Originally I was going to go ahead and talk about one of the second chapter’s themes, but the more I tried to write, the more I realized that there was another theme from the first chapter that I still needed to address. After saying a bit about the Dao and about the limitations of language …
Author Archives: hermitalex
On The Daodejing — The Dao
A couple years ago I started a series of posts on the Daodejing in which I attempted to say anything I could think of regarding every one of its 81 passages. This turned out to be a bad approach for me, and I soon started skipping chapters before dropping the project not even halfway through …
Issues in Extrapolating a Physicalist Conquest of Consciousness from Physicalism’s defeat of Vitalism
In online discussions on the hard problem of consciousness, I have on many occasions seen people object to the alleged intractability of the hard problem by drawing a comparison with vitalism. They point out that vitalism, much like the hard problem, posed a challenge to physicalism by arguing that physicalism was incapable of fully explaining …
Knowledge in Theory and Practice
As human beings, we all hold beliefs about which we feel so certain as to call them “knowledge” (in the sense of “knowledge-that”). Despite our confidence in these beliefs, in some future we might encounter information showing that they’re mistaken. We would then reevaluate these beliefs and say that they were never really knowledge; but …
On Desire; Its Motivations and Perversions
It moves us. Motivates us. Pulls us along as if on strings. It has been called the cause of all suffering, and many people have fallen into misfortune for following its siren song. Seeing the problems desire can cause, some people call for its elimination. So long as we live, however, desire is inescapable, and …
Daoism as Going with the Flow
When first looking into Daoism, it is common for people to understand the philosophy as saying that one should go with the flow, or just do whatever one feels like doing. While these descriptions aren’t entirely wrong, they’re vague and ambiguous, and not every sense in which they can be taken actually agrees with what …
Ruminations on Zero (and Infinity)
Zero is a strange beast. It is the only number that is neither positive nor negative, it is arguably neither real nor imaginary (or maybe both), and it’s the only number that in modern mathematics no number can be divided by. The way that 0 sometimes behaves like any other number and sometimes doesn’t reminds …
On Epiphenomenalism
Physicalist philosophers, recognizing that the existence of consciousness poses a threat to their worldview, have been trying recently to come up with theories that can explain the existence of consciousness within a physicalist framework, which usually involves turning consciousness into a completely pointless addition to the universe. They dismiss it as a mere illusion or …
My Meditation Story
Over the past couple years, I’ve been practicing meditation on and off and I wanted to write down some of my journey over that time. I started out trying to learn how to meditate for the same of learning how to lucid dream through the WILD method (which I never did achieve), though I soon …
Unmagical Magic
Most people believe that magic–not in the sense of prestidigitation and illusionism, but in the sense of sorcery–involves such exotic things as immaterial beings, subtle substances, and other planes of existence. However, there are practitioners of magic who assert that invocations, spells, charms and the like all work, but they do so through purely psychological …
Under the Spell of Words 