Bylaw

I agree, I think, and I'll come at it a different way, by specific example. Materialism (and in one usage physicalism) is a monism where there is only...

Got it

As for the rest. Yes, some people may think their single personal experience is proof. Those people exist. Also they make leaps in what it might be ev...

Now you are using the word proof. Before it was evidence. UFOs seen in the sky by navy pilots on hundreds of occasions. This included only instances w...

Right but in a philosophy forum it is an immediate claim to dualism

Sure, you can have terrible heuristics when dealing with anecdotes. Or you can have good ones. Anecdotes can come from people suffering psychotic brea...

I believe you. I can see that the statements I was reacting to were in the context of that discussion. I read it as a more general claim. I do. Obviou...

I think there is middle ground here. An observation in science is a tiny (rigorously controlled in good research) anecdote. We did X (with these testi...

Great, though I was thinking more of elimination by deduction, I think.

This is true regardless, or? It shouldn't matter what the person claiming X is the case categorizes the phenomenon as. What matters is if there is evi...

Isn't this what often leads to something being ruled out and then later accepted in science. For example: people lving near elephants and then some no...

A small note to start: if it's a shop clerk he or she is not running the business, they are working for someone. (I realize 'running' is a bit ambiguo...

I'm talking about the model, which I don't agree with, and how it is conceived. Though I do think some believers think that eventually we'll all figur...

You don't remember, but you can still learn and become more compassionate or whatever. Later, in some conceptions of Karma, you do remember past lives...

It is one version of Karma though not necessarily thought of as retributive, but rather as teaching the person what they failed to understand in the p...

:lol:

The real problem is the implication that the Jews deserved their punishment. They must have done something such that the universe needed to teach them...

We're being put in a situation where we are told that we KNOW. Here is the truth, period. This is the way it is and now you KNOW it. We're not in that...

We do for some things, but not for many many others. For example, we have large sets of heuristics about how to achieve certain things: money, friends...

Right, nor can neuroscience lay claim to this issue being just on their turf. Since we don't know, we don't know if it depends on neurons and other ob...

That probably seems like a good idea. He seems trustworthy. But once its more money it seems like there is too much risk. You have done some statistic...

1) I think we all do this and 2) I think it is useful. To be at the stage of seeming, it probably has either worked ok for us or it is not worked to a...

I'd want to go in again to the example 'the atmosphere', not to change your mind about your points about universe - which I think are good ones - but ...

I'd never heard of him. Stanford has this to say... https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hare/#Aft Here's the strange dream, just to make that reference...

Yes, we can. So, we get a series of snapshots of the outsideYes. My main idea is that we are always using a multitude of observations to construct a k...

Yes, I got that. My point was that there is inferring in pretty much everything we look at, even small stuff. But also the atmosphere, rivers, and oth...

That was me being playful.

I thought you'd never say Uncle.

woud this mean one can't study the atmosphere (unlike a car), unless one can go outside the atmosphere. And aren't we really studying lots of incomple...

Well, we certainly use the same brain for whatever we engage in. Each of us, that is, have but one brain.I think that's a pretty incomplete test. Yes,...

I don't have a thing about physicists. I was trying to show the different needs of two professions by showing what one could possibly get away with in...

As I said: that's apples and bicycles. If I need a snack and my blood sugar is low sucking on the bicycle doesn't help me. If I need to commute to wor...

I did say 'be false', but that's what almost all professional life with some kind of regular contact with strangers includes. Your doctor can't honest...

It's comparing apples to bicycles. Politicians need to be able to read people very well, use people, negotiate well, be false and be comfortable with ...

Sure, a soldier is in a specific situation, though even there some show mercy to wounded enemy soldiers. What I was saying about empathy was that one ...

He certainly could have been influenced by thinking he understood some things, that made the job unappleaing, and didn't understand other things makin...

And in those who weild a great deal of power. IOW it's not something that printing books on parenting or changing pedagogical practices, I think, will...

I don't think we need to restrict empathy to situations where we have a worldview difference. Do you wince when you see someone get hurt? Does it dist...

There are certainly conflicts between worldviews, but I suppose if I were to generalize I would say there is a war between people with no empathy and ...

I'd go even further and say that not only is it redundant, it's misleading. It's as if we can not only see it's truth AND consider it's justification ...

I don't mean it's a farce. I think there may be significant overlaps with what they actually believe. I just mean that I don't assume it matches, and ...

I'm not sure what the 'it' refers to. I have a sense that people have official worldviews and then often something else and/or something more complex ...

Philosophy is a field of study. We aspire. And pragmatists aspire to utility. (and if you read between the lines of other types of philosophers, even ...

Yes, I think it add entitlement. It also perhaps is just simply a natural bias. The closer something is to me, the more likely I am to give it a pass ...

Yes, and 'we' have a history of not granting consciousness even to some races in our species, in the science and philosophy communities (with exceptio...

Thank you. Yes. I mean, yes to the category of value I think the thread lead to. It lead to seeing people sum up their positions on a number of philos...

I don't see it there.

And how do we know they are not, those that we deem not having them?

You don't have to go that far. In people's homes in the West, at private parties. Try exercising a wide range of free speech while at work (including ...

Small talk certainly can be important. It's like a dance. It's not the content, but the near play of it, the feeling the other person out on trivia or...