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  • Top Ten Favorite Films
    ↪jgill
    ↪javi2541997


    My baker's dozen ...

    All in the Family 1971-75
    The Boondocks 2005-10
    Chappell's Show
    Deadwood (+ Movie)
    The Expanse 2015-18
    Fawlty Towers
    Firefly
    I, Claudius
    Mad Men 2007-10
    Rome
    Star Trek 1966-69
    True Detective 2014
    The Twilight Zone 1959-64
  • Top Ten Favorite Films
    ↪jgill
    :cool:
  • Top Ten Favorite Films
    I prefer series over films for the opportunity to develop personalities and plot intricacies — jgill
    Ditto :up:

    Top Ten TV series???
  • Emergence
    @universeness

    Thanks for the posts. I'm confident that they won't persuade those who need to be persuaded out of their error. Lots of pseudo-science and bad physics – 'idealist / antirealist interpretations' of physical theories – plague this site and the purveyors – no need to name names :sparkle: – are incorrigible.
  • Mind-body problem
    How do we explain comprehension with molecules and their structures? — Agent Smith
    I guess you didn't run down all these rabbit holes...
    ↪Agent Smith
    From a Metzingerian perspectiive, "self" is a (persistently embodied) phenomenal illusion re:
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/626347
    — 180 Proof
  • Mind-body problem
    ↪Agent Smith
    :roll:
  • Mind-body problem
    ↪Agent Smith
    Atoms which make up strawberries don't taste like strawberries either. Biology emerges from chemistry, Smith, not "sorcery".
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    Of course, we have subjective experiences. — Jack Cummins
    You take it as a given but you don't know. I agree it's a handy heuristic, and maybe that's all it is.

    We can make some guess at others' minds ...
    ... and your / my own "mind" too – since it's also "subjective" – perhaps an introspection illusion ...
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion
  • Mind-body problem
    So holism i.e. antireductionism? :chin: — Agent Smith
    Non sequitur.
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    We know that other people have inner experiences because we are able to talk about them in a comparative way. — Jack Cummins
    Yet if another didn't have "inner experiences" but acted or spoke as if she did, you wouldn't – couldn't – know. It seems to me, Jack, that's not a reliable way of knowing.

    ... common aspects of such experience.
    If by "inner experiences" what you mean is subjective, then I don't see what about them can possibly be called "common" (i.e. public, objective). :chin:
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    ... the inner experiences of human beings — Jack Cummins
    Tell me how do you know that any other human being than yourself has "inner experiences". None of the concepts in the OP make clear how you (or anyone) can know that.
  • Mind-body problem
    If I rubbed two sticks together and consciousness emerged that would be an emergent property but it would also be magic and inexplicable like neurons firing creating consciousness. — Andrew4Handel
    Equivocating non sequitur. :roll:

    ↪180 Proof You didn't cite any of the article.
    The article offers a further reading reference, not an argument. I gave an example of how 'a whole greater than the sum of its parts' is the most ordinary, least mysterious thing (again, such as semantics of a sentence). It's a mystery to me, Andrew, how any numerate person would find emergence – nonlinear dynamic (i.e. chaotic) processes or systems – "mysterious".
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    The issue which I am trying to think about is how these concepts emerged and inform thinking, especially in relation to human consciousness. — Jack Cummins
    So tell us what you think ...
  • Mind-body problem
    ↪Andrew4Handel
    Why do you belieeve "emergence is a mystery"? What's "mysterious" in the wiki article I linked above?
  • Mind-body problem
    How can a group (the brain) consisting of stuff that can't understand (neurons) understand? — Agent Smith
    Just as this sentence consisting of individually meaningless letters conveys meaning. :roll:

    Emergence.
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    ↪Agent Smith
    :smirk: :up:
  • What are you listening to right now?
    If I have a favorite Beatles' song ...


    "You Never Give Me Your Money" (4:03)
    Abbey Road, 1969
    writers Lennon-McCartney
    The Beatles
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    ↪Agent Smith
    wut ...

    "into this world we're thrown" (Heidegger)
  • Biggest Puzzles in Philosophy
    ↪Andrew4Handel
    IMO, religion is for mystifying answers (i.e. placebos, snakeoil) whereas philosophy is for clarifying questions (i.e. medicine, surgery). Believers seek certainty; thinkers seek lucidity.
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    In other words, does future self exist from the beginning as a blueprint? — Jack Cummins
    I don't think so. 'Future self' is 'present self's' handiwork (or wreckage). Insofar as there's a "blueprint", it's the 'past self' that both enables and constrains the 'present self' – that genetic-existential hand each one of us is dealth at birth when "into this world we're thrown".
  • Biggest Puzzles in Philosophy
    ↪Tom Storm
    :smirk: :up:
  • Biggest Puzzles in Philosophy
    I'm uncomfortable with the word truth. — Tom Storm
    Well, aren't facts (non-tautologous) truth-makers?

    Btw, "transcendent" being indistinguishable from imaginary or fictional, I agree there are no such "truths" (moral or otherwise).
  • Emergence
    ↪Alkis Piskas
    The graph represents the continuous propagation of discrete electrons (i.e. electricity). Ever look at a Seurat painting from a distance and then up close where the continuous lines & shapes are revealed to be an illusion of discrete (pixellated) dabs of color? After all, movies are sequences of discrete pictures (aka "motion pictures") and smooth beaches are made up of discrete grains of sand, no? I suspect the Law of Large Numbers (LLN) probably has something to do with 'the continuity illusion' (gestalt). :chin:
  • Biggest Puzzles in Philosophy
    I don't have good reason to think there are moral truths or moral facts ... — Tom Storm
    There's no good reason to think 'suffering' is not a moral fact?

    There's no good reason to think 'a natural person knows what makes natural persons suffer and therefore that she can avoid making a natural person suffer or reduce her suffering' is not a moral truth?
  • Mind-body problem
    ↪Agent Smith
    Or a five-sided triangle. :smirk:
  • Biggest Puzzles in Philosophy
    ↪Agent Smith
    Well I was referring only to philosophical puzzles (per the OP). Otherwise, I suspect neither QFT or GR are "solved" (i.e. complete) theories which may be why QG is so intractably elusive. String theory, btw, makes untestable (due to astronomically high energies required) predictions. And, as @Gnomon says, "Enformationism" is not scientific but "Meta-physical", therefore its a pure speculation (e.g. transcendental illusion) that does not make any predictions, testable or not, in the first place ... like "First Cause", "Intelligent Design" or other woo-of-the-gaps.
  • Top Ten Favorite Films
    What about "Ten Favorite TV Series" (maybe another thread)?
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    ↪Agent Smith
    Your rambling has lost me again.

    Cancel my subscription to the
    Resurrection ...
    ... moksha :fire:
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    The question of a stable sense of 'self' for philosophy or living is an interesting dilemma. — Jack Cummins
    Isn't each one of us simultaneously and fluidly a 'past-self, present-self, future-self' imbedded in, or enabled and constrained by, some 'past-population, present-population, future-population' – a heteronomous rather than autonomous agent (i.e. existent)? Consider this old thread ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/344126

    Who am I and what happens to me (postmortem)? — Agent Smith
    "Who" you are is constituted by your personal and social relationships. Self-identity (ego) supervenes on self-continuity (embodiment). And, like an orchestra after the final encore of an evening's symphony performance, your (everyone's) identity's constitution dissipates due to entropy into oblivion "postmortem". Anicca —> anatta, no?

    :death: :flower:
  • Argument for establishing the inner nature of appearances/representations
    ↪unenlightened

    To me, the absolutely crucial thing about Kant is his recognition that 'things conform to thoughts' rather than vice versa. I still think very few people really get the significance of that. If you understand it, it completely undercuts 'scientism'. — Wayfarer
    Kant's idea is that phenomena – representations – "conform to" categories of reason (not "things" & "thoughts", respectively). If you understand it, it undercuts idealism.

    https://epochemagazine.org/14/kant-and-the-idealists-reality-problem/

    the subject/object dichotomy is the private/public dichotomy dismantled by the private language argument. — Banno
    :fire:

    I do not understand this argument. — KantDane21
    It's not an "argument"; Schopenauer takes his extension of Kant's 'phenomena-noumena' distinction (à la Plato's 'appearances-forms' & Descartes' 'subject-object' / 'mind-body') as axiomatic and stipulates this 'idea' in the first sentence of the World As Will and Representation (vol. one): "The world is MY representation (Die Welt ist MEINE Vorstellung)."
  • Emergence
    ... practical applications of philosophical concepts. — Gnomon
    :rofl:

    ... you have just labelled YOUR 'god-model of Enformationism,' confirming that your proposals are modelled on god posits. God of the gaps imo. — universeness
    :clap: :smirk:

    Nothing in 'material' science, is accepted 'meekly,' or 'without question,' that only happens in theism or mysticism. We observe intent and purpose in lifeforms like humans. We observe 'natural processes' in spacetime that happened due to very large variety combining in every way possible, over a very large timescale.
    :100:

    If you 'don't believe' in democracy, then you must never be given any political power.
    If by "democracy" you also mean economic democracy, then I agree. :up:
  • Biggest Puzzles in Philosophy
    A puzzle solved fits some other puzzle.
  • Is Atheism Significant Only to Theists?
    ↪javi2541997
    "Fake it till ya make it." :pray:
  • Is "good", indefinable?
    ↪Fooloso4
    Yes, that's Iris Murdoch's position too. She was quite political as well as sociable in her day.
  • Emergence
    ↪T Clark
    Good taste! I agree :up:
  • Is "good", indefinable?
    ↪Fooloso4
    She has been a significant influence for me, especially The Sovereignty of Good, as I've briefly discussed ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/705105

    Btw, I don't care for her fiction but I believe I've read all of her (collected) philosophical papers & lectures a few times, though decades ago.
  • R. M. Hare
    ↪Banno
    I suspect there are other less stringent – rigorous – forms of non-cognitivism for those inclined to it which probably accounts for the general neglect of Hare. I'm in the cognitivist camp (perhaps a vestige of Catholicism I couldn't exorcise back in the day) and only vaguely recall reading some of his work back in the '80s before moving on to other Oxbridge thinkers.
  • Is "good", indefinable?
    ↪Fooloso4
    Maybe I've asked this of you before (if I have pardon me), but are you familiar with Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good and, if so, what do think of her moral-aesthetic reconception of 'Platonic Good'?
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    A far far less shallow read on the relation of speculative history to contemporary physics (c1993), IIRC, is The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon M. Lederman. I've been meaning to read his follow-up Beyond the God Particle which he co-authored after the LHC confirmation of the Higgs Boson.
  • Emergence
    Have you read Capra's Tao of physics?
    If you have, was it worth reading?
    — universeness
    :lol: Too much woo for me.
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