• What are you playing right now?

    You're right, I made a mistake, but it also got me thinking about a comparison of music and games.
  • What are you playing right now?

    It's full of adventure and virtuosity, inspires imagination without the need for high-end graphics, physics engines or the like.
  • Post truth
    He is a bullshitter, and bullshit can be used as a control technology (like obscurantism in religion, art philosophy and so on).
  • Dream Machine
    Everyday experiences are very different from dreams. Consider, for example, that dreams typically disappear when you wake up, whereas experiences of seeing something when you are awake tend to have a continuous flow and clarity which allows you to further investigate the objects that you see.

    I'd say dreams are experiences of things that happen to be on one's mind, such as memories and knowledge of things and emotions.
  • Extreme Nominalism vs. Extreme Realism
    for the sake of discussion, suppose that we must adopt one or the other.aletheist

    A nominalist who would adopt realism for the sake of discussion is an extreme relativist. His or her ontological commitment would merely be an adoption for the sake of discussion, not a belief about the nature of reality which, according to realists, exists independently of our discussions.
  • Favorite philosophical quote?
    “A metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting”.
    --Nelson Goodman
  • Original and significant female philosophers?
    Ruth Millikan is not difficult to understand, and she's both original and significant.
  • How do we come into existence?
    Is an emergent property a preexisting disposition or something completely new?Andrew4Handel

    For example, when you put certain ingredients together in one and the same glass they might begin to interact with each other so that a new property emerges, which you might find more tasty than the separate ingredients. It's a matter of physics and biology. Any physical object or property is predisposed to have physical causes and effects...
  • Original and significant female philosophers?
    If we take care to distinguish significance from influencePierre-Normand
    Good point. Being influential, or considered significant, does not mean that a philosopher is philosophically significant. Like Hegel, for instance ;)
  • Original and significant female philosophers?
    Perhaps most women are wise enough to see that philosophy is mostly nonsense disguised as hard questions.
  • What is the rawest form of an idea? How should one go about translating it into language?
    You don´t have a feeling that guides your argument?Perdidi Corpus

    An argument is guided by the truth of its words.

    The thoughts you experience cannot come out verbalized.Perdidi Corpus

    First, with what sense organ do you experience a thought? Second, if you can think, but can't verbalize it, then the problem is just poor vocabulary. Any thought can be verbalized.

    Who is feeding you this structured information?Perdidi Corpus

    Whence the assumption that someone would be feeding me structured information?

    But you need at least the experience of thinking/feeling (I have yet to know wether there is true difference between the two) how it would be like to walk on the moon before you activelly talk about it.Perdidi Corpus

    Thought without feeling is empty, feeling without thought is blind, but talk is a use of words, recall, and our lack of experiences, thoughts, or feelings of how it would be like to walk on the moon won't prevent us from composing insightful sentences of what it's like to walk on the moon.
  • Sellars' Empiricism & The Philosophy of Mind
    Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property of the item that is sensed. — Sellars
    Like a living organism may have a disposition to sense items in a certain way, also items may have a disposition to be sensed in a certain way. Perhaps this is what Sellars means by relational property?
  • Study of Philosophy
    Acquaintance with bioethics, for instance, seems appropriate for a good nurse.
  • Vengeance and justice
    I don't get itTheMadFool
    The justice system exists because there were benefits for different individuals to comply to a shared system, and thus avoid the bad effects that vengeance had on their society. For example, medieval Italy was plagued by wars between vengeful families. It was bad for all of them. Hence the emergence of a shared justice system. So now punishment is not vengeance but correctional care, or a means to motivate members of a society to comply to its shared system.
  • Vengeance and justice

    Punishment is a means to make different individuals comply to the system. The system, however, emerged because of the general benefits of a shared system (regardless of emotions or thoughts on vengeance).
  • What is the rawest form of an idea? How should one go about translating it into language?
    The assumption that there would be something to translate, and necessary for starting and finishing a sentence, is unwarranted. For example, it is not necessary to have experiences of walking on the moon in order to be allowed or able to talk about it.
  • Is pencil and paper enough?

    What is it about computation, or translations from some sets of symbols to other sets of symbols, that could produce a state of conscious awareness? I don't get it. Far more convincing is the idea of conscious awareness being, like photosynthesis, a biological phenomenon.
  • Is pencil and paper enough?
    An experience is a biological phenomena: the identification of something, not an expression of it (eg with pen and paper).
  • How do physicalists explain 'intentional content'?
    Intentional content is set by the present features of the object that you experience. It's location is where the object is.
  • What is the rawest form of an idea? How should one go about translating it into language?
    What is an example of a raw form of an idea? Seems like a metaphor passed for logic.
  • Are non-human animals aware of death? Can they fear it?
    Both of my past cats showed symptoms of stress as in death agony when they got ill and died. One died slowly of kidney failure, and about a year later the other died more quickly of heart failure. Death agony amounts to a kind of awareness of one's forthcoming death.
  • Was Dylann Roof Guilty and Responsible?
    Death penalty is murder. .
  • How about the possibility of converging?

    What do you think is achieved by rephrasing the same statement?
  • Can we be mistaken about our own experiences?
    One's own experience of an object is the object that one experiences. There is no relation between the experience and the object. The computer screen that you see now, for instance, is not a mistaken version of itself; you see it exactly as it is.
  • How about the possibility of converging?
    The theist may have reasons and arguments for their position, which is simply something called god exists.Chany

    That would be a statement, not an argument, nor a reason.
  • How about the possibility of converging?


    The conclusion, that god created the big bang, is arbitrary and not based on reason.
  • How about the possibility of converging?

    Science is, roughly, the name for human knowledge (in its classic definition, justified true belief).

    You justify statements with good reasons (eg evidence, true argument), not by dismissing or attempting to undermine the most basic criteria for what counts as knowledge in order to get away with anything.
  • How about the possibility of converging?

    Well, by single-mindedly defining science as some kind of a crippled physicalism you can certainly get away with anything "non physical". But that's intellectually dishonest.
  • How about the possibility of converging?
    I don't agree with any of those statements. Big bang "in sync with creation"? Wtf?
  • How about the possibility of converging?
    Because then you're following theism, not science. You're not following science by assuming that science would be discovering the work of a theist god.
  • How about the possibility of converging?
    ..theism. . . . ; ..is a position within a broader metaphysical system.Chany

    What broader metaphysical system?

    . . .One can follow science and be a theist.Chany

    Not really. It is possible to follow science and become a theist in case the existence of god is scientifically discovered. But you can't be a theist and follow science, because by concluding that "god did it", prior to, or regardless of, a scientific discovery in support of such a conclusion, is not to follow science at all but theism.

    You can certainly be a theist with an interest for science as an intellectual puzzle, eg to follow the latest advances in science while keeping them separate from your personal belief in a god. But then your personal belief is not following science but theism.
  • How about the possibility of converging?
    Science could converge with theism in the case of a true discovery of the existence of god. Theism, however, cannot converge with science, because theism is not on a path towards better knowledge where it could converge with science (ie "scientific" ways of rephrasing that "god did it" does not qualify as being on a path towards better knowledge). So, a possible convergence could only go in one direction: from science to theism. It is this openness which makes science great, and the argument against theism so much more convincing.
  • Can we be mistaken about our own experiences?
    There is no category mistake here. The claim has ben made that we cannot be mistaken concerning our present experiences. But if fundamental physics demonstrates to us that "the present" is just an illusion, then "present experience" is itself a mistaken concept.Metaphysician Undercover

    Look, an experience is not a phenomenon in fundamental physics but biology. Is there any benefit in interpreting biological phenomena in terms of fundamental physics? I don't think so. Concepts such as the present, the past, apples, experiences etc. might be of little interest or "mistaken" even in descriptions of fundamental physics. Yet they clearly make sense in biology, or in the logic of ordinary language in which statements about the past are logically distinguishable from statements about the present or the future. For an experience which relies on the present features of an object in your visual field it matters little whether their presence refers to some absolute point in time or not.
  • Can we be mistaken about our own experiences?
    It is arguably a category mistake to exploit problems of fundamental physics or worse even metaphysics in order to dismiss notions such as the present. Fundamental physics is typically as irrrelevant in descriptions of biology and the philosophy of perception as perception and natural kinds are irrelevant in fundamental physics. One thing that sets experiences apart from descriptions is that experiences are indexical, they occur in the here and now. You can be wrong about your descriptions of your experiences, as descriptions are representational, but your experiences can be neither right nor wrong, since they're facts, not representations of facts.
  • 3 dimensional writing?


    An architectural model of a building, or an astronomical model of the solar system, are examples of three dimensional symbol systems. What they symbolise in three dimensions is usually easier and less ambiguously symbolised in words. But unlike words the models show what they describe: ie they exemplify certain relations, proportions and so on. They also lack the syntactic and semantic disjointness of verbal descriptions, ie a white wall does not only symbolise white but what it looks like in a continuum of various light conditions.
  • Humes scepticism and Ash'ari Response. Sufficient?
    yes, youre very right. but again ou are not criticizing this article. he argues that the quran does contain logic which cannot be rejecteddan1

    I'm obviously criticizing the article when I'm pointing out that its abstract contains a lie about Hume.

    Furthermore, most factual or fictional statements contain logic which can't be rejected. For example, saying that I like tea and sandwiches contains logic which can't be rejected (i.e. that there are such things as tea and sandwiches).

    Since the article shows disrespect for facts, and purports to "argue" for what is trivially true but pointless, I'd say like Hume: to the flames.
  • Entrenched
    I don't think you see what I'm getting at. Consider, for instance, an individual or a community coming to regard the scientific method itself as authoritative. We might explain our former embrace of what now looks to us like superstition or prejudice in terms of wishful thinking or an irrational/natural trust of our parents or heritage.R-13

    It was neither wishful, superstitious, nor irrational, to believe that Pluto was a planet prior the formal definition of 'planet'.

    ..the move away from God is probably more related to human technology and the confidence and abundance that came with it (an "emotional" argument)...R-13

    What's emotional about concluding that sanitation technology is more efficient than prayer?

    Essentially, I'm suggesting that human thinking is not cold calculation, although it includes cold calculation in pursuit of that which it desires.R-13

    But who suggests that human thinking would be cold calculation?