How do they lean what dreams are? — Banno

I am not really a psychologist of dreams, even though Freud was a cocaine addict, but since you are asking my opinion, I will give to you:

It is the things, which are sometimes coherent and other times incoherent in respect to each other, that come before waking up to the thing that is always coherent in respect to itself every single time we wake up. In other words, induction and comparison.

When it comes to that quote, I will read the thread eventually. Most likely not this year.

As is usual with some folks here, middle school content has been completely forgotten. If you have no clue what the difference between blastocyst and an embryo is, you should not raise your opinion on the topic. It is the same as the person stuck on y=2x+3 walking into the mathematicians' meeting to talk about differential equations.

A baby is not inside the womb — Vera Mont

The foetus starts after the nineth month and goes until conception. A foetus, especially a late one, can be called correctly a baby. A human the day before it is born is a baby, it just hasn't been born yet.

That's pretty much the point ofcontra-ception — Vera Mont

Contraception is preventing the fertilisation of the eggs.

None of that is relevant, however, it is just poor usage of language to cause confusion. Physiologically, besides small details such as eyes and lungs, a baby the day before it is born is the same as the day after it is born. Killing a foetus one day before it is born is killing a baby.

if I recall correctly, believed that absolutely everything was inevitable — boundless

In other words, every possibility is a necessity, modal collapse? Good post btw, keep it coming.

Children think that 12+12=22.

but I like to furbish my opinions with reasons. — Lionino

Not really a tangent, but weakly related: I detest those goofy "Well we have less philosophical problems with this stance so I am taking this stance" arguments. One that comes to mind is the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument. Quine is the king of shit metaphysical arguments. Scientific parsimony needs to stay away from metaphysics.

how is it that we have the distinction between dreams and lucidity? — Banno

Have you had the realest dream of a cow, or just the realest-1% dream of a cow?

No one, in every-day life, understands the difference of refering to Red, the colour, and referring to things as red-causing things. — AmadeusD

But key there is "understands" the difference. Physicists say that some star is red, even though they can't see the star at all, all they got are numbers on a screen. People who learn pop science, which are many, will take on that use of 'red' to refer to things they can't see. They will say UY Scuti is red, even though they have never seen it. Do they understand the difference between the cause of red and the experience of red? Likely not, but that doesn't mean that they are not talking about a different thing as when they say the shirt is red, when they say UY Scuti is red (a scientifically correct statement). Who are we to say one domain of discourse is invalid and the other is valid? If you want to do prescriptive linguistics, English is the wrong language for that, I recommend Icelandic instead.

When you say "in every-day life", you mean "to those that don't pay attention to philosophical matters". Should we, in philosophy, take input from those that don't pay attention to philosophy? I suppose the common-sense philosophers would chant "yes".

The body is not necessary — AmadeusD

I am taking it you misread. I am saying the body is not necessary, but it is sufficient. So we are agreeing there, unless you miswrote.

My understanding is "no" — AmadeusD

This, imo. — AmadeusD

We are all entitled to our opinions on topics, but I like to furbish my opinions with reasons.

I am an "asshole" when walking, cycling, driving.

But it is not a joke, it is actually not my fault. Everybody in this city is an idiot, except me. So I have to tell grown adults not to park their queer little scooters in front of garage doors. It doesn't matter whether the garage is mine or not.

I am Irish, and born in England. — AmadeusD

So a cat born in a barn is not a cow? Curious. Food for thought.

The body, in conjunction with the brain, feels. Feeling X.

That body has been cut off, but the brain can still feel. Feeling Y.

Issue: feeling X and feeling Y feel the same, indistinguishable.

Example: the realest dream of a cow is indistinguishable from actually seeing a cow.

Question: how do we discriminate feeling X from feeling Y? Are they indeed exactly the same?

Consequence: can experience be located in different points, or is experience non-spatial?

Example: do I feel things in my finger and my brain/mind, or just my brain, which correlates, through induction, some sensations to some points in space?

Maybe that makes the problem more clear.

Motorneurons. — AmadeusD

I think those are involved in the reflex, not in the perception of pain. Not important anyway.

Contact with C-fibers at a sufficient level is the cause. — AmadeusD

There are also A-fibers.

where the brain receives the data (think Chinese Room) and looks up the appropriate sensation to deploy to the perceiving mind — AmadeusD

So something happens in the brain, as a consequence of signals sent from the body, that equates to a mental feeling.
↓

It is caused by the affected area, but hte pain itself need not actually correlate with the injury. — AmadeusD

In other words, the body is a sufficient but not necessary condition of pain.

Since it is sufficient, there is the question: is experience spatially extended, or is it located at "a point in the pineal gland"?
This question is in fact extremely important for biology and (it may come off weirdly) politics: do worms — who lack a central nervous system but still react to stimulus — feel pain, and thus suffer?

If you cut off someone's foot, the person might still feel pain in what they believe to be their foot. — Hanover

Of course.

You can reliably stop the phantom pain by removing the person's brain. Without the brain, there is no pain because it is the brain that makes the pain. — Hanover

Hopefully it was that simple. By removing the brain, which is where experience is located, and putting it in a vat, you split the brain away from the medula, which sends the pain impulses to the brain. So the brain feels no pain because you removed it from the rest of the body. Is the separation between the body (as opposed to the brain) and the pain so easily done then?

You don't say that your face is sad because your women done left you — Hanover

It is their loss, not mine, ok?

illusion — AmadeusD

And so what is this illusion? What is this idea that something is happening all the way down there instead of the idea that is happening all the way up here? How does it come to be?

"do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?" — Michael

Let me rephrase that: "Do red objects have the private experience of red in them?"

Do you think it is a proper rephrasing? If so, it is a better one — understood by two people instead of just one.

The answer to the rephrased question is obviously not. Again, the trick word there is 'appear', that, if ignored, leads us to the same semantic ambiguity that shows up in this thread all the time.

Nobody can a kill a baby that was never conceived — Vera Mont

Yes, we can. A baby inside the womb is alive. What is this nonsense?

Technically procreating babies will eventually lead to their death — schopenhauer1

Dumb.

Once people are educated, they generally have fewer or no children — schopenhauer1

The reason for that isn't what you are trying to imply. And the consequence of it is not positive, it is in fact catastrophic.

THAT is not politics? — schopenhauer1

No, it is not. You have to learn how to use words correctly before starting an argument.

The sciences are concerned with how. How does light propagate, how are chemical bonds formed, how do worms reproduce.

The sciences aren't all about measurement. Biology has little to no measures outside of biochemistry.

Replying to the rest of the post. It was edited.

This amounts to the claim that the property that all objects that appear to be bitter have in common is that they cause a bitter taste. — Michael

The property they have in common is something in their chemical structure. That chemical structure is part of a causal chain to elicit bitterness.

If all you can say is that the property that all objects that appear to be red have in common is that they cause a red sensation then that amounts to colour eliminativism. — Michael

Some objects have a property which reflects red light, whether we are there to see it or not. We may call those objects red, even if these objects can only possibly exist in the dark, where they would appear black. Likewise, we may call the Sun green, even though it seems white to us.

There is a physical meaning of 'red', 'blue', 'green' that is used in physics.

I understand it just fine — Michael

"Understanding it just fine" means you do not notice the ambiguity in the phrase.

scientists — Michael

There is no such thing as a "scientist".

The question "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?" is not answered by saying that the word "red" can refer to different things. — Michael

Says who? I have replied before that the question is badly posed.

I think the answer that you want specifically is that they do not have the appearance, it is something constructed by our mind. The word that does the trick there is 'appear'.

and establishing universal reproductive rights for women — Vera Mont

"Utopia is when we can kill babies".
"Utopia is when my politics is in place".

Outstanding.

I was talking metaphysics there, not biology.

Speaking of biology, there are many molecules that may bind to bitter taste receptors. One part ot the causal chain that typically gives us the perception of bitter taste is the binding to the respective receptor, whatever molecule binds to it. Being able to bind to the receptor is a common property of those molecules, and that ability breaks down to their molecular structure, they either have it or they don't.

Now, talking grammar. Of course, you will then say that no molecule is bitter, bitterness is a perception. That is correct, but that is because that is the only possible meaning that 'bitter' may take. However, that is not the case for colours, 'blue' may very well take on a physical meaning. It would be otherwise if 'binding to the bitter taste receptor' was a current, chemical usage of the word 'bitter', but it is not. What I am saying can be attested in dictionaries.

A converse example is that there are many molecules that may bind to hemoglobin, but only oxygen gas allows us to survive. Here, the binding molecule does matter.

That does not follow — Michael

It does follow if we do not admit ex nihilo regularities. That is, as soon as we accept that everything has a cause, and that our senses at least sometimes are caused by outside objects, the commonality of some senses will have a cause in common — some would call this a universal, platonic or not.

? — Lionino

By the way, for a previous discussion on this topic, there is this https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/879257 (it continues in the next page with javra)

First, do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?

The question is not well posed. What is the function of "appear" here? All those fruits have a property in common, otherwise we would not see something in common in them. And that property is the profile of the emission spectrum of whatever substance is optically predominant, for an outside looker, in that object. In the dark, the strawberry looks black, but strawberries are red.

• I see red.
• The light is red.
• Rubidium is red.

In each of these, 'red' may take on a different meaning.
An important distinction is that the Sun looks white, but it can be correctly said to be green.

Bikes on bus lanes are fine in the Low Countries.

There is nothing wrong with 'red' meaning both the experience of red and the usual cause of red, and that is what it means. Scientists — who don't even exist — don't determine language. Words can have more than one meaning, it is not mysterious.

You can't. — AmadeusD

If you touch something with your hand, you reliably know it is on your hand, not your foot.

1. The above - pain signals are not apodictic indicators of anything; and — AmadeusD

No sense perception is. We have fallen back into solipsism.

2. An injured body part doesn't 'feel' anything. The perceiving mind does. — AmadeusD

Begging the question, aren't we?

I will restate the question: if the pain happens exclusively in the mind, how does a burn on your finger hurt your finger and not your foot?

That is fine, but it still does not answer my question:

What creates the depth perception of pain inside your lungs instead of a pain inside your bowels? — Lionino

How can you tell it happens inside the lung and not inside the intestine?

He claimed his work was scientific. — Moliere

Even worse, he claimed his branch of socialism™ was scientific. The same hubris we see in post-modern leftists: "Dead old men? Hng, who cares? We in the 21st century know better!"

- VOLUME I. A RETROSPECT. Chapter XI. RACE AND PEOPLE — Tarskian

This is a racial theory of his, he doesn't spell out any policy there.

Why he was going to go to war with Russia: — Tarskian

War with Russia was only decided well over a decade after Mein Kampf was published. The book doesn't include any call to war against Russia either, it simply explains why a military alliance with it (or Turkey) is not advantageous for Germany.

Nothing there that "spelled it out very clearly [...] what he would do" as you say. You are free to quote excerpts however.

Edit 6 days later: no excerpts. Curious. I guess the BSer BSed again.

Oh, no. It is the indirect realism X direct realism discussion all over again. Here we go 50 pages. — Lionino – page 7

I am excitedly looking forward to the moment my prediction realises and my smugness fully blossoms as a beautiful orchid.

I'm not sure about Brussels — Ludwig V

Generally flat too. I have heavily edited my comment btw.

especially where there is heavy traffic, especially where roads are narrow — Ludwig V

That is something you see in Brussels. Specially Kruidtuinlaan next to Brussels-Nord station and its transversal streets, they are often congested, so one may rent a Uber/Bolt bike for 10 minutes and 3 euros rather than paying 20 euros to stay in a smelly taxi for 25 minutes to get to a hotel — that is possible and made comfortable because, even though there is no separate bike lane, cars and buses mostly respect that bikes may ride on the slow rightmost lane.

From my experience, bikes are used more in small/concentrated cities than big/spread-out ones. That is to say, if your weekly services are in a 2km radius to you, you may bike there, but if you live in the edges of a neighbourhood that cartographically looks like Chile, you will have to use engines. It is a matter of density of services and concentricity of urban planning. If you look at Cancún, the Zona Hotelera neighbourhood is awfully spread-out, but Puerto Juarez is more concentric.

In the Netherland, bikes are everywhere, but that is because you can actually get to places with it, nobody is riding 10km+ with their bike to get somewhere (maybe those three people).

However, I don't see a lot of bikes in many smaller cities in Southern Europe, like Coimbra (which fair enough it is on a hill) or Como. On the other hand, Brussels is a big city with a lot of bikes and scooters.

There is also a cultural side to it.

At the end of the day, without infrastructure, people won't use bikes. But as is the case with companies and services, there must be some "market-research" to see if the product will have customers. Many years ago in São Paulo, they removed car lanes to add bike lanes, the result was more traffic jams and the benefit of bike lanes was not great, the city is way too large and spread out, also crime. The government however doesn't go bankrupt, so they don't care as much.

I thought that "car-centric" was the standard word for this. — Ludwig V

Maybe I was dead-on in saying the researchers haven't mastered their own language.

Is the SEP chopped liver to you? Because I quoted it in the post you are replying to.

Speaking of Routledge, we see some hesitation in calling him a philosopher as well:

Karl Marx was the most important of all theorists of socialism. He was not a professional philosopher, although he completed a doctorate in philosophy. His life was devoted to radical political activity, journalism and theoretical studies in history and political economy.

It is hard to see how Marx loved knowledge.

In absolute numbers — Tarskian

Absolute numbers is irrelevant. The "most atheist country" refers to percentage. India has one quarter of a billion Muslims and yet no one would say Indian is one of the most Muslim countries.

Then your claim was misleading. — AmadeusD

He does that on purpose.

I don't really know what you're getting at here. — AmadeusD

After being called out on his nonsense, he changes the topic and starts rambling about something completely unrelated. He does that every time. It is a smoke and screens tactic but not a very smart one.

your internal depth perception is what creates the experience of distance — AmadeusD

What creates the depth perception of pain inside your lungs instead of a pain inside your bowels?

Your point seems to be that the Soviets were actually just a bunch of pretty chill dudes who wanted everyone to get along but made some silly mistakes along the way : - )
That could literally not be more opposite to the truth.

I would appreciate if my thread didn't turn into a discussion around someone else's nonsensical pet theories.

It is now even the norm in the most atheist country on earth, China. — Tarskian

Except China is not the most atheist country.

Hitler had spelled it out very clearly in Mein Kampf what he would do. — Tarskian

You didn't read it, did you?

the Soviet Union was or became after him — Shawn

A slowly declining system where the socialist elements had to be removed one by one until we ended up in a corporative capitalist oligarchy called the Russian Republic?