Clarendon

I am not sure I follow. You have said that it seems consciousness seems to depend on internal structure. But if the parts of that structure wholly lac...

Again, you seem not to grasp the problem. E = mc2 is not a case of something coming from nothing. Energy has mass equivalence. Mass is not conjured ou...

Seems to me you haven't understood the problem. No amount of empirical detail explains how a wholly new kind of property could come into existence fro...

Yes, if they think conciousness is noncausal then they should revise their view that existences have causal powers given it clearly exists, or revise ...

Hi, I'm no physicist, but if fusion could have been predicted from first principles then that seems to demonstrate that it is a case of weak emergence...

A couple of people have mentioned the fallacy of composition here, though without taking the trouble to explain what this is or how I am supposed to h...

To elaborate a little more: Zeno’s paradoxes concern the divisibility of magnitude and motion. They raise questions about how continuous quantities ca...

I don't think I follow. The point about size was simply to illustrate the principle that you cannot get something from nothing. Combining sizeless thi...

But the point is that there can't possibly be. It's not for want of more detail that one can't build a shaped thing from shapeless things or a sized t...

It seems to me that you're focussing on a different issue. My point is that the real problem of consciousness for the physicalist - one that has real ...

I take kinds to be basic. Everyone must accept that some kinds are basic, so this is not a problem (or if it is, it's a problem for the strong emergen...

In my limited experience, those who toss fallacy accusations around without taking the trouble to explain in precisely what way a fallacy has been com...

Well 'colour' is one of those features whose status as objective or subjective is a matter of debate. If it is objective, then one would have to suppo...

I'm afraid I do not know what you mean. Is there a problem in the idea of making a sized thing from that which has no size? If you agree that this sou...

That seems to miss the point. A distinction is commonly drawn between weak emergence and strong emergence. Combining objects of different weights will...

Are you saying that I have committed such a fallacy?

Yes, that sounds right. Although they'd have a hard time getting that argument to stand up, I think. The parsimony claim seems unjustified given that ...

Thank you for these comments. I think we can distinguish between an indirect realist who claims that it is impossible for a perceiver to perceive anyt...

I am sorry, but I do not follow your point. Mental imagery can sometimes be mistaken for the objects of which they are images. But even then, there wo...

But I'm addressing all the issues you raise, or take myself to be doing. I do not know the literature well enough to know if my view is already in it....

That was not what I claimed. The point was that one cannot, by perceiving the content of a mental state thereby perceive a mind-external object. And t...

Thank you for your criticisms. I'd first want to say that in denying mental images a role to play in the perception of mind-external objects I am not ...

I am a direct realist too - though I would say that I am a proper one whereas I think most of those who call themselves direct realists are not the re...

You said my view was extravagant in positing an object of awareness in hallucination cases. I don't understand your reply to my reply, for I explained...

But that last bit - the direct bit - is stipulated. I don't see how it would be direct. What Searle does is just emphasize the distinction between per...

I'd say that overcomplicates things. I take it we can agree that hallucinating a ship and perceiving a ship are indistinguishable experiences. So we n...

No need to apologize. What I was trying to get across - not very clearly - in that quoted passage is that the mental experience of perceiving is 'of' ...

My gripe is with direct realists, most of whom seem to me to be indirect realists in disguise. I think indirect realism is false as an account of what...

But my view is that no mental state is involved. That's the objection I'm making to other direct realists - they still make a mental state - an experi...

I do not understand. I take for granted that experiences are mental states. But that's not unorthodox or something the other direct realists would dis...

I am a direct realist and so i am not disputing that we perceive the actual objects out there - guitars and such like. But when I read other direct re...

A perceptual experience is 'of' something, namely a perceptual relationship. My argument is that a perceptual relationship cannot possibly involve a m...

I'm arguing that experience is not a constituent of a perceptual relationship. We do not perceive things by experience (though we have experiences of ...

I think it's not in dispute that perception involves direct contact between the perceiver and the object of perception. What's in dispute is what's pe...

Yes, those are objections that are used to motivate indirect realism (the idea that what we perceive are mental states). They don't seem to apply to t...

Late to this debate, but I take it that despite all the heat of the public debate, this is just an issue in metaphysics. The public debate - my impres...

What a juvenile response.

But it wouldn't clarify what the term means. Its current meaning is not determined by the content of Aristotle's work titled 'metaphysics'. That would...

I think you quite clearly are committing the etymological fallacy. The etymological fallacy occurs when someone argues that the current meaning of a w...

For example, take the word 'cartoon' The word 'cartoon' originally referred to a kind of paper on which artists would draw the outline of a painting f...

I am saying that it is not the way to understand what 'metaphysics' means.

That commits the etymological fallacy. Imagine 'The House Next Door' is the title someone gives to a book I wrote about the composition and appearance...

Because we're just discussing how a word is used. That's a first order question, not a second order one. "What does the word 'metaphysics' mean?" is n...

But in point of fact, 'metaphysics' was first used as a label (not by Aristotle himself) denoting the placement of a treatise. It's like 'the house ne...

Only insofar as that will tell you something about what sort of a thing it is, in and of itself. It is a properly of the act of wantonly killing anoth...

No, it was simply the title given to the work that had been placed 'after the physics'. It denoted its placement in an order, not its subject matter.

No. It's about the meaning of the word 'metaphysics'.

It might do on ordinary usage, I am not sure. It comes from 'metaphysics' which was simply the title given to one of Aristotle's treatises - the one t...

I understand metaphysics to be about what things are, in and of themselves. For example, "which propositions are true?" is not a metaphysical question...

I think unless there is a 'logical' problem of evil, there is no real problem of evil. I think there isn't a logical problem of evil as all one has to...