Science might say that events (things, matter, whatever) existed in the universe for eons without us, but it does not offer an opinion on the philosop...
OK, the Harry Potter stories (be they conveyed in books, films, plays, whatever) are representations, all forms of language, allowing us to share a vi...
No, the U is arbitrary, and usually means all that stuff I see, and all the rest that is implied by it. The far side of the moon exists despite the la...
I want to agree, but I think where I differ is the claim. If this universe did not exist, I would still be able to point to it. I would just not exist...
I am not referring to knowledge of the structure, but rather the objective (independent of knowledge or observation) reality of the structure. Is the ...
I had not meant it to be about existential quantification, but my attempts to sort this out come to this quite a bit: I have a base aversion to ideali...
I'm talking about what makes the world actual, not some member of it. And I'm certainly not talking about 'material things', which is just how things ...
You miss my point. I am not talking about things that are actual in a world (or more plainly, are members of the set of things in that world/universe/...
So what would it mean for something to be 'actual'? I could think of no objective way to frame that answer. Best I could do is "the thing is a member ...
Wait, everybody has to agree with it? Don't remember that being a requirement. I have personally found some math problems to be cute, and I can find a...
Perhaps it is because of weight of evidence for the other side as well, and your refusal to acknowledge that. Nevertheless, it seems that our views of...
So what is the essence of 'essence'? What doesn't have essence? You just seems to be asserting that every adjective or noun in the language has an ess...
Yes, but look at it from the perspective of the edge. According to SR, a clock on the edge, in its own frame, is stationary and thus runs faster, not ...
The clock nearest the disk center will most closely match the reference clock since it is pretty much stationary. Time dilation has nothing to do with...
I was thinking of the identity of those mental states. I feel like I have a persistent identity (being the same person I was a minute ago, despite a d...
There seems to be no distinction between left and right. If there were, the universe would not be symmetrical. Hard to imagine that, but would there b...
I think that anybody that expects to take their memories (and thus any sort of identity at all) into what they hope to be an afterlife cannot take a s...
As to plausibility: To scan a person exactly would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Matter can be (and has been) teleported, but not scanne...
Agree, it is implausible, but still immaterial (pun intended) to the point of the experiment. So what if the twin Earth were antimatter? Now the chemi...
Not animate. Duhhh... Let me try this logic out. Suppose I try to nail down the essence of 'cute'. I pick an arbitrary way to sort things into two hea...
OK, you've selected that arbitrary criteria of which I spoke (not exactly since we've not defined where 'the head' stops, but let's define that as the...
About this one: No 'essence' (in quotes because I dislike applying the term here) has been established, so the example is not a clear one. There are t...
If there is no solid truth value to some proposition, it is not a logical (boolean) argument, but rather a fuzzy one. "I am bald" and "I am not bald" ...
We've been over this in prior posts. Law of non-contradiction does not hold without a hard definition of the essence, so invoking the law presupposes ...
You pick two easy ones. Pick something on the line like a biological virus and a computer virus that does random signature changes. The label is not s...
There must be data which allows it to persist improvements made. Fire doesn't have that. Plenty of non-living things do, so the feature is not suffici...
Brief, but I like it. The author of the article (identified only as 'magazine staff') seems not to entirely understand the subject, giving this statem...
Fire seems not to meet the last one. I don't particularly agree with the list, since I can think of exceptions to the other four items, but semiosis a...
This works fine when we have essentially one instance of life and everything that evolved from it. But as Bitter Crank pointed out, we cannot wield ou...
Posted the difference earlier. A dead cow in a field is an example of life, but is not alive. A live cow might still be created from one, but not the ...
Second one is disqualified, because if a particular instance is designed, it is not original cause. I personally suspect Earth life originated elsewhe...
I differentiated the terms. I would have said the virus is life, but it is not alive since it has no functioning parts most of the time. So a computer...
Yes, and sterile as you point out. Defective examples of life are still life. I think 'intelligence' is about as fuzzy a term as 'life' or 'unnatural'...
I am also not self sustaining, hijacking the machinery of plants to harvest solar energy. Nothing is completely self-contained, so I don't see the iss...
There must always be a relation to an X, and there is no objective X. It seems always contextual. In everyday conversation, "He is tall" references a ...
Your title does not describe your OP, as Pneumenon points out. Why be moral? Because it's the right thing to do. It's that easy, and by definition. As...
The elimination of unfit members is natural selection in action. The species itself would die out if suicide was a general trait. My definition of lif...
Sounds like a definition of 'taller', which is a relation, and not how the word 'tall' is typically used. There is no standard X implied by the typica...
If we found intelligent life out there, I doubt it would be sufficiently human to allow application of the human legal system. Exploring some cases de...
A creature that is anti-natal or commits suicide for no gain is not fit and is eliminated from the gene pool. Give me an example where it is the fit t...
I totally agree with this. Whatever we're doing attempting to define life here, a hard definition cannot come of it. I'm a bit proponent of things lik...
You just gave a pretty good description of a very non-human (non-earth-like actually) species. A non-negative-feedback-having race would not be human-...
My examples of AI did not have self-perpetuation as a goal. The ones that did were not AI, but those I consider life if they include a mechanism to ev...
I would differ on this opinion. We have AI that learns, but it is not life. We have some very non-AI computer code that much more qualifies as life. Y...
Banno is correct in that we're not going to get the definition we're looking for since it is too vague. Fun trying though. You still haven't commented...
The first one is the least qualified to be on the list. Sure, humans, but human consciousness does not seem in any way to be a life form. It is not se...
A long time ago Wayfarer (who seems to support something akin to vitalism) asked me this question. I provided this definition as my best attempt, whic...
Suspect of what? The identity distinction seems to hold no metaphysical importance at all except to those views that require to tie some non-physical ...
Comments