.
Based on our third-wave framing of predictive processing, we argued in our previous post (4) that generative models cannot be unplugged from the world, given that action couples the agent to the environment.
In ‘Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic investigation of default inferences’,(Synthese, 2019) Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhard, Joachim Horvath and Hiroshi Ohtani seek to take experimental philosophy beyond the study of intuitions and highlight links to one of its historical precursors.
Here we have to look at a broader literature and make some inferences, but a pattern does seem to emerge. First, agnostics and atheists tend to score higher than believers on tests of intellectual ability such as standard IQ tests. Religious skeptics score more highly than believers on both the verbal and the quantitative sections …
There are many ways to classify the myriad systems of belief about the nature of the world and humanity’s relationship to it, but for present purposes a very simple distinction between two broad categories will do. In the accompanying table, I include a third category for the sake of completeness. I will return to it …
Many people introduced to Stoicism by twenty-first-century popularizers are surprised by the religious nature of the philosophy. The deafening silence on this topic leaves most people unaware of the deep religious piety of the Stoics.
Attempts to define mystical experience have been as diversified and as conflicting as attempts to interpret and assess its significance. This is not surprising, for the language used to express and describe mystical experience is richly paradoxical, figurative, and poetical.
Betting is cognitive and entertaining, and for many people it is a very profitable business. The essence of it is that: the bookmaker offers you to bet, according to the coefficient she sets, that a sporting event will occur. The bookmaker determines the coefficient, from the probability in his opinion of betting, the coefficient may …
If you bring together two enigmas, do you get a bigger enigma, or do they cancel each other out, like multiplied negative numbers, to produce clarity? The latter, I hope, as I take on Wittgenstein and mysticism.