Can't we monitor people's physiology - brain activity, heart etc - with specialized equipment designed specifically for this purpose, in relation to various stimuli, thereby building a huge database correlating physical processes with experiences? — Pussycat

I cannot think of any view that suggests that you would. I may have suggested that you experience the time during which I was listening instead of being stuck experiencing only the time that you are talking. — noAxioms

You misunderstand. I am not asking for a determination of when that time is, only that you must inevitably be simultaneous with it at some point, unless you are skipping over swaths of time — noAxioms

There is no way to know how long it takes for an actual hour to pass since one does not experience the actual flow of time, but rather one experiences proper time, same as what clocks measure. — noAxioms

Hasn't Eternalism also given itself numerous other unsolvable problems? — substantivalism

You make it sound like you're stuck in a moment, and never experience the later time when I am 'listening'. — noAxioms

It's like saying that the seller in a sale, profits more than the buyer. — Benkei

You might say that's fine because a rising tide raises all boats, and so everybody gets more wealthy. But that's not actually what happened. Real wages of workers in the West haven't grow much since the seventies, it's Western elites and Asia that has benefitted from the growth predominantly. — ChatteringMonkey

But there must be a property there that can give rise to the "what it's like" of consciousness, because, if there isn't, then our subjective experience emerges for no reason. — Patterner

The time of speaking and time of hearing are different, yes, but both those times are 'the present' when they occur, for everybody. — noAxioms

The best part, he's now negotiating from a position of weakness because he admits needing his allies and trade partners. What an insane loser. — Benkei

Then how is it that some espouse it while being presentists and others such as William Lane Craig famously seemed to be in favor of it but with a growing block theory of time? — substantivalism

That may be your opinion but its most definitely not the opinion of most dissidents, philosophers, and physicists who have spilled ink on this topic usually using Lorentz aether theory as a vehicle for their intuitive presentist viewpoints. Even such people are fearful of action at distance to a point that it's better to propose something with peculiar properties than to propose nothing at all and say it's just distant disembodied action. Course, then the distant connections would be causal in nature through this 'aether' but instantaneous and truly symmetrical, reflexive, as well as transitive. — substantivalism

Presentism requires absolutism, else simultaneity would not work. — noAxioms

The US runs persistent trade deficits because global investors funnel capital into the country. — Benkei

So since this led us to this point, let's assume for a moment that this is the goal; getting rid of the dollar's reserve currency status. — Benkei

In the end, everywhere I look, I only see inconsistencies, which means this has not been thought through. — Benkei

There is the implication that to truly hold to SR you have to accept a form of spacetime realism of sorts and therefore also a form of eternalism. Fine. . . but the opposing position doesn't have to resort to postulating the existence of future/past states by supposing a universal Aether frame that can be seen as an objective present or a 'physical' absolute simultaneity marker. — substantivalism

If they are postulating an absolute present. . . I.E. a way of giving an absolute simultaneity. . . then aren't they a presentist? — substantivalism

Or are they just holding to a slightly different block theory of time than SR? Does that make presentism actually inconsistent with traditional Lorentz Aether theory? — substantivalism

i'm saying there must be an explanation for our consciousness in the properties of the particles that we are made out of. — Patterner

An absolute frame of reference is typically conjoined with a form of presentism or at least its implied to be so. — substantivalism

Wouldn't this then make the notion of an absolute frame altogether meaningless under a thin presentism? — substantivalism

"Less heat" means the conditions have changed. The degree of heat is a condition. Initially, I described liquid water. Then I mentioned different conditions - less heat - under which the hydrogen bonds don't break as easily. — Patterner

What do you mean by "substantiated" if not proven? Scientific theories, much less philosophical claims, cannot be proven. Your apparent demand for absolute certainty (proof) leads if the logic is followed consistently to absolute skepticism. In that case just forget about claiming anything at all that is not analytically true or tautologous. — Janus

So take Q to be the statement "mental processes are physical processes". Now, the two pieces of information I listed before - the chemical effect on mental processes, and the early foray into AI that we're witnessing - I think pretty reasonably raise the probability of Q, compared to what Q would be given the opposite observations. Opposite observations being, a hypothetical world in which chemically altering the neuronal environment DOESN'T affect thinking, and in which simulating neurons in a computer DOESN'T produce a machine that can solve problems, pass the turing test, and generate internal models of the data it interacts with. — flannel jesus

An unsubstantiated claim is a claim without any evidence. — flannel jesus

The best we can do is investigate empirically as much as possible and then provisionally accept what seems most plausible. — Janus

H2O's macro physical characteristics, under any conditions, are explained by how's it's micro physical properties behave under those conditions. Every physicist, website, and book that explains its characteristics, under any conditions, including why ice floats on water, will say the same. It's because of the properties of its molecules, like its weak hydrogen bonds, and the angle of the arrangement of its atoms in the molecules. These things, in turn, due to the nature of electron shells. — Patterner

Or point me to any other macro characteristic that is not explained by how the micro properties of its constituents behave under the conditions it is in. — Patterner

Affect the chemistry of the brain and you affect mental processes too. — flannel jesus

Perhaps you're not entirely compelled to agree, that's fine, but we're far far away at this point from it being an entirely unsubstantiated assumption. We have plenty of fantastic reasons to think mental processes might be neural processes. — flannel jesus

We are 'blind' to neural processes in vivo, so of course mental processes don't seem to us to be neural processes. I think this "seeming" is what causes all the difficulties. — Janus

Of course. I used H2O to illustrate this. — Patterner

Second, big things are made of little things. And the big things have the characteristics they have because of the properties of the little things. — Patterner

Why wouldn't you expect half of the world's population to produce half of the stuff and get half of the profits? — Banno

If so, what is it? — 180 Proof

The world we know, is the medium. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's less inconsistent and more parsimonious, it seems to me, to conceive of "physical" and "mental" as two properties – ways of describing / modeling – substance than positing them as "two substances" (which do not share a medium by which to interact with one another). Property dualism, for example, does not have "substance dualism's" interaction problem. — 180 Proof

My point was not about the truthful perception of a thing, but about differences in general. A thing can never be perceived absolutely; there are no 1:1 real-time representations. — DasGegenmittel

Correct, but I would add that both sameness and difference are equally important to emphasize the definitional core of the matter. There is no delimitation without differentiation. — DasGegenmittel

Biden’s final “fuck you” to the world was the crossing of “red-lines” and the possibility (50% possibility, according to US intelligence) of all out nuclear war. — NOS4A2

I can only speak for myself, but my own paranoia is the compression of space, that distant events and people can influence local and regional affairs. — NOS4A2

His installing as prime minister is the swan song of globalism — NOS4A2

Then I want to say that when we know what the sign means, what we know is how to use it. That means not only understanding the conceptual structure that gives is meaning, but what it requires us to do (and not to do). — Ludwig V

I don’t think so. “2 + 2 = 4” isn’t a statement about reality as such, but about a perceptual pattern abstracted by the mind. Numbers aren’t part of the world in the same way as, say, rocks or trees. They’re tools—mental instruments that help us structure and process sensory input. They emerge after perception, not before it. — DasGegenmittel

Perception introduces difference. Without difference, there’s no concept of “two.” Numbers are thus not touchable objects, but operational categories—modalities of cognition. — DasGegenmittel

As for the broken clock case:

To say, “S cannot believe that a broken clock is working,” misrepresents the belief. “Broken clock” is an external diagnosis, not necessarily part of S’s belief content.

If S looks at the clock at 2:00 p.m., and the clock (stuck at 2:00) shows 2:00, S forms the belief “It’s 2:00.” That belief is justified (the clock appears fine), true (it is 2:00), and believed. The Gettier problem arises here. — DasGegenmittel

This particular act wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment meltdown of the mentally ill, as usually is the case, but the use of a mask and duct tape suggest some level of planning, so the owner guesses it was probably a neighbor or someone who followed him home. — NOS4A2

Well, what you say is not wrong, of course. But I would have put it differently. That I prefer to say that "2+2=4" is a statement in what grammarians call the timeless present just shows that I'm uncomfortable with metaphysics. So let that pass. When I said it signified nothing, I was taking advantage of an ambiguity in the meaning of "signified". The traditional structure of signifier and signified articulates the two terms as inherently relational - two objects in a relationship. I don't think it necessarily is. For example, does a road sign saying "Road closed" stand in any necessary relation to anything that you would want to call an object, in the sense that the sign itself is an object. I don't think so. But the sign has a clear meaning, nonetheless. — Ludwig V

We can say that, but we do well to pause for a moment and work out the meaning of what we just said. If we post the meaning (significance) of a term as an object and think things through, we may realize that no object could possibly do the things that we require meaning to do. So we have to park that idea and think more carefully about what we actually mean by meaning. — Ludwig V

And it has turned out that—if true—everything it has removed... — NOS4A2

Yes, but representing and corresponding are not the only ways to mean something. If we can calculate and apply our equations to the world, we know what they mean even if the signify nothing. — Ludwig V

Musk's right wing ideology is something he recently grew into. He was a hero of the left right up until he chose to think for himself and observe the censorship and complete ineptitude of the administration in power which was largely the liberal democrat bureaucracy. — philosch

At the same time, his daughter Vivian came out as transgender and changed her name, declaring that she no longer wanted to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.

Musk himself has cited Vivian as a reason for his political shift, telling the pop psychologist Jordan Peterson that he had “lost [his] son [sic], essentially”, and concluding that his son “is dead, killed by the woke mind virus”.

Lastly colonizing Mars is a next logical step in our development and is critical to the long term survival of human kind. That's simply a scientific fact. — philosch

These two descriptions describe the same thing. — Banno

it is waffle because it tries to mix two different types of language games - the physical and the intentional. — Banno

There go my pig videos — Shawn