HA,
The Ouroboros is simply a symbol.
The symbol represents the self consuming itself, which is a good description of the process that happens once "you" start investigating the nature of "you" seriously. That's what Nick and I are referring to, although I suspect Nick conceptually reduces it all to brain states, while I see brain states and personal egos as phenomena playing out within the fundamental unity of Awareness.
Nick did a very nice job explaining why seeing the reality of the "self" explodes egotism.
In fact, altruism may even be more reasonable, on grounds of symmetry and the fact that 'the self' is an illusion.
I think Richard Dawkins is on the right track with his idea of "memes". If the Buddha were alive today, I suspect he would call the self, and self-centered thinking a particularly prevalent and virulent meme infesting our cognitive facilities. And amazing but true, it is quite possible to visualize the operation of the "self" in its meme-hood and cease to identify with it, as even materialistic atheists like Susan Blackmor...
This is exactly what I mean, there are strong cognitive biases underlying the singularitarian ideas. . .
I'm not sure what he means much of the time, but Kevembuangga hits this particular ball out of the park. Perhaps someone will write up a disagreement case study about the "Singularity" and post it here. That would be quite the treat. I'm already working on a different disagreement case study that will be posted to my own blog in the relatively near future. Cool concept, these disagreement case studies. . .
Michael,
I think the problematic belief system is not just "materialism" but rather "reductionistic materialism". A good example of that would be someone who is certain that all phenomena in the universe are simply an outcome of the Schrodinger Equation. The kinds of evidence that I feel are incompatible with reductionistic materialism include spontaneous precognition, spontaneous telepathy, controlled laboratory studies showing these effects, triple-blind mediumship studies, etc.
The truth-seeking approach is to allow observations and ...
Mitchell,
What I find particularly interesting reading his papers is his emphasis that space and time are features of the macroscopic world, and don't go "all the way down".
They seem absolute and real to us because of our evolutionary psychology and especially the "space and time" orientation of the visual maps in our brains. He contrasts his view with interpretations which postulate an infinitely sliced spatial manifold which is fundamentally real, but cannot be measured at the finest scales. I'm assuming by that he is referring to MW...
There is an interesting critique of MWI here that I just finished reading. An fascinating topic to be sure. . .
Michael,
Monism simply means the philosophy that the universe is fundamentally comprised of one type of reality. One can be a physical monist (materialist), neutral monist or mental monist (idealist).
I haven't defended people who spend large amounts of money on lottery tickets, clearly that is a disfunctional behavior.
But I have and do defend small-time purchase lottery tickets (at least up to $104 a year, that gets you one powerball ticket for each drawing). If someone wants to daydream about becoming a millionaire for much less money than daydreaming about hollywood stars in movies on a regular basis, I cannot call that a sin.
How and why the current reigning philosophical hegemon (reductionistic materialism) is obviously correct, unbiased, rational, and factual, while the reigning philosophical viewpoints of all past societies and civilizations are obviously suspect and based solely on superstitious nonsense and irrational dogma, and how the future will judge us as essentially correct in this matter, unlike how we judge all previous civilizations.
A nice coda would be some well-placed rocks thrown at anyone who would challenge the current paradigm, since they are obviously just ...