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TheMadFool

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Well spoken for one confident in the status quo. However, what of ongoing research? Do you think all new discoveries will fit perfectly with the curre...
April 23, 2018 at 07:10
What I think is ethics involves 2 types of behavior - negative and positive. Negative behavior is prohibited. No killing, no stealing, no lying, etc. ...
April 23, 2018 at 07:08
Mental maturity is a rare commodity. It doesn't come easy - requires more time and effort than most people are willing to invest. People want to have ...
April 23, 2018 at 06:52
From a philosophical perspective maybe but not from biology. See this. Some of these paradoxes have defied solution. It's probably true that the best ...
April 23, 2018 at 06:41
Frightening possibility. The smarter we get, the badder we become. There's a silver lining though. Intelligence is a tool in its own right and, with t...
April 21, 2018 at 17:24
You're right. Our logical mind is driven to solve the paradox. But what if there's truth in these paradoxes that some other part (non-logical) of our ...
April 21, 2018 at 17:08
The hippo which killed the impala isn't motivated by hate, jealousy, greed or any of the ''bad'' intentions humans are capable of. One can only explai...
April 21, 2018 at 16:38
Yes and yes. I don't know what you're getting at though. ''This sentence is false''. The accepted solution is to call it nonsense - that it's not a lo...
April 21, 2018 at 12:52
That's sad to hear. Probably because it's the truth.
April 21, 2018 at 12:44
Well said and noted but let me express this better. Consider a thought experiment in which you have two objects A and B. A and B are identical in ever...
April 21, 2018 at 12:19
The accepted truth is that the brain, the thought machine, is made of neurons. I question this too but what I'm really interested in is whether other ...
April 21, 2018 at 06:16
Interesting. Thanks.:up:
April 21, 2018 at 06:02
I'm just putting it out there just in case we have it wrong. Forget the heart for the moment. We're drawn to mystery and the unknown. Does the procliv...
April 21, 2018 at 06:01
:lol: By that I mean like the neurons in the brain - involved in thinking actively rather than say a lung cell, a passive background upon which the ne...
April 21, 2018 at 05:56
I think you're right in that there's a some kind of biological ''deal'' - immortality for specialization. So, stem cells specialize into specific tiss...
April 20, 2018 at 06:40
According to current biology not so. I think it's called the limbic system - the part of the brain that does emotions. People (it's a hunch of mine) l...
April 19, 2018 at 16:00
Very vaguely but I'm happy emotion is still part of the moral equation. Thank you. To tell you frankly I don't understand why philosophers have ignore...
April 19, 2018 at 14:56
True and false arise from the diabolical nexus of mind and heart. Mind and heart are not equals. Paradoxes are both true and false. The mind rejects i...
April 19, 2018 at 11:20
But reproduction seems to be related to death. Organisms can't survive death due to chemical/physical degradation and so reproduction does two things:...
April 19, 2018 at 06:16
Be careful what you wish for, especially when you lack wisdom. Right. Perhaps death is necessary. I take it you mean that. But what if it's contingent...
April 18, 2018 at 03:45
:up: "how life and death cannot be as cleanly separated as I think you'd like'' - interesting!! You mean death is a part of life itself? I also though...
April 17, 2018 at 11:50
Why not? There must be a reason we die, right? Death is the anti-thesis of life and yet it appears that it's programmed into our cells. That's paradox...
April 17, 2018 at 10:38
You're right. Seems I mixed up death with extinction but there is an analogy to be had. Don't you think? After all death on a large scale is the mode ...
April 17, 2018 at 10:36
Does joy have meaning? If you look at all the happy people you won't find them saying ''happiness is what I wanted''. Instead the usual response would...
April 17, 2018 at 08:09
I think we're on the same page. Mental objects seem to be, well, timeless. Over the course of a discourse we expect meanings of terms and words to rem...
April 17, 2018 at 07:54
Evolution of language needn't have a 1-to-1 correspondence with biological evolution. The key concepts that are relevant would be new environments and...
April 17, 2018 at 07:44
I think we need to draw a distinction between evolution and change in language. Evolution connotes some kind of progression towards a goal - adapting ...
April 17, 2018 at 06:27
To me abstraction requires the ability to see similarities more than differences. Differences are, well, obvious as illustrated by your apple example....
April 17, 2018 at 05:57
There are so many possibilities. We can imagine an infinite number of theories, especially when we're in the dark. I don't know what to believe. We've...
April 17, 2018 at 05:41
Perhaps you expose a deep flaw in society and perhaps you set too high a standard on society. Yes, there's the perfect way to deal with anything, incl...
April 17, 2018 at 04:55
Thank you very much. It seems there's something lost in translation. Anyway, I still feel the one aspect that counts here, an eternal essence, that in...
April 17, 2018 at 04:48
I have my doubts about this ''unity''. Our world is choc-a-bloc with contradictions. Philosophy itself, the pinnacle of human minds, is full of thesis...
April 12, 2018 at 05:47
It does seem that consciousness, at least the stuff that's happening in it, is like jigsaw pieces fitting together - a unity of experience if I may sa...
April 11, 2018 at 13:26
What you say goes against basic philosophy, the unexamined life is not worth living, and yet there is truth in what you say, a knife can't cut itself....
April 11, 2018 at 07:54
I think losing the random element in human evolution, sciological or otherwise, is ultimately harmful. My gut feeling, for what it's worth, tells me w...
April 11, 2018 at 07:42
This is something that bothers me. I think we need to make a distinction between equality and fairness. We're NOT equal (some are stronger, wiser, pre...
April 08, 2018 at 09:58
In: Belief  — view comment
I think belief, as a philosophical subject, is overrated. What purpose does it serve but to confound the issue? It is knowledge we seek and implicit i...
April 08, 2018 at 06:47
I don't think morality is about equality. If equality were to be a fact in society then there would be no need to be good and bad would simply not exi...
April 08, 2018 at 06:29
Not really. Common sense would have you believe a feather should fall slower than an iron ball but physics shows that that's untrue. That said common ...
April 08, 2018 at 06:14
Common sense, if it means non-mathematical wisdom, is at best confined to Earth and at worst to a community - patterns that are local. Physics, mathem...
April 07, 2018 at 12:10
Pessimism is ''sadder'' than nihilism. Pessimism involves mental anguish arising from the perceived meaninglessness of life. Nihilism, on the other ha...
April 07, 2018 at 08:32
To me the infinite regress argument is both good and bad. Good because it sets a high standard for epistemology, thereby assuring quality in knowledge...
March 23, 2018 at 05:20
I thought we crossed that bridge a long time ago - the problem of induction. The problem with Nancy Cartwright's outlook is that she's simply serving ...
March 08, 2018 at 07:00
Perhaps. If we take heaven and hell as states rather than places then some of us are in heaven and others in hell.
February 27, 2018 at 06:09
I once tried to start a thread on ''it's impossible for god to punish a masochist'' but it was always deleted. I don't know why. Of course there are v...
February 26, 2018 at 06:37
May be God's perfection isn't human perfection.
February 25, 2018 at 09:57
Heaven = happiness Hell = suffering What more need be said?
February 25, 2018 at 09:53
Your hedonic treadmill eloquently describes the majority and their our condition. You suggest we abandon the principle of happiness as a motivation. I...
February 21, 2018 at 12:00
I fear death for two reasons. Either there's no afterlife or there is. If there's no afterlife I'm devastated to know that all my loved ones and the m...
February 21, 2018 at 11:35
That's what I mean. Radical doubt is, must be, painful to philosophers because it undermines everything, from their axioms to their logic.
February 21, 2018 at 11:19