Fire Ologist

So, by your logic, you are saying a brain dead child is not a human being. Is that right?

So the equation is bunch of cells plus a mind equals a human being? Is that the magic formula? No mind, no human being?

Watch anything by Jeffrey Kaplan on YouTube. He’s got whole intro to philosophy courses online and he’s great to watch. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

Hi Clearbury, welcome. I could easily be misunderstanding, but I think I have to disagree. I don’t think you can reason about morality without some co...

And science is the process where we inquire about what a human being is, what a pregnancy is, comparing newborns to adults to zygotes. Science, like m...

So the moral pivot point for right killing and wrong killing for you is “intelligence”? Is that your position?

That’s it? You are sufficiently intelligent? This has nothing to do with laws regulating when and how you can and can’t conduct an abortion. I’m not g...

You are just playing epistemology games and post modern metaphysician. So no one can know or say anything about the “real world”. That’s your answer. ...

Are you serious? A human being in the context of abortion is at least a body, clearly able to be defined and delimited. Body like a pregnant mom. Body...

No. Are human zygotes human beings? Unless that is the question you haven’t entered the abortion debate. And you sound like an essentialist every time...

When it’s born, the government calls it a human being. Are they right about that?

Not if you are a lawmaker making policy on when a woman can and cannot decide what to do with her own pregnancy. Ridiculous argument. According to you...

Ok I found the closest thing to an argument in your post. But that’s dumb. If a zygote IS NOT a human being, it is certainly not wrong to kill it and ...

You whole post here has no argument in it. You just make statements. I thought we were talking about abortion and why someone would be “pro-life”. You...

I hate the term pro-life. Using it leads everyone to imprecision about everything. Just like “pro-choice.” I’m “anti-private-right-to-abortion-without...

I appreciate that. I am conflating distinguishable concepts of human being and personhood. But I am trying to treat this more plainly. I see the disti...

True. But how do these possible turns of events detract from what I'm saying occurs at the moment of conception, a conception that occurs prior to any...

For purposes of a conversation about when a woman can terminate her own pregnancy, most of us, for some ambiguous reason, agree, that the moment of bi...

To be an argument, words as premises and words as conclusions must be related with logic. Gillian Russell made an argument. ______________________ The...

It registers here. People invest a lot in the observation that we humans, like many other animals, are “higher” animals on the evolutionary continuum....

Wonder if it would catch on. I guess the only thing I would add is I would make the outcome either come sooner, or less up to we human beings. To me, ...

“The World’s Religions” by Huston Smith.

I'd take the form of a man, live a simple life, teach everyone how to be and what is true, withstand the rejection and keep teaching and being an exam...

Determinism is happening. That’s a given. Things are the way they are because of the way their causes were, and things become what they become because...

That is my point. We are the only one who invented knowledge and concepts and base our actions on these. If you would even say “only one” you should a...

So sometimes animals are irrational? And there is mental illness? So more rational is better than less rational or irrational? If so, is something tha...

What else is there besides vacuum fluctuations?

By “see” you mean more precisely “conceive of” because we are talking about thinking, not just vision. If you think animals think, then you are saying...

Would you say that explains everything? A cat is only an expanding (cooling or entropic) vacuum fluctuation? A supernova? 14 galaxies? A number? Your ...

1. There is a difference between rational behavior, and behaving according to reason. It is certainly rational to pull one's hand out of fire if one w...

When the air in my house is above 75 degrees, the air conditioning goes on and the house is cooled and the thermostat reacts to the cooler temperature...

Because we use reason. Animals don’t read reasons. Otherwise we read off of smells and visions and feelings. Like other animals. And “read” in this co...

Animals have behaviors, many of which humans share (eating, sleeping, hunting, etc.). One of the behaviors humans exhibit is reasoning, or being ratio...

Oh. So the issue is purely psychological. All evidence for god is hallucinatory or fraud. You are saying humans have psychological drive (for some unk...

My sense of philosophers is the opposite - I ask of them all, why do others take this one seriously? What was this philosopher’s take and why did it g...

Is this question being asked on the assumption that there is no actual god, and that “god” like a “garden gnome” was purely fabricated for some small ...

We are actually agreeing here. The OP asks if anyone can “prove a god”. That’s my point. I took the OP to be asking for someone to argue (provide word...

Right. That’s your experience. You talk about essential features such as “name” and “empty” in reference to a “God” and the assert it exists in heads....

Can anyone prove the existence of their self? (I mean Descartes thought he did, but he only proved his self to his self. He didn’t prove Descartes exi...

Good stuff. Reflection (mind that is minding, or “I” that is “I-ing”), is the interruption. Reflection has its own motion, but it is an interruption o...

I see “rational thinking” and “communication skills” as parts of one thing - rational thinking is communicable thinking, communicable to other thinkin...

I my be off-topic here, but I can’t seem to sustain any discussion that touches on the essence or existence of the “I” and “willing” without addressin...

But what is wrong with inflicting suffering? Why is it wrong to torture babies to death and make more babies to torture them? You need an ethics to ar...

And the concept of "no consent" and the concept of "inflicted suffering on another" and the concepts of "good" and "ethics" are reified concepts. Not ...

I agree - we don’t exist for ethics. But AN is the ethical system that places the ethics above the humans. For the ANist, the ethical principal is a h...

I agree with that. Ethics is born, or created, in between, or out of, two or more people. In my view, saying “ethics” is to call up a community, such ...

Don’t you mean because the world is perfectly non-ethical?

Which is another way AN harms itself as a reasonable ethical system. If the goal of ethics is to eliminate ethics, we could just ignore any pangs of m...

I’m Catholic. Go to church every Sunday because the Church tells me to. Believe the history in the New Testament (because of the ethics in the whole B...

This is a major question of mine. I am fascinated by the irony that right now, I am using ideas (such as "mind-dependent," "objective," "idealism", "d...