Author: Matthew David Segall
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The End of Space is the Beginning of Time
The year is 2007, and even to say so is to deface nature. Of all Man’s stolen goods, is not time itself the tool that not even the divine dare use? History is written by men; God merely watches the show from far beyond. The ticks of Earthly time cannot be heard from eternity. To…
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Enactivism, Integral Theory, and 21st Century Spirituality
The following is lifted from my old blog at Gaia.com, which has since shut down. Sorry of some hypertext doesn’t work! I first want to thank everyone for participating in this symposium. The intersection of integral spirituality and enactive cognitive science is, for whatever reason, one of my passions, and I couldn’t be more excited…
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World Made by Hand
Prophesying the coming apocalypse has become something of an American pastime, so excuse me while I endulge in a bit of wild speculation. There is talk, and not just among conspiracy theorists, that peak oil has already been reached. I’m no expert in statistics, so I have to take other people’s word for it. So…
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Mechanism and Meaning: Making Room for Consciousness
The following is an exchange I had on YouTube with cosmanthony21 about the nature of “awareness.” —————————————————–cosmanthony21’s original message: Ok, lemme give it a shot. This is an interesting topic for discussion, so if you’ll humor me, Id like to write some thoughts coming to mind on the topic of awareness you had brought up.…
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Naturalizing Representation
I wrote this essay a few years ago for a philosophy of mental representation course. I think I would rework a few ideas looking back, but I would still defend the idea that reality is not describable from 1st or 3rd person perspectives alone. Both are part of a larger ongoing whole/part. Q: Why is…
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She Cries Wolf
t is not enough to merely believe in love.For it to be real, it must be born. Love as an idea is an empty promise.Love embodied is what moves minds and changes the world. Hate can change the world as well, but typically acting on one’s hatred is far easier than acting on love. The…
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Dennett’s Dangerous Idea
I am a little more than half way through Daniel Dennett’s book about how evolutionary biology provides you with the only meaning your life needs (or at least the only meaning it can have, regardless of what you may think otherwise). Thoughts are, after all (after Dennett waves his material wand), just the side effects…
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Evol
It is a disease, a poison, a curse and a burden. That is unless it comes true… unless the expectation dies to itself and is set free. Love is the one remaining cosmic mystery. Understanding its secret is the rarest gift on earth, one everyone is after. But chasing it is not being in it.…
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Twins
Tickling my tummy makes it rumble because butterflies are set loose inside. The surface conceals the circus, the tent blocks the light from chasing the jitters away. A beautiful face with two eyes, one a smile and the other in pain. My prescriptions are mangled because I lack medical understanding. How to diagnose the situation?…
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God is Three Things
People are always talking about God, but they use the same word for three different people. Call it the Holy Trinity if you must. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God the Father is the material world, all the stuff out there (points around). God the Son is the body, an incarnate…
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Masculine Minds make for Selfish Genes
Either altruism is possible, or it isn’t, and this goes for both nature and humanity. I happen to think altruism is possible, and that the human being is just one of the most striking examples of it. Equally striking are our bodies themselves, composed of trillions of cells who somehow have chosen to participate in…
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The Living Cosmos
‘ve been struggling with how to bring teleology back into scientific cosmology (by which I mean the development of the entire universe, from the birth of matter and energy, to stars and planets, to cells and animals…). It is difficult, because we are so used to seeing the world as a collection of blind atoms.…
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What’s Going On?
I didn’t know where else to start… But now I see I can’t! To say what is going on, I need to know how it all began. Problem is I have access only to the present. I have memories, sure; but these are not the past. And I plan, but for a future which never…
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Biology Culture Wars
From Wonderist: First I want to say that the closest I’ve heard to a serious shift in thinking is with epigenetics, for which there is *actually* evidence that it occurs in life.With that out of the way, I’ll boil down my point. Let’s say you have a well-known metaphor A, and a lesser-known metaphor B.…
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Being No One
Canteatpancakes Love your videos, Love your comments, I’m a giant Alan Watts fan my self I’ve found Thomas Metzinger to be a great addition to his ideas, have you read Being No One? The functional boundary between a supposed internal and external world seems to me nothing more then a evolutionary tool which can not…
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Curing Philosophy
Wittgenstein’s model philosopher would act like a physician, though instead of trying to cure physical ailments, he would attempt to relieve metaphysical tension. The philosopher is a doctor of the mind, more commonly known as a psychologist. His task is to keep the language from misunderstanding itself. This, in turn, prevents people from becoming insane.…
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Embody Your Soul
Honesty is only possible if one agrees with oneself. If an inner conflict persists, one can only delay the truth, or lie. If we can befriend ourselves, speaking the truth becomes a possibility. Telling the truth consists in carrying the inside, out. Truth reveals what is of itself so, but which had prior to its…
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I am Time
Suffering,or bliss. Do not be disturbed. Do not lose your head. Do not knot your soul. There is no testimony, no measuring of miss. The either/or is mysterious, that’s sure. Just hear it. Then see it. Now taste it. What have you found? Ask your mind what it is like… go on. Four dimensions: The…
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Integrating Rationality
Prickles, I’m gooey and you’re prickly. This may be the root of our disagreement… -Goo —————————- Goo, i think there my be a distinction in the ‘personality’ of our philosophy… heres what ive been thinking though regarding our discussion: Like i said before, and im going to try to make more clear in another video……
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Hofstadter, Wittgenstein, Varela: Loops, Language, Poesis
The purpose of this essay is to display how the Enlightenment’s arête became its hamartia. In other words, it is to show how Modernity’s greatest virtue became its tragic flaw. Its virtue was to separate the Big Three: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This differentiation lead to all the positive aspects of Modern…
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Love of Wisdom
To you, As long as we’ve known each other, even intimately at least for brief episodes, there seems to remain something hidden between us. It is not something so simple as a secret kept by one of us from the other, but rather seems to be something we share but are unwilling or unable to…
Footnotes2Plato 