• What’s your description of Metaphysics?
    Please explain, beyond the perspective of metaphysics initially given? Or beyond the perspective that, with regard to metaphysics, while it is futile in its attempt to access Truth; it is valuable in its efforts at accessing that which structures our experiences, ultimately Fiction, and since we seem to be inescably bound to the Fiction, the more we understand it the better?
  • What’s your description of Metaphysics?
    Not no to metaphysics. It's the foundation upon which all other human, hence, ultimately fictional pursuits are built, from poetry to mathematics.
  • What’s your description of Metaphysics?
    An archeological dig of a site structured by Fiction, applying as tools of excavation, the very same Fictional structures, hoping to find Reality, but digging up the only possibility, artifacts of Fiction, improperly labeled and indexed as Reality; all the while forgetting that the digger is Real, and the site is Fiction.
  • An irony, perhaps, in the Leftist takes on Immigration and Palestine.
    Flannel J, I appreciate the point you are making but I think your premise is naive, one-dimensional, or wrong. I don't think the immigration of Jewish people into Palestine pre-state of Israel can stand alone as the cause of Palestinians' suffering. I don't think they are or were opposed to the Jewish settlers' way of life. I don't think Palestine was a majority 90% Muslim, but already had a significant indigenous Christian and smaller Jewish population. I dont think therefore that the allegedly leftist position on immigration does pose the amusing inconsistency you suggest. I think that if the current migration of Muslims (as you say) into western countries was coupled with an international order that these migrants be permitted to partition the US or UK and set up their own state, even western so called leftists might object. While you highlight that you are a leftist, you are implying that immigration alone, in mass numbers could create the same problem for Americans and Western Europeans as it (you imply) did for the Palestinians. The better analogy would be to compare Palestine/Israel to the expansion of the US by white settlers into Mexican or Native territories and the corresponding imposition of American statehood on same. If the indigenous Americans (rather than the so-called Left) were the ones loudly supporting mass migration of immigrants into America, and calling for those immigrants' rights to establish statehood, a finding of amusing inconsistency might be more apt.
  • The Thomas Riker argument for body-soul dualism
    There is only the Body. Mind is a fiction constructed over time and stored in memory, having the effect of displacing Reality, but not replacing it with a new reality. So, when an organism like Riker is duplicated, although the same fictional narrative is superimposed to date, the Organism, that is the Real Riker remains the same, and the duplicate is a twin. If both were given the choice to kill the other or die, subject to their ethics, both would exercise the same drive to live and choose the other’s demise. Neither would be comforted by, "oh, well, the story lives on," and yet, that seems to be the very thing we cling to. The desire to keep the narrative "alive" and dismiss the organism is the same folly which has gotten us into this mess over what is Mind, in the first place.
    A simplistic start: sensation and the natural drives, which may be summed up as the drive to live and multiply, and its aware-ing by the body is real activity involving the real consciousness of the human Organism. Perception is an activity restricted to human Mind wherein what is sensed is seized by Language, and, by forming attachments to other Language structures, converted into meaning which meaning is not derived from Reality, but constructed by these attachments, and thus, ultimately, fictional.