The Significance of Spiritual Epiphanies with Jeffrey Kripal

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His books include Kali’s Child, Esalen, Authors of the Impossible, The Serpent’s Gift, Mutants and Mystics, The Supernatural (with Whitley Strieber), and Secret Body. He is coauthor, with Elizabeth Krohn, of Changed in a Flash: One Woman’s Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All. His most recent book is The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge. His website is https://jeffreyjkripal.com/ Professor Kripal organized the Archives of the Impossible symposium at Ric University. See https://impossiblearchives.rice.edu/ Here he points out that spiritual epiphanies can occur to individuals with strong scientific backgrounds and materialistic beliefs, such as Nobel laureate Kary Mullis or professional skeptic Michael Shermer. Sometimes, but not always, such events lead to profound shifts in belief. Synchronistic events can shape major cultural shifts, such has occurred with the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement. He points out that, often, such epiphanies defy all attempts at rational explanation. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on March 24, 2022)

What Every Childhood Trauma Survivor Needs To Unlearn

Annie Tanasugarn, PhDAnnie Tanasugarn, PhD

Psychologist. Certified Trauma & Relationship Specialist. Consultant. Helping others build a solid sense of Self with a side of badassery.

Mar 13 (Medium.com)

Unlearning these is what leads to our empowerment

dganin/pexels

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 61% of adults report having had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) and 16% reported scores of four or more. If you’re interested in taking the ACE test, you can go here.

Childhood trauma comes in many forms, which commonly include: our emotional, social, or psychological needs going unmet, our physical needs (food, shelter, water, safety, warmth) going unmet, divorce/physical abandonment, physical/emotional/psychological/sexual abuse, witnessing violence, alcoholism/drug addiction, sexual addictions/other addictions, poverty, or a lack of consistent rules and boundaries. This list isn’t exhaustive, and other forms of childhood maltreatment are less common but are still documented, such as war, natural disaster, or gang violence.

Elevated ACE scores of four, or higher, exponentially increase risks of emotional, psychological, and physical disorders and diseases including reduced emotional empathy; low emotional intelligence; personality or mood disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); and major depression or bipolar disorder. Additionally, it is reported that there are positive correlations with physical diseases and higher ACE scores, including asthma, high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

With facts like these, it makes it even more critical for us to examine how our childhood may have affected our adult lives. While it’s hard enough reaching a place of acceptance that adult intimate relationship abuse (narcissistic abuse) isn’t love, it begs us to look even closer at how our adverse childhood experiences may have set the stage for us getting tangled up in toxic adult relationships.

Unlearn Trying To Please People. The fact is, some are going to have an opinion — from parents and caregivers who may have abused you, to an ex who discarded you for whatever they had on the side. And, a hard truth is that their opinion will likely be based on self-preservation and misinformation. Others may base their opinion on half-assed information, or a Herd Mentality.

Will they gossip about you? Maybe.

Will they obscure facts or try to make you look “crazy” to spare themselves? Perhaps.

The fact is, people dismiss what they don’t understand or what they see as threatening to their Ego. If their lives have been arranged in such a way as to shun those with different lived experiences from their own, forget them. You don’ t owe them an explanation or an apology. And, you aren’t obligated to set space aside for them in your life.

The sooner we unlearn thinking we have to appease others, the sooner we begin healing.

Unlearn Believing You Deserved It. No one deserves it. No. One. Not even a parent who lived their life parenting us from a place of torture, captivity, or restraint. When we release ourselves from thinking that we deserved their abuse, it frees us. We are no longer held captive by their agenda. It’s the emotional scars that are carried with us, long after the physical ones have faded. It’s these emotional scars that fool us into believing we somehow “caused” their abuse, or “deserved” their mistreatment.

A hard truth is that inter-generational trauma is repeated and carried from one generation to the next because the older generation taught abuse as “normal” while the younger generation accepted it as something being wrong with them, or that this is just how things are.

Once we take a few steps back and see the crazy-making nonsense for what it is, it gets easier to release ourselves from the misbeliefs that we somehow “deserved” abuse.

We didn’t.

Unlearn Thinking You Can’t Heal. The reason we believe we can’t heal from our pain is because we wound up carrying it with us when it was never our burden to carry. It was our parents’ and caregiver’s burden. Their responsibility.

Our choices are a direct result of the things we were taught in our earliest years. Our attachment style, our beliefs on whether we think people are genuinely good, how we see ourselves, and how we engage in our world, are the messages taught to us by our caregivers.

And, they’re teaching us from how they see the world.

A hard truth is that there is a difference between can’t, and won’t.

Many survivors of abuse wind up living their lives in one of two ways:

They either wind up betraying themselves into believing that their opinions, feelings, and experiences are invalid and as a result, they become vulnerable for more abuse. These are the people who find themselves in one toxic friendship or intimate relationship after another and often question, “Why?” The answer: It’s because they haven’t learned their value or to stop betraying their sense of Self.

On the flipside are those who abandon everyone around them and hold tight to the misbeliefs, misinformation, and misguided agendas they were taught. They often find themselves bored, restless, disillusioned, and going from one relationship or situation to another. Never happy. Never seeing that they’re perpetuating lies that keep them unhappy and disillusioned. The result: They also wind up abandoning their sense of Self and take on the identity of those who spoonfed them lies and abuse.

But, there’s a third option. Some call it The Road Less Traveled. Some call it Fighting the Good Fight. There’s reasons for this; the road less traveled has many bumps, detours, and risks. There’s no roadmap, and many fear getting lost along the way.

And, the good fight will inevitably leave a few emotional bruises if we choose to get in that boxing ring. We can block, duck and run…but that only perpetuates what we were taught earlier. Fighting the Good Fight means taking that risk, facing it head-on, and standing our ground.

So, some won’t choose these routes. But, the thing is, no one really tells us that it’s the Road Less Traveled and the Good Fight that lead to empowerment, to growth, and to healing.

But, they are…

Unlearn Distracting Yourself. A hard truth is we distract ourselves from healing because distractions numb. They perpetuate feeling nothing or feeling a momentary high that pushes our pain to the back of the line. Then, another inevitable crash. And another distraction is turned to. This is how a cycle of self-numbing begins — whether its based on self-medicating, technology/gaming addiction, shopping, workaholism, perfectionism, or idealism— anything that catches our attention long enough to distract us from our pain is what we turn to.

Distractions all have us by the short-fuzzies. We live in a world of distraction. It’s a quick fix for anyone who isn’t wanting to heal, is afraid of the pain of healing, or is ashamed that they will be judged for wanting to heal. Walking away from distractions takes inner strength. We’ll be tempted and will have to resist being pulled back into it. Those who authentically care about us will support us in slowing things down, tossing out the video games for quiet conversation, or the noise and chaos for an introspective hike in nature.

The fact is, pain, anger, anxiety, and negative Self-talk are all there for a reason: to wake us up. And they beg to be healed. Why do you think depression, anxiety, and addictive behaviors are cyclic? Because they show up as manifestations of unhealed pain. Distractions are merely bandaids; not solutions.

And, as with any bandaid, it either needs to be replaced with another bandaid, or it has to be tended to, so it can heal.

The Prosperos Dean Search

April 4, 2022

I sent the following email to Rick Thomas, President of the Trustees, on April 3, 2022. Today he said he would forward it on to the Dean Search Committee (HughJohn Malanaphy, Anne Bollman, Calvin Harris):

–Mike Zonta, BB editor

Rick, thanks for opening up the Dean search to the broader student body.  Not sure I agree with your search committee selection.  A little too orthodox for my taste.

Glad also you are open to examining the role of the Dean’s office.  Since Thane and Jesus are not available for this position, that’s quite a list of duties.    [The Dean Search Committee is “looking for a person, a spiritual leader who can fill the role not only of administrator but of visionary, political cheerleader and spokesperson for our School.  Someone we can recognize as elevated in perception, clearly conscious of The Prosperos goals and deeply involved and committed to the task of revealing spiritual truth – one student at a time.”]

That’s why I think a more healthy, and less hierarchical, direction for the school to take would be to have the Executive Council as a whole take on this role (the role of Dean) which up to now has been fulfilled by one person.  The Executive Council has been THE decision-making body throughout the history of the school.  Even when Thane was dean, all decisions of the Executive Council had to be unanimous.  

In effect, this would be getting rid of the title and role of Dean but the duties, including visionary, cheerleader, spokesperson, etc., would be fulfilled by the all three members of the Executive Council, not a single person. 

Why should one person be the visionary or the cheerleader or the spokesperson for our school?  We all have a stake in the future of our school.

It is as a group we will grow or perish.  And being led by a group, even such a small group as the Executive Council, would be a small step in the direction of a more group-centered leadership model for the school as a whole.

Mike Zonta, H.W., M.

P.S.  If people really feel that only one person can be a spokesperson for the school, a compromise version of this idea would be to have a rotating dean among the three members of the Executive Council, like some cities have rotating mayors on a yearly basis.  As far as being a visionary or a cheerleader, that should be up to all of us.

Tarot Card for April 4: The Fool

The Fool

The Fool is the first card of the Tarot and is generally unnumbered, or numbered zero. The Fool is at the start of our journey and is the initiator. Seen by many as the innocent, he has an eagerness and freshness about him. He is young and carefree, entering the World without preconceptions.

The Fool trusts in life and expects his path to be a happy and rewarding one. There is faith in the gods to see him through and a complete absence of fear.

Sometimes the Fool is seen as too carefree – certainly a good dose of other people’s more negative reality could damage him. However, for as long as the Fool has faith in his own purity and innocence, others will not be able to take advantage.

This is the child within. This is how we were before the many experiences of life forced us to build up so many walls. The Fool does not shade himself from the light – here we are born and from here we walk the path. It’s time to jump off the cliff…

The Fool

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

The war in Ukraine and a ‘turning point in history’

Image without a caption

By Ishaan Tharoor Columnist Yesterday (WashingtonPost.com)

A Ukrainian service member stands in front of an Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo plane destroyed by Russian troops in Hostomel, Ukraine, on April 3. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

Five weeks ago, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a fateful speech in reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His government’s decision to, among other things, inject more than $100 billion into the country’s military and deliver lethal support to Kyiv marked a sweeping policy shift away from decades of constitutional pacifism that had kept Germany often on the sidelines of major conflicts.Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

It was, in the words of Scholz and his allies, a “Zeitenwende” — a turning point in history, a watershed moment made all the more pronounced by the German language’s knack for sprawling, declarative nouns.Advertisement

On a visit to Washington last week, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said that Germany “cannot look away or stand apart,” and that this “Zeitenwende cannot be had for free.” After clinging to European visions of perpetual peace, war in the heart of the continent had shaken Germany’s cautious political establishment into action.

For many on both sides of the Atlantic, the battles in Ukraine may even mark something more stark — a “Zeitenbruch,” as coined by former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, which is a rupture in history, the closing of one age and the entry into another marked by even deeper uncertainty and great power rivalry.

This 60-foot Ukrainian flag was unfurled off the side of a hotel located across the street from the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/UbQCwt5jId— NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 10, 2022

In Washington, let alone the capitals of Western Europe, there’s a palpable change in atmosphere. The heroism of Ukraine’s defenders and the reported atrocities carried out by Russian forces have fired the imaginations of the Beltway class, which after years of quagmire and stalemate in the Middle East now has a far more morally clear and potentially winnable conflict to get behind.Advertisement

American flags seldom fly in my left-leaning Washington neighborhood, but a brief Sunday stroll turned up myriad iterations of Ukraine’s blue-yellow bars hanging from fences and doorways. European diplomats in the city speak of an unprecedented solidarity among NATO allies and hail the Biden administration’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine and sweeping sanctions on Russia. The West as a geopolitical entity has rarely been more united as a bloc and more coherent as a political project.

For some U.S. commentators, Ukraine is not just ground zero in a confrontation with the Kremlin, but the battlefield for the future of liberalism. “If [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is successful in undermining Ukrainian independence and democracy, the world will return to an era of aggressive and intolerant nationalism reminiscent of the early twentieth century,” warned political theorist Francis Fukuyama. “The United States will not be immune from this trend, as populists such as [Donald] Trump aspire to replicate Putin’s authoritarian ways.”

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum located in Ukraine the launchpad for an ever-expanding ideological war against illiberal autocracy. “Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China,” she wrote. “But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others.”

For 50 years Washington armed and abetted mortal enemies of Indian democracy.

Now Washington threatens India with “consequences” for refusing to break with Russia—India’s most reliable partner for 60 years—over a war in faraway Europe.

Is this “friendship” or imperial contempt?— Kapil Komireddi (@kapskom) April 2, 2022

Russia’s war in Ukraine galvanizes extremists globally

Yet, for many outside the West, the moment is less a turning point than a reminder of the past. Critics point to a long tradition of Western double standards on the world stage. The Russian invasion elicited a Western response that was swift and all-encompassing — Ukrainian refugees were welcomed, while governments imposed crippling sanctions on Russia for its violation of international law. Where was such action in other contexts, they argue, including those where the United States and allies were complicit in ruinous wars and occupations?Advertisement

“We have seen every means we were told could not be activated for over 70 years deployed in less than seven days,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said at a security conference in Turkey in March. “Amazing hypocrisy.”

A delivery driver in Baghdad recently told the Associated Press that Iraqi insurgency against U.S. troops was as justified as Ukrainian resistance to Russian forces. “If anything, the resistance to the Americans in Iraq was more justified, given that the Americans traveled thousands of kilometers to come to our country, while the Russians are going after a supposed threat next door to them,” he said.

In the West, the fight over Ukraine is seen with almost Churchillian clarity. Elsewhere — particularly in countries that have reasons to doubt Winston Churchill and Western moralism — suspicion and distrust endures. “You never know when the U.S. will spring a nasty surprise on you and start to look at you negatively, which is something the world’s only Hindu-majority country has to worry about,” right-wing Indian journalist Raghavan Jagannathan told my colleague Gerry Shih. “You have an Abrahamic past. There’s a strong binary of, ‘You’re right or wrong, you’re with us or against us.’ ”Advertisement

Even in Germany, more than a month after Scholz’s speech, it’s not clear how transformative this “Zeitenwende” may be. The war in Ukraine may bog down into a conflict of attrition, raising the stakes the longer it drags out. Scholz may have initiated a sea-change in German defense policy but has so far resisted calls for wholesale bans on imports of Russian natural gas and oil, which fill the Kremlin’s coffers yet also buttress much of the German economy.

“The Zeitenwende speech broke some taboos in German foreign policy, but so far these are only enough to soothe the German conscience,” wrote Berlin-based analyst Oxana Schmies. “Economic opportunism has not yet been overcome either. Strategic thinking has yet to establish itself in the body politic.”

“The problem is that no one knows how long the Zeitenwende will actually last because now comes the hard part,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “If the war starts to ramp down, I worry that there will be a real desire for things to go back to how they were, and that’s just not possible.”

War in Ukraine: What you need to know

The latest: Russian troops appeared to be regrouping and shifting their focus away from Kyiv. That could set the stage for a new phase in the conflict — centered on the country’s east — that military analysts warn could be long and bloody. Also, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Ukrainians to prepare for “difficult fights” ahead in the besieged port city of Mariupol. And on the southern coast, explosions were heard throughout Odessa on Sunday morning.

The fight: Nearly five weeks into their invasion, Russian forces continue to mount sporadic attacks on civilian targets in a number of Ukrainian cities. Russia has been accused of committing war crimes.

The weapons: Ukraine is making use of weapons such as Javelin antitank missiles and Switchblade “kamikaze” drones, provided by the United States and other allies. Russia has used an array of weapons against Ukraine, some of which have drawn the attention and concern of analysts.

In Russia: Putin has locked down the flow of information within Russia, where the war isn’t even being called a war. The last independent newsletter in Russia suspended its operations Monday.

Photos: Post photographers have been on the ground from the very beginning of the war — here’s some of their most powerful work.

How you can help: Here are ways those in the U.S. can help support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

washingtonpost.com © 1996-2022 The Washington Post

(Submitted by Sarah Flynn)

David Bohm’s last words

On the afternoon of October 27, 1992, David Bohm was at Birkbeck College, the University of London, putting the finishing touches on a book that would sum up his lifelong struggle to create an alternative quantum theory. At six-fifteen he telephoned his wife, Saral, to let her know he was about to leave. “You know, it’s tantalizing,” he said. “I feel I’m on the edge of something.”‘ An hour later, just as his taxi pulled up outside his home, Bohm suffered a massive heart attack and died.

(whatisgoingon.org)

Book: “Thought as a System”

Thought as a System

Thought as a System

by David BohmLee Nichol (Foreword by) 

This study concerns the role of thought and knowledge. The author rejects the notion that our thinking processes neutrally report on what is out there in an objective world. He explores the manner in which thought actively participates in forming our perceptions, our sense of meaning and our daily actions. He suggests that collective thought and knowledge have become so automated that we are in large part controlled by them, with a subsequent loss of authenticity, freedom and order.

(Goodreads.com)

Bio: David Chalmers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Chalmers
Chalmers in 2008
BornDavid John Chalmers
20 April 1966 (age 55)
SydneyNew South Wales, Australia
Alma materUniversity of Adelaide
Lincoln College, Oxford
Indiana University Bloomington (PhD, 1993)
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic
ThesisToward a Theory of Consciousness (1993)
Doctoral advisorDouglas Hofstadter
Main interestsPhilosophy of mind
Consciousness
Philosophy of language
Notable ideasHard problem of consciousnessextended mindtwo-dimensional semanticsnaturalistic dualismphilosophical zombie
showInfluences
showInfluenced
WebsiteOfficial website

David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃælmərz/;[1] born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block).[2][3] In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.[4] In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[5]

Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness. He is the cofounder of PhilPapers (a database of journal articles for professionals and students in philosophy) along with David Bourget.

Early life and education

Chalmers was born in SydneyNew South Wales, in 1966, and subsequently grew up in AdelaideSouth Australia.[6] As a child, he experienced synesthesia.[6] He also performed exceptionally in mathematics, and secured a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad.[6]

Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia[7] and continued his studies at the University of Oxford,[7] where he was a Rhodes Scholar.[8] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter,[9] writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.[8] He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.

Career

In 1994, Chalmers presented a lecture at the inaugural Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.[9] According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this “lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence.”[9] He went on to coorganize the conference (now renamed “The Science of Consciousness”) for some years with Stuart Hameroff, but stepped away when it became too divergent from mainstream science.[9] Chalmers is also a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, as well as one of its past presidents.[10]

Having established his reputation, Chalmers received his first professorship the following year, at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998. In 1996, while teaching there, he published the widely cited book The Conscious Mind. Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and, subsequently, Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona, sponsor of the conference that had first brought him to prominence. In 2004, Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARC Federation Fellowship, becoming Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University.[citation needed] Chalmers accepted a part-time professorship at the philosophy department of New York University in 2009, and then a full-time professorship there in 2014.[11]

In 2013, Chalmers was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[5] He is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[12] In May 2018, it was announced that he would serve on the jury for the Berggruen Prize.[13]

Philosophical work

Philosophy of mind

Chalmers on stage for an Alan Turing Year event at De La Salle University, Manila, March 27, 2012

Chalmers is best known for formulating what he calls the “hard problem of consciousness,” in both his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. He makes a distinction between “easy” problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated “why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?” The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind: physicalism. Chalmers argues for an “explanatory gap” from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as “naturalistic dualism”: naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene “naturally” on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. He has also characterized his view by more traditional formulations such as property dualism.

In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies.[14] These zombies are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone; the facts about them are further facts. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties,[15] and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms “psychophysical laws” that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries. According to Chalmers, his arguments are similar to a line of thought that goes back to Leibniz‘s 1714 “mill” argument; the first substantial use of philosophical “zombie” terminology may be Robert Kirk‘s 1974 “Zombies vs. Materialists”.[16]

After the publication of Chalmers’ landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. These papers (by Daniel DennettColin McGinnFrancisco VarelaFrancis Crick, and Roger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem.[17] John Searle critiqued Chalmers’ views in The New York Review of Books.[18][19]

With Andy Clark, Chalmers has written “The Extended Mind“, an article about the borders of the mind.[20]

Philosophy of language

Chalmers has published works on the “theory of reference” concerning how words secure their referents. He, together with others such as Frank Jackson, proposes a kind of theory called two dimensionalism arguing against Saul Kripke. Before Kripke delivered the famous lecture series Naming and Necessity in 1970, the descriptivism advocated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell was the orthodoxy. Descriptivism suggests that a name is indeed an abbreviation of a description, which is a set of properties or, as later modified by John Searle, a disjunction of properties. This name secures its reference by a process of properties fitting: whichever object fits the description most, then it is the referent of the name. Therefore, the description is seen as the connotation, or, in Fregean terms, the sense of the name, and it is via this sense by which the denotation of the name is determined.

However, as Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity, a name does not secure its reference via any process of description fitting. Rather, a name determines its reference via a historical-causal link tracing back to the process of naming. And thus, Kripke thinks that a name does not have a sense, or, at least, does not have a sense which is rich enough to play the reference-determining role. Moreover, a name, in Kripke’s view, is a rigid designator, which refers to the same object in all possible worlds. Following this line of thought, Kripke suggests that any scientific identity statement such as “Water is H2O” is also a necessary statement, i.e. true in all possible worlds. Kripke thinks that this is a phenomenon that the descriptivist cannot explain.

And, as also proposed by Hilary Putnam and Kripke himself, Kripke’s view on names can also be applied to the reference of natural kind terms. The kind of theory of reference that is advocated by Kripke and Putnam is called the direct reference theory.

However, Chalmers disagrees with Kripke, and all the direct reference theorists in general. He thinks that there are two kinds of intension of a natural kind term, a stance which is now called two dimensionalism. For example, the words,”Water is H2O”

are taken to express two distinct propositions, often referred to as a primary intension and a secondary intension, which together compose its meaning.[21]

The primary intension of a word or sentence is its sense, i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent. The primary intension of “water” might be a description, such as watery stuff. The thing picked out by the primary intension of “water” could have been otherwise. For example, on some other world where the inhabitants take “water” to mean watery stuff, but where the chemical make-up of watery stuff is not H2O, it is not the case that water is H2O for that world.

The secondary intension of “water” is whatever thing “water” happens to pick out in this world, whatever that world happens to be. So if we assign “water” the primary intension watery stuff then the secondary intension of “water” is H2O, since H2O is watery stuff in this world. The secondary intension of “water” in our world is H2O, and is H2O in every world because unlike watery stuff it is impossible for H2O to be other than H2O. When considered according to its secondary intension, water means H2O in every world. Via this secondary intension, Chalmers proposes a way simultaneously to explain the necessity of the identity statement and to preserve the role of intension/sense in determining the reference.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

Book: “Avesta”

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Avesta

by Avesta 

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: … Be it with the hands inflicts, or gives good to the body, He gives according to the wish and will of Ahura-Mazda. 3. Whoso is the best for the pure, be it through relationship or deeds, 0r through obedience, 0 Ahura, caring for the cattle with activity, He finds himself in the service of Asha and of Vohu-mand. 4. I curse, 0 Mazda, disobedience against Thee and the evil mindedness, The despising of relationship, the Drukhs nearest to the work.f The disdainer of obedience, the bad measure of the fodder of the cattle. 5. I to thy Qraosha.J as the greatest of all, call for help: Give us long life in the kingdom of Vohu-mano, Unto the pure paths of purity, in which Ahura-Mazda dwells. 6. What Zaota (walks) in the pure (paths) of purity he desires after the heavenly Paradise, From him has he help through the Spirit, who thinks the works which are to be done, These are desired by Thee, Ahura-Mazda, for seeing and conversation. 7. Come to me ye best, of Himself may Mazda show to us, Together with Asha and Vohu-mano, who are to be praised before the greatest; May the manifest offerings be manifest to us the worshippers. 8. Teach me to know both laws that I may walk with Vohu-mano. (Teach me to know) the offering of Thy equal Mazda, then your laudable sayings, 0 Asha, Which were made by you as help for Ameretat, as reward for Haurvat. 9. May the dominion greatly increase to Thee, Mazda, (and) to this heavenly (Vohu-mand); May there come brightness, enduring, wisdom through the’ best spirit, Accomplishment of that whereby the souls cohere. 10. All the enjoyments of life, which were and still are, And which will be, these distribute according to Thy will; May I increase through Vohu-mand, Khshathra and Asha in happiness for the body. 11….

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