Comments

  • What do you live for?
    ↪Sapientia

    I'm not discussing whether something to live for seems necessary for a good life but whether it is necessary, sufficient, both, or neither. I say neither, because ascribing life's worth on something else is neither sufficient nor necessary to make it better. In fact it could make it worse, as in cases of destructive cults, where the idea of having something to live for is exploited and sometimes taken to its extreme.
  • What do you live for?
    ↪Sapientia


    For example, some people find their pet worth living or dying for. But living for a pet is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good life. You could live and love your pet (or whatever) and find it just as significant, and your life just as meaningful, without the melodramatic act of ascribing all your life's worth on it.
  • What do you live for?
    One lives and dies regardless of whether there is something to live for. It is neither sufficient nor necessary for a good life.
  • seeking metaphors in this sorrow
    Is there something in particular you wish to discuss?
  • Nietzsche's view of truth

    Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

    Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is they are not even superficial.     — Nietzsche

    I'm curious about how truth is being used in each of these sentences. . . — Mongrel

    Looks like they don't use it but mention it.
  • How would you describe consciousness?
    Whence the rhetoric? I asked you two straightforward questions.
  • How would you describe consciousness?
    . . .consciousness itself . . .is a non-sensory experience - capable in principle of being undergone in a state where all of the five interactive senses are negated. . . . — Robert Lockhart
    What's it like to be senselessly undergoing a state of negating something?

    . . The significance of this fact consists in the consequence that our experience of consciousness is inimical to the method of scientific description, capable soley of describing our sensory perception of material interaction. . . — Robert Lockhart
    Please feel free to describe a senseless experience of an immaterial interaction.
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    ↪Marchesk

    You can also wake up from the bang, or pain, and experience a shock which causes your heart to stop, regardless of the physical damage caused by the bullet.
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    ↪Marchesk

    You can die from experiences as well as knives, which result in physical ailments and death. In the case of a knife it might be loss of blood, in the case of an experience some stress-induced heart failure. You won't get away with murder by selective talk about the loss of blood, or heart failure.
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    ↪Marchesk
    I've yet to die from a dream or a perception. — Marchesk

    Some people die from the experience of pain, depression, a broken heart, delusion or a reality perceived as unbearable etc..
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    ↪Wayfarer

    To deflate something merely because of its authority is clearly not philosophical. You're campaigning here against the authority of anything scientific, as if biological explanations would be reductionist, and as if reduction ought to be avoided. But that's nonsense.

    If you'd read at least the short intro to John Searle's Consciousness, then it should be easy for you to also understand that there are ways to understand consciousness as a non-reducible biological phenomenon.
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    ↪Wayfarer

    Deflating the best explanations because of their authority is adolescent, not philosophical. And reductionism is not assumed in my talk of a biological phenomenon.
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    It simply provides a way of managing the debate from a point of view which is understandable by the physical sciences, in the absence of any other agreed normative framework. — Wayfarer

    It's not a point of view but an explanstion, your campaign to deflate the authority of the sciences, and the best explanations, seems ideological, or religious.
  • Brains do not cause conscious experience.
    Consciousness is obviously a biological phenomenon, caused by the organism as it interacts with the world in various ways: e.g. as perceived, remembered, imagined, habitually talked about, predicted, pre-conceived, discovered, revised and so on.
  • What are you listening to right now?
  • What are you listening to right now?
  • PopSci: The secret of how life on Earth began
    . . . But when some of these chemicals contact water they form spherical globules called "coacervates", which can be up to 0.01cm (0.004 inches) across.

    If you watch coacervates under a microscope, they behave unnervingly like living cells. They grow and change shape, and sometimes divide into two. They can also take in chemicals from the surrounding water, so life-like chemicals can become concentrated inside them. Oparin proposed that coacervates were the ancestors of modern cells. . . .     — BBC, Michael Marshall

    How some things behave in fields of force :)
  • Program for website
    ↪Benkei

    You don't need a special web-site management program for showing your CV online.

    If you wrote your CV with a word processor, then save it as an html file named index.html, and upload it to your host's server (e.g. with FileZilla).

    Before uploading it you can open the file with your web-browser to see whether it looks good enough. If you'd like to elaborate its design with small means then you can use a simple text editor (e.g. notepad++) and learn to edit the html-code.
  • How do I know I'm going to stay dead?
    . . why can't that same magic soul drop into a new body after it becomes disembodied after my death and I can live again? . . . — Hanover
    Right, and why talk of one's death in the first place under the assumption that a part of oneself lives on? Reminds me of talk of ghosts assumed to be immaterial yet capable of rattling chains and the like.
  • How do I know I'm going to stay dead?
    By understanding the meaning of 'dead' you can know that once you die you're going to stay dead.
  • Individualism vs. Collectivism
    How does one go about balancing the needs of the individual vs. the collective? . . . — Nick Sousa

    What's the assumed problem? Collectives as well as individuals thrive on shared infrastructure, shared built environments, division of knowledge and labour, shared cultural or sports facilities, shared languages and so on. What is it that should be balanced? Tax rates?
  • the limits of science.
    Science, by its very definition, is radically limited in its scope of authority.

    Science can only report observations, but can never assume to know anything about when, what, where, and why. . . . The things of meaning in the life are outside the realm of science.     — taylordonbarrett

    So you find the authority of science offensive. Should we care about that?
  • Religious experience has rendered atheism null and void to me
    ↪mcdoodle

    I also find people like Dennett, Dawkins & Co. somewhat insensitive. But I don't think that their dismissal of religion is a dismissal of spiritual experiences. Neither religion nor art have a monopoly on spiritual experiences, they occur in many different domains: e.g. sports, sciences or in one's relation to other people, animals, or other things.
  • How Many Different Harms Can You Name?
    It's easy to name harms, harder to say whether they are actual. Some people find the mere presence or absence of others harmful, or a reality which exists independently of their beliefs or statements.
  • How would you describe consciousness?
    ↪Babbeus

    Your questioning of 'brain' is unwarranted, I write 'biological', recall, and brains are literally biological. You can't get more precise than that. Electronic devices are called "brains" metaphorically under the assumption that they would share behavioural or functional characteristics with biological brains. But that assumption is controversial, and the 'brains' in 'electronic brains' is far more imprecise since we don't know whether electronic devices could be conscious at all. We know, without doubt, that literal brains can be conscious.
  • How would you describe consciousness?
    Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, it arises from conditions of satisfaction such as a brain and things to be conscious of. So, I would describe it as such.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    The TRUE objectification of women occurs when you only see them as nothing more than a singular representation of some wider political group ("women"). . . . — dukkha
    That's a good point.

    One might add that when you see a woman you see the woman, not a portrait. Unless she's acting in a theatre she represents neither a portrayal of herself, nor of other women.

    Yet some people seem to think that all they see would be representational, or a social construction, and thus engage in political campaigns to re-construct it their way. Hence the rhetoric about objectification.
  • Why are we seeking enlightenment? What is it?
    ↪Benjamin Dovano


    During the historical era called The Enlightenment, which led to the industrial and scientific revolutions, more people began to rely on the explanatory power of reason than on traditions based on superstition, magical thinking, or other undeserved authorities. But the word Enlightenment is used in many different senses, and seeking all of them makes no sense.
  • An argument that an infinite past is impossible
    . . .(just like Spinal Tap's amps!) — apokrisis
    :D
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    Libel is a legal term, recall, not a constitution of harm. Courts of law investigate whether a case of alleged libel is unlawful. You don't get to determine that libel would constitute harm.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    Why do you rephrase what is open to read? I've said none of those things. Your argument is clearly unsound, and the above is an informal fallacy (loaded question).
  • Life without paradox
    ↪MonfortS26

    Clarity of thought is possible. Some have a talent for thinking or seeing things clearly, seemingly without much effort, while others need a lot of time, practice, or get stuck in meaningless loops of thought. One might also be good at thinking clearly in one context but lousy at it in other contexts. Most people think less clearly under the influence of alcohol or pot, others need coffee to be able to think at all, Allegedly Rudolph Carnap (the austrian philosopher) didn't drink coffee even because he didn't want it to mess with his mind.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    I don't see how I'm using your statement "selectively" in my argument. . . . — Nagase

    It is open to read in my post (e.g. "Granted that some.. portrayals are unfair or misleading...") that here I'm not primarily concerned with the right or wrong of portrayals but the relation in the assumption that one could be diminished or objectified by them. In social constructionism, for instance, it is assumed (incorrectly) that our reality would be constructed by they ways we portray it.

    You omit what is said in my post, and instead misuse one of it sentences in a related but different context, libel, which concerns the right and wrong of portrayals. The shift of context makes the sentence appear ironic or irrational, which seems to be your primary concern. But your argument isn't sound, just vengeful sophistry disguised as "logic".
  • Living with the noumenon
    I agree it's a limit for possible knowledge, but not that 'it is a thing stripped of properties'; that would be 'nothing'. — Wayfarer

    That's Kant's distinction between appearance and thing, a thing without apperances. Only mystics or those in favour of the two-worlds-interpretation of the distinction claim they'd know that the thing would be unknowable, yet somehow real in a world beyond our world.
  • Living with the noumenon
    . . Presumably. . . . . there is something existing beyond sensory experience and the intellect. . . — Punshhh
    Sure, what one thinks of exists beyond the thought, what one experiences exists beyond the experience; anything one points at exists beyond the finger :) But you don't get to point at the unpointable, speak of the unspeakable, think the unthinkable etc..

    We can speak, or think, of 'everything', 'every thing', 'anything' etc., so the very idea of something unspeakable is obviously false.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    I don't deny the validity of your conclusion, but it ain't sound. It is selective and misleading, because my statement, which is selectively used in your argument, is not directed at those who find libel unfair but at those who believe that an unfair portrayal could somehow objectify or diminish what it portrays. It takes magical thinking, social constructionism, or the like, to believe that a mere utterance or depiction could diminish or objectify what it portrays. But one does not have to be a social constructionist to find portrayals unfair or draft libel laws against them.
  • Living with the noumenon
    What quandry? Kant's thing in itself is not a real thing but a definition of a limit for possible knowledge: i.e. a thing stripped of every property, so there is simply nothing left to know about it hence "impossible" to know in a trivial sense.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    Really? Or is that just postmodern "irony"?
  • The Nature of The Individual's Responsibility to the Group or Society
    Some responsibilities come with formal agreements, such as contracts of employment or marriage. Others arise from informal agreements, often for practical reasons, such as being friendly in a shared environment where being unfriendly would provoke protest, punishment etc. But also from a personal point of view, as when one feels responsibility to care for one's friends, or lover; which might be mutually practical, or something which arises individually, regardless of agreement, in particular when you love somebody. A parent's responsibility for his or her children seems biologically motivated, whereas my responsibility for my cat arises from the fact that I like the bugger and her company.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Hanover

    Porn is public, more now than ever before. Previous attempts to limit its presence are motivated by sex being considered taboo, not primarily by how women are portrayed (those attempts didnt 'exclude female friendly porn).
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