In Defense of Descartes

Rene Descartes

One thing that struck me about Descartes, and I’ve remembered it my entire life, was that he was allowed to lie in bed in the morning. He retained that habit throughout his life as he believed it was “conducive to intellectual profit and comfort.” I’ve never had that luxury until the last dozen years or so. Since I am now blessed with insomnia, I awaken early in the morning. I just simply lie still with nothing but my thoughts and prayers. Every now and then a revelation comes to me and a post is born. Continue reading

Consciousness Explained

Potemkin Village

There is no point being concerned about conscious experience, although everyone is. All your pains, anxiety, depression, fears, and so on, do not matter for the world process. Neither do your joys, pleasures, and so on. They are merely epiphenomena of biological processes. That view is eerily reminiscent of those Gnostic sects that believed we were created by an evil demiurge. The Demiurge trapped our consciousnesses in a world of matter, with no ability to escape. We are doomed to suffer in matter, yet unable to do anything about it.
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The Third Ring of Saturn

ring around saturn

George Santayana is the third of the Saturnine philosophers, following Spinoza and Schopenhauer. Although all three have a similar understanding of the Manifest world, the differ on how to express the Unseen. By dint of human effort, they rise to the top of the Visible world and point their mental telescopes at the sky. There they find the secret sun, which shines so bright, that its light hides all the lesser lights of the Visible World.
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