Herg

As I said; evolution decided it, i.e. at an early stage of evolution, some genes caused organisms to experience pain when they did something that redu...

I have certainly never taken either a model of the hydrogen atom, or the idea of a hydrogen atom, to be the hydrogen atom itself. I never confuse a mo...

Nuclear weapons, climate change, species extinction, pollution of the seas... when you play Russian roulette with several guns at once, sooner or late...

Are you seriously claiming that all opinions on such a subject are equally good? Of course they aren't. Goodall and de Waal are experts in primate beh...

Primatologists Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal both stated that the child was at risk of being killed, if only because the gorilla was so immensely str...

There are two groups of people in the scientific and philosophical worlds: those who hold the view that there is an unsolved and probably insoluble ha...

Yes. And macrosoft's statement ("There is a big statue of Lincoln in DC") and mine ("The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron") are not on a ...

You seem to be reasoning as follows: Premise: Physics is only intelligible in a wider context. Inference: If the wider context is not present, what ph...

"The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron." Over to you.

I'm not a Platonist either. And 'external to us' is perfectly comprehensible: I don't see your difficulty. Are you trying to sell us idealism? Because...

Mathematics is not mental in the sense you mean. It is grasped by the mental, but it is not constituted by the mental, because it is external to us.

You've changed my words. Your version is a tautology, mine is not. You're attacking a straw man. Evolution decided it, so it's not arbitrary. In gener...

I live in the UK. For the past 34 years, I have been a non-Tory living in an ultra-safe Tory constituency. Teresa May and Jeremy Corbyn will fly over ...

Not sure what you mean. If you mean that mental content is brain content and is therefore physical because the brain is physical, that may be so, but ...

You want to avoid pain because of what pain feels like. (And that's an end to the regress.)

Evidently when I said we had no significant areas of disagreement, I was jumping the gun. Holmes is not mental content. The mental content here is the...

Good lord. No, that was not my intention. What I was trying to suggest is that you and I, when we read a story about Sherlock Holmes, play along with ...

Yes, exactly. If Jesus had said 'love thy neighbour as thou wouldst love thyself if thou wert loving thyself properly,' that would have meant not feed...

This is not necessarily a good idea. I, for instance, eat too much ice cream and don't get enough exercise. If I follow Jesus' precept, I would encour...

We still evidently have some disagreements on the detail (unless you are merely being a little loose in the way you express yourself). Viz: I agree th...

Part of the problem, I think, comes from supposing that there is identity between your Holmes and mine. Since there is no Holmes, there can't be; but ...

That would only settle the truthfulness of statements about the properties of Holmes within the stories. The issue MindForged and I are discussing is ...

Reading my posts here yesterday, I realise that being referred to a very expensive book is probably just annoying. Apologies for that. I shall not do ...

I wasn't going to try and advise you, Posty, because I've never been clinically depressed (though my mother was, for most of her life), and so it seem...

This is like claiming that if one person counterfeited a few coins, the entire system of using money would collapse through lack of trust. It wouldn't...

I've addressed it now, by quoting Griffin's theory in my preceding post. No. We can pretend or suppose that they do, but really they don't.

I assume that MindForged means that the chief reason philosophers propose non-existent objects is to explain how we can speak truthfully about such th...

No, you're not saying 'pretend'; you're simply pretending. No, there are no non-existent objects. To say that an object is non-existent is the same as...

False, since 'everyone' includes me, and I don't know that. I think you are pretending that he is real without realising that that's what you are doin...

That's not about whether you're pretending, it's about why you're pretending. There can be many reasons why you would do this. You could dress up as H...

My mother was always sad that she wouldn't see me in heaven after we both died. She was saved, I am not. She's probably up there now asking for an exc...

Evidently I didn't make myself clear. To speak of a non-existent God is to pretend that there is a God when there isn't. Since it's a pretence, it's n...

Happiness can sometimes be bad, but only when it causes greater unhappiness later on. (You are happy lazing in the sun instead of studying for your ex...

There are two strong reasons to believe that death is the end: 1) science has found no evidence of consciousness occurring without brain activity, and...

I think there are two errors in TOA. The first is the assumption that a God who exists is greater than a God who doesn't exist. This is false, because...

It is denied by nominalists. I'm surprised that you don't know that. See, for example, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/ In g...

I see no need for abstract objects, so I invoke Occam's razor. Away with them. Nor do I see a need for abstract facts. Consider the fact that 2 + 2 = ...

As I understand it (which is not very well, since I am no scientist), time only came into being with the big bang, and since 'always' is a temporal co...

Noted, but given the grammatical form of the sentences, the burden of proof here is on the prescriptivist.

Your example does not contain imperatives, it contains two statements. These are imperatives, and therefore cannot have truth values: Always be honest...

Wow. Powerful philosophical argument! ;) You have moral obligations only insofar as your actions are likely to promote happiness, or relieve or preven...

I'm an uncomplicated hedonist. I take the view that happiness and pleasure are always, and the only, intrinsically good things, and unhappiness and pa...

What you're saying, I think, is that there's something wrong with saying that a bad or wrong action can have a good component. I can't see anything wr...

If indulging in fantasies about immoral sexual acts would make it more likely that one would commit those acts, then I would say that it is immoral to...

I didn't say happiness was paramount, I said it was good. I accept that in some cases it may not be paramount. My argument doesn't need it to be. Even...

Your implied argument is: There are unhealthy conditions which involve happiness. Therefore happiness is not good. Not a valid argument. The happiness...

I'll offer you an argument. 1) Happiness is good, unhappiness is bad. (proved by the fact that everyone wants happiness and no-one wants unhappiness) ...

You mean I am disagreeing for the sake of it? That's pretty insulting, and not true. I disagree with you because I think you are wrong. The being of t...

I think I can produce a version of the ontological argument that avoids both of these objections, viz: Premise 1: A being that is beneficent and exist...

Number is not the same as quantity. The number 3 is not the same as 3 OF something. No it isn’t. Red is a colour. There is a wavelength of light that,...