Comments

  • Guest Speaker: Noam Chomsky
    ↪Mikie
    :up:
  • What jazz, classical, or folk music are you listening to?
    Michael Brecker's "Syzygy" &
    Brick's "Dazz"

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/754042
  • Numbers: A Physical Handshake with Design
    ↪ucarr
    Paradigm =/= model.
  • Numbers: A Physical Handshake with Design
    If one models the universe as beginning-less, and thus origin-less, does cosmology then cover the totality of existence? — ucarr
    We don't know – possibly not. The observable universe is the only "existence", however, that matters significantly to us (i.e. terrestrial life).

    Perhaps a categorical essence is out of domain, but essential things aren’t.
    In this statement, for clarity's sake, I prefer fundamental to your term "essential".

    This raises the question whether metaphysics has any place within a physicalist universe.
    The doesn't make sense to me because I think of "physicalist universe" itself as a metaphysical construct, that is, merely a speculative supposition – way of observing and describing nature.

    You clearly credit metaphysics with real status. How do you reconcile this with your physicalist identity?
    These terms don't make sense to me. I am not a (logical) positivist or (Humean) empiricist. My methodological physicalism is a function, or corollary, of my philosophical naturalism which is a metaphysics (or speculative supposition).

    Is it the case you think metaphysics not a categorical separation from physics but instead a higher-order physics?
    No. I think metaphysics concerns 'a priori speculative suppositions about nature (i.e. humanly knowable aspects of existence)' and physics concerns 'explaining transformations in nature by making testable, hypothetical-deductive models'. I consider methodological physicalism only a paradigm for making/evaluating 'physical models' (sans non-physical ideas or entities) and interpreting their results, or problematics.
  • Has The "N" Word Been Reclaimed - And should We Continue Using It?
    ↪GTTRPNK
    My read of (modern) history is that the pendulum, so to speak, swings back and forth from intolerance to tolerance, some times in faster-shorter cycles than most other times, and "social progress" is mostly a mirage because achievements in tolerance-inclusion tend to be quite fragile (e.g. in the US in recent decades, eviceration of civil & voting rights; increase in voter suppression policies, rise of virulent ethnonationalism and nonwhite immigrant scapegoating (à la MAGA-GOP politics); ahistorical expansion of 2nd Amendment & denial of women"s reproductive healthcare rights; rise in rate of hate crimes against LGBTIs Asians Muslims & Jews; etc). It seems axiomatic that while there is (mostly) "progress" in technosciences, struggle for dignity against injustice in social relations is an existential constant. IME, epithets, "reclaimed" or not, are almost entirely inconsequential.

    I am openly not straight and being insulted for it doesn’t bother me because I’m not ashamed. — AmadeusD
    :up:
  • Has The "N" Word Been Reclaimed - And should We Continue Using It?
    ↪Ciceronianus
    :up:
  • Has The "N" Word Been Reclaimed - And should We Continue Using It?
    I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what they do. Behavior never lies. — Winston Churchill, British imperialist politician
    In other words: "sticks and stones ..."

    postpone progress? — GTTRPNK
    As a Black man, I wonder what you mean by "progress" ... specifically "progress" of what and for whom?
  • Numbers: A Physical Handshake with Design
    ↪ucarr
    IMHO, cosmology (physics) concerns only modelling the development of what we call "the observable universe" and not "beginnings" or "origins" or "essences" of all things (metaphysics).
  • Bob's Normative Ethical Theory
    align ourselves with our nature as a species: — Bob Ross
    Describe "our nature as a species" and explain how you determine that to be so (unless you mean something like 'Aristotle's teleology', then never mind).
  • African Americans still wearing Covid-19 masks.
    ↪TiredThinker
    I finished my BS (it took me 6.5 years) at Syracuse U in the 1980s and had some good visits to Rochester & Buffalo during those years. Thought I knew what bad winters were like until I'd moved on to Minnesota for graduate school. :grimace:
  • Agnostic atheism seems like an irrational label
    ↪Hallucinogen
    Okay ... if you say so.
  • Agnostic atheism seems like an irrational label
    I'm not talking about "believing in"... — Hallucinogen
    You misconstrue atheism which denotes 'lack of belief in god' and / or 'belief in the nonexistence of god' and is not a statement of knowledge (i.e. not a truth-claim) like agnosticism. It's you who are equivocating – confusing – belief and knowledge in order to conjure up an inconsistency where there isn't one.

    If you know something, it is rational to believe it.
    Yes, just as it can be "rational" to believe something without knowing whether it is true.
  • Agnostic atheism seems like an irrational label
    ↪Hallucinogen
    So do you think it is "irrational" to know that there is a god and not to believe in that god (just as a wife can know that her husband exists and does not believe in him)?

    If so, please explain.

    If not, then explain why your OP is not inconsistent with the disjunction of 'knowing that G' and 'believing in G' I've presented here. :chin:

    I think your conflation of knowing (i.e. a proposition) and believing (i.e. to have trust in, or to be committed to, a statement or disposition), Hallucinogen, is clearly unwarranted.
  • Bob's Normative Ethical Theory
    'biologically wired to' see if they are not defective — Bob Ross
    Are yoi referring to homeostasis?
  • Bob's Normative Ethical Theory
    ↪Bob Ross
    Homeostasis?
  • Bob's Normative Ethical Theory
    P1: One should abide by the intended function(s) of their organism. — Bob Ross
    "Intended" by who? Which or all "function(s)"? (Hidden premises again invalidate your demonstration.)
  • Numbers: A Physical Handshake with Design
    ↪jgill
    I appreciate your insights. :up:
  • Numbers: A Physical Handshake with Design
    ↪ucarr
    I don't understand the question. Rephrase?
  • What is the way to deal with inequalities?
    ↪Vera Mont
    :up:
  • Numbers: A Physical Handshake with Design
    From an old thread ...
    My 'anti-platonist pragmatics' (finitism?) comes to this: pure mathematics is mostly 'invented' (re: pattern-making) and applied mathematics is mostly 'discovered' (re: pattern-matching). — 180 Proof
    Like the rules and strategies of (e.g.) chess, respectively (i.e. grammars and narratives).
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    ↪ucarr
    I don't follow your line of questioning, ucarr. What's your point?
  • African Americans still wearing Covid-19 masks.
    Living in the US Southeast (Atlanta, Georgia) until spring 2022, I'd contracted Covid-19 twice in the winter and again in the fall of 2021 wearing masks, etc the whole time. Despite the onerous and opportunistic effects of "long covid", I managed to drag my dutifully masked self to the US Pacific Northwest (metro Portland, Oregon), relocating permanently in the spring of 2022, and by the fall had stopped wearing masks feeling fortified by my third vaccine booster (I was 59 then).

    Four months ago I received my booster, still maskless, and then contracted the virus again two months later and suffered mild (and some new) symptoms during the holidays which seem to have finally(?) subsided. I'm Black and still maskless. I haven't encountered any Black men or women wearing masks in metro Portland in the last twenry months. AFAIK, none of my friends and family who are Black and living in NYC, Phoenix, Atlanta & Seattle wear masks either so I have no experiential basis on which to find the OP credible. If anything, I only see Asians and some Whites still wearing masks.
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    ↪ucarr
    If you say so. Epistemology, not semiotics ... but whatever floats your boat.
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    Is this a correct paraphrase of your response to Philosophim’s thesis: spacetime, an unbounded, finite, beginning-less phenomenon, requires an arbitrary starting point re: sequential processes. It can be considered a “working” starting point, but there’s no logical necessity guiding the choice of a particular starting point. — ucarr
    Okay, more or less. Dynamic models "require" initial conditions but what they model (e.g. the univerde) does not. In other words, wouldn't you agree we ought not mistake the maps we make for the territory itself?
  • Regarding the antisemitic label
    ↪Eros1982
    Among semitic peoples, "anti-Jewish" makes more sense than "antisemitic". Criticism of Israel's "Greater Israel" policies is called "antisemitism" by apologists / propagandists for Israel but most of such critics are, in fact, principled "anti-Zionists"¹ (many of which are conscientious Israeli and non-Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews (like myself)). Colloquially the term "antisemitism" is used synonymously with "Jew-hatred" as a traditionally sectarian form of systemic discrimination (i.e. racism) against Jews and Judaism (i.e. slandered as the source of "conspiracies" to control or destroy all "Christian nations", etc).

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/858450 ¹
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    :roll: If you say do ...
  • Bob's Normative Ethical Theory
    Now, to be completely honest, I am rethinking this normative theory; because I don’t think it works anymore. — Bob Ross
    :up:
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    You say first, a beginning is necessary, it is logically necessary to begin somewhere, but then you proceed to say that beginnings are not logically necessary, they are possible. — Metaphysician Undercover
    This sloppy misquotation, MU, shows why you (willfully) misunderstand my position.
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    Counting is a process, standing isn’t. — Michael
    Silly semantics. :roll:
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    ↪Michael
    I don't think so. IMO, spacetime =/= time sequence (A or B).
  • A first cause is logically necessary
    If the past is infinite then the present is the end of an infinite sequence of events. An infinite sequence of events has no end. Therefore, the past is not infinite. — Michael
    If (post-Newtonian) spacetime describes an unbounded, finite magnitude like the surface of the Earth (or torus, Klein bottle, Möbius loop, etc) – does not have edges or end-points – then the tenses of events (i.e. inertial reference-frames) are relative and not absolute (e.g. "the past" "the present"). It is "logically necessary" to "begin counting" somewhere in a beginning-less sequence just as it is to be standing somewhere on the Earth's surface. Thus, beginnings, or "first causes", are demonstrably not "logically necessary" in ontology (topology or cosmology) though, of course, they are possible.

    "It simply is" is the first cause. — Philosophim
    :roll:
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Addendum to
    ↪180 Proof
    :victory: :mask:

    "The Coming Biden Blowout"
    by David Frum

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/gop-republicans-2024-election-biden-trump/673856/
  • What are you listening to right now?

    "What's Going On" (3:53)
    What's Going On, 1971
    writers A. Cleveland, R. Benson & M. Gaye, 1970
    performer Marvin Gaye
  • Deconstructing our intuitions of consciousness
    What is an example of something non-empirical and natural? — Lionino
    (Some) Mathematical structures.
  • Deconstructing our intuitions of consciousness
    Do you think that could be done from some perspective outside of consciousness? — Wayfarer
    I'm a p-naturalist¹ and thereby speculatively assume that aspects of nature are only explained within – immanently to – nature itself by using other aspects of nature, which includes "consciousness" as an attribute of at least one natural species. Atomic structures, genomic evoluntion and human brains, for instance, are each scientifically studied publicly, or "from outside any one conscious perspective", within the horizon – limits – of culture (e.g. ordinary / narrative & formal languages) that is, again, an attribute of at least one natural species. IMO, Wayfarer, whatever else (individual) "consciousness" may be, it seems to function as a lower-information phenomena always situated within higher-information systems of culture which likewise is always conditioned by the unbounded-information 'strange-looping, fractal-like' structure of nature that I compare analogously to 1-d lines imbedded on surfaces of 2-d planes imbedded in 3-d objects / an N-d manifold, etc.


    ¹Whatever else reality might consist in, nature is the only aspect of reality with which we natural beings, who are inseparable from – encompassed by – nature and therefore constrained by our natural capabilities, or attributes, can only finitely observe and thereby asymptotically explain nature itself. (re: Epicurus, Spinoza, Peirce-Dewey, Zapffe-Camus, D. Parfit, P. Foot et al)
  • New Year's Eve celebrations
    When I'd seen 2010 in theatrical release back in the 80s I thought it was okay too but rewatching it again several years ago I really didn't like it. Same with A.C. Clarke's three sequel novels – for me, they diminished, or cheapened, the original. With few exceptions, I tend not to like sequels (or series) in any medium though.

    How was your TNG marathon? How many episodes did you watch? Which season/s? I'm a diehard TOS trekkie so for me "canon" ends with the Star Trek: The Animated Series (though I do enjoy rewatching the movies ST II & ST VI). While my nephews were growing up in the early 2000s, I'd watched quite a few episodes of TNG (& DS9) with them. They were huge Patrick Stewart fans from his role in the X-Men movies and I suspect that somehow lead them to TNG. Well I remain stuck in the 60s era of the franchise; must be childhood nostalgia from watching all those "reruns". :nerd: \\//_ "LLAP"
  • Deconstructing our intuitions of consciousness
    Is anything "non-empirical" supernatural? — Skalidris
    No.

    And if by empirical you mean scientific, well this is a philosophy forum, not a scientific one.
    'Empirical' is also a philosophical term (e.g. Kant) so it's not synonymous with "scientific".

    If science is the only field that is allowed to deal with the topic of consciousness, should it be banned from this forum?
    No. :roll:
  • Best Arguments for Physicalism
    And this is where I find myself in some agreement with Wayfarer. — Banno
    :gasp:
  • Best Arguments for Physicalism
    Here's a thought: why not use different sorts of explanations for different things. — Banno
    :up:

    This is why I say 'aspects of nature' and not 'everything'. Epistemological pluralism (e.g. N. Goodman's irrealism) makes the most sense to me.
  • Deconstructing our intuitions of consciousness
    What do you think of this reasoning? — Skalidris
    Too reliant on folk psychology and seemingly not informed enough by contemporary cognitive neuroscience. "Consciousness" is an empirical problem yet to be solved (i.e. testably explained) and not merely, or even principally, a speculative question ... unless by "consciousness" one means a 'supernatural' or non-empirical entity. :chin:
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