Platonism & Neoplatonism
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and Plato: Where do our ideas come from?
22/07/2007
Do ideas originate in the brain, or from the input of the senses, or are they independent of any individual brain? Do we depend on external stimuli to form ideas, or are we born with a set of ideas that just kick in independently of our environment? Is consciousness the product of nurture or nature? How interdependent are our ideas and our consciousness?
These questions may seem very outdated today, as the debate appears to have been settled by the neurological argument, according to which the brain is the origin of our consciousness. The question has now shifted to how consciousness arises, which is a similar problem to how ideas are produced.
However, the hypothesis that the brain is not the origin of all our ideas, but merely a “transducer”, can still be made: can one discriminate between a brain that only analyses and translates a raw input into a given output and a brain that is the actual source of the same output? Read More...
These questions may seem very outdated today, as the debate appears to have been settled by the neurological argument, according to which the brain is the origin of our consciousness. The question has now shifted to how consciousness arises, which is a similar problem to how ideas are produced.
However, the hypothesis that the brain is not the origin of all our ideas, but merely a “transducer”, can still be made: can one discriminate between a brain that only analyses and translates a raw input into a given output and a brain that is the actual source of the same output? Read More...
Perception of God: Beauty and the soul, according to Plotinus
19/05/2007
People of faith claim that they can feel God’s presence, metaphorically in their lives, and even physically in their hearts. But if God is transcendent, non-physical or supra-physical as it were, how can such a perception be possible at all? Let alone be proven? Also, how can one receive what is sometimes described as a calling from a God that is supposed to be so unfathomable? These questions have acquired some momentum with writers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Read More...