Privileged binaries

There is no justification for the claim that an experience is delusional. Such a claim can only be made against its report.  It is the task of a researcher to establish an ontological or linguistic context that is agreeable to both.

A storm warning: for science and religion

There is a storm brewing far over the horizon of public perception in the evolution debate, one that threatens to wipe out differences in our contemporary secular-religious divide. The storm, should it reach us, will lay waste the conceptual fortifications built by both sides of the intelligent design debate, and more. These will be washed away, their timbers crushed, tumbled together and exposed as doctrinal disagreements between factions of their common, ancestral religion – animism.

Are the Brain Sciences trashing the Human Wardrobe?

The brain sciences impose limits on our knowledge of human experience. That is, their knowledge base is prescriptive regarding human experience, not instructive. Claims for advancement in the brain sciences in this arena are necessarily empty. This is a cause for public concern.

Is Nature Consistent?

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By theoretical appointment, materials posturing in the quantum mode are unpredictable - a muse which annoyed Einstein who said that Nature didn't throw dice.
And Godel, of course, seeking to undermine the then currently popular mathematical view of Nature, established to almost universal academic applause the inconsistency or unprovability of certain mathematical statements in any supposedly mathematically defined system, hence showing that Nature wasn't mathematically assayable.

The Philosophy of Logic

It is remarkable that we have descriptions of the laws of logic but few descriptions of the nature of logic itself.  Wittgenstein, often a last resort for our debunking needs, describes the nature of logic "logic is trancendental". That is, logic provides a foundation or ground, in this case, as it happens, for the world "structure". He also identifies this ground as "necessary" when describing the propositions of logic as tautologies. A tautology is necessarily true - "either it is raining or it is not raining". This confuses the transcendental with the transcendent* for conditions or grounds are only necessary for the objects they ground or identify. To make those grounds absolute or self-justifying is to confuse the grounds for an object with the object itself. But then commentators on logic, including Wittgenstein, suffer from that over-familiarity that paints its cultural totems into a self-evident or transcendent, corner.

Logic is a contingent element in the ad infinitum of legitimacy. Logic, or rather a logic,

Medieval perspective and reality

Medieval perspective presents us with what we may regard as a quaint "flat" view of objects. Yet this may be a better representation of spatiality than our modern three-dimensional perspective which makes objects appear from an arbitrary, privileged, single point or viewer. Even so, there is a yet more real way of representing objects. That is to privilege NO viewing point over another, and to view objects from all points.

Autism and modern Eugenics

The autist is shadowed by his eugenic image, a perfection of normalcy made approachable by a Clinical directive of modern medicine. This directive differs from those offered by the eugenics programs conducted in the war-torn industrial west of the last century, though the goal of a perfection endures.

Under Clinical directive it is not the autist that suffers. It is the autist's eugenic image that suffers from the autist. The autist is reduced to a mere physical condition. Failing the test of being a possessor of an identity he must instead posture as a type of socially disenfranchised archetype -  The Patient. Holidays become therapies, associates become helpers, home-life a tick-box activity of tasks achieved.