Michael Gogins

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) has now awarded first prize in its annual essay contest to Louis Crane for Stardrives and Spinoza. This is a follow-up to Are Black Hole Starships Possible? by Crane and Shawn Westmoreland, which I have already commented on below.
The theme of this year’s contest is “What is ultimately possible in [...]

I am reading Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World.
Guenon has a reasoned prejudice against science that is however quite mistaken. He is rhetorical rather than cogent, has a number of outright crank views… and yet is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
What is right about Guenon, what is wrong, and what do I fail to grasp?
What [...]

As actors, we form ideas of our purposes and the world in which we try to realize them that are complete. This we do either explicitly, or implicitly (by implication from our actions and motives). However, empirical conceptions of our purposes are necessarily incomplete (since they refer to a future which may or may not [...]

The gods demand sacrifice, sacrifices imply results, this implication is karma, karma implies dependent arising, dependent arising is sunyata, emptiness. Thus, Schopen.
Where does the one God fit into this picture? The impredicability of sunyata implies that if emptiness is inconsistent, this does not necessarily apply to God.
Briefly, the impredicability of sunyata arises when the notion [...]