It's not a question of what I believe or what you believe. You asserted that is a "given". But you don't say the identity of the giver, not trace the ...
Every sentient being is born with the capacity to learn - and no two of those capacities is exactly the same. Some chimps, gorillas and dolphins may h...
I did not preconceive language: I learned it. I did not preconceive reasoning; I developed it over many years, with the help of other people, living a...
Where is that "first place" supposed to reside? In the embryo? On the ovum? Surely not in the genes of apes that oh so recently could not philosophize...
No it doesn't! The concept encompasses the general as well as the particular; domains, classes, orders, families, genera, species, every member thereo...
And still contain no information which is beyond observable reality. Not sure what this means. One simply understands the concept of animal, world or ...
Of course it is. But the ways in which that difference is interpreted by humans is also significant. No; they exploit real differences. ‘what more is ...
That's the 'point'. Conjecture, intuition, imagination, projection, gut feeling are all valuable starting points for the investigation of some phenome...
A complete side-track. We had one of those. We had a fairly big table in the kitchen, off limit to animals. We hardly ever saw her on it, but when I p...
Science confirms or disproves it through experimentation. I call all means into question. Here, I was merely pointing out the self-contradiction of a ...
That's not information; that's conjecture. AFAICS, there is no reliable source of information on what it means to be what it is. Who assumes there has...
I get that there is a question, or maybe more than one. What I'm asking is, what do you have to consider? What information do you have to work with be...
Sorry. I saw it on "The Nature of Things" a couple of years ago, but don't recall which episode. There have been quite a few, since about 2018 dealing...
Interesting. This bit is slightly out of date. There have recently been some quite convincing virtual reality attempts to help humans what cats see, h...
Of course, that's much better. But the Christians have an out for that: things without souls are not sentient. And that brings us full circle to the b...
They could not mean anything. Language, where and as it arose (it would have to, being one of the possibilities) in such a random universe, would deve...
That's a very interesting anthropological question. It wasn't easy to divide early hominids into classes, and even for a very long period into the spe...
Can you show me the threshold? Tool use is not unique; language is not unique; the 'so on' is built-up levels of complexity. The problem of "more than...
So, the distinction is of structure and complexity. Did the first two humans communicate in a language with hierarchical syntax - or were they freak c...
How sure are we about this baseline of 'rationality'? If evolution is a continuous, fluid process, it admits of no hard boundaries between existing an...
Rational/irrational is one of those weasel concepts, innit? What's the dubious definition of rationality to do with experience? Don't mentally ill peo...
Of course ethical standards are relative to the principles they are conceived to serve. There is nothing irrational about that, since ethics are about...
You can try, but very few buck the prevailing attitude of their times. As individual people, scientists start out as little babies. They grow up in an...
Therefore, in his school of thought, all humans are also eligible for protein, slave labour, spare parts and experimentation without their consent? I ...
I guess I didn't understand it. I didn't discern confusion. I thought they simply resolved to put aside the controversy - that is, the conflict betwee...
Do we need to explain or prove the value of life or freedom or happiness before we grant people the right to it? We don't all have one another's subje...
Since they never know whether the latest capture is a smart guy, a mule or an innocent bystander, they'll have tortured and maimed two dozen people be...
Yes, they love their vicious circles. I especially like when they excoriate the American natives' practice of human sacrifice, without the slightest t...
Aim incorrectly, possibly at the wrong target; lose sight of the essentials - the phrase is capable of some complexity. In religious societies, gettin...
Probably international copyright disputes again. It's a CBC production, can probably be seen on other venues. But never mind, You Tube has a whole bun...
My first reaction was very similar to bert1's. But then I realized you're right: just knowing something, or considering it obvious isn't enough to con...
It is not, and never was, that simple. The ancient Greeks were far more subtle in their thinking, far more canny in their understanding of psychology....
That's probably true. Knowledge is not wisdom, or sound judgment or prudence or far-sightedness or justice. Knowledge is nothing more than the acquisi...
Be my guest. Find all the fault you want with knowledge. Just don't expect me to "do" a philosophy that denies its existence. In this thread, I was ho...
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