Where is the self? How can dualism stand if it's just a fiction?

Have you heard of pilot waves or waves as guiding particles ? there are some new perspectives that now claim that perhaps both wave and particle exist, the particle being guided by the wave...and the results are coming from macro phenomena where Newtonian physics can be applied.

I can only offer an opinion, igm...and my opinion would be that it is a notion.

We are having a conversation...or at very least, we have the illusion of having a conversation. I submit that either the conversation or the illusion of the conversation ARE possible characteristics of REALITY.

Other than by simply asserting they are not...can you give me any reason for accepting that they CANNOT be...which is where I would be if I accepted your assertion that there are no characteristics of REALITY?

Interesting observation Frank, the assertion depending upon the location of that imaginary line in the imaginary scale of abstraction as I hope you might remember from many past postings

You got too cute here, Dale. I honestly do not understand your point.

Thanks Fil!
That's intriguing. I have always harbored a suspicion that such things as wave/particle duality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle are modeling problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

My suspicion is most aroused by how such mathematically simple things can produce such complex/unpredictable behavior. Like cellular automata.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CellularAutomaton.html

Sorry Frank, in my massive ego I had assumed you might earlier have picked up my assertion about the duality and arbitrariness of "reality"

http://able2know.org/topic/209050-1

Matt that was beautiful, you've again made my day

Frank, I don't mean to demean your efforts here, but when it comes to the "truths" of Buddhism, at least the meditative forms such as zen and its cousins, it does not much matter what the Buddha taught. What does matter is what one comes to perceive after persistent and sincere meditation. This is very different from the kinds of "knowledge" generated by either the inductive or deductive logical techniques. In other words there is little chance of sharing Buddhist insights with you given your cognitive commitments. Understand that I am not criticizing you any more than I would criticise a Fijian for his inability to grasp our American cultural notions because of his (mostly unconscious) commitments to Fijian presuppositions.
Oh, and let me stress that one does not arrive at the logical conclusion or make a guess that the ego does not exist; one comes to have a very different sense of its ontological status.

No machine is capable of reproducing itself, because it has no way to have access to all the raw materials necessary.

Thanks Fil that is a great into to self-organization and self-reference.
I think you might enjoy Godel, Escher Bach if you haven't already read it.
The video's connection to cellular automata however is a little loose.
A much more strict treatment is in A New Kind of Science (a horribly immodest title, but what to do?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_new_kind_of_science

I don't have time to watch that all right now.
Probably will sometime later today or tomorrow, though

Thanks Fil, very interesting!

Cis wouldn't a robot be able to round it all up

Thanks JL nicely put... as usual.

How? If the raw materials are in another country, or it had to be mined at different locations - and it still needed to be processed before use.

It's almost like you've never seen Transformers?

What kind of "transformer?"

As Matt implies immediately above, why not

Presumably it can do anything we can