You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

jkop

Comments

What our statements refer to don't necessarily need minds. Likewise with experiences. From the fact that we perceive objects with our minds it does no...
April 23, 2017 at 17:35
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/purity.png
April 22, 2017 at 18:19
What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected?
April 22, 2017 at 17:51
What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism". Lapis Lazuli was the blue of antiquity.The ancien...
April 22, 2017 at 17:33
Being complex and of no interest to fundamental physics isn't a failure to be "real" (Hilary Putnam).
April 22, 2017 at 16:28
Interpretation is a use of language, recall, and unlike language you don't learn how you ought to see things. You see what there is to see, and retrie...
April 22, 2017 at 16:03
It is simply the experience of the location of objects that reflect sound. You don't have to be a bat to know what that is, and the experienced locati...
April 22, 2017 at 14:37
What Mary lacks is not the knowledge of what it’s like to see a particular colour but the possibility to acquire that knowledge by seeing it directly....
April 22, 2017 at 12:47
External to what? The possibility to have consciousness is already assumed in talk of reality being external or internal to consciousness. To have con...
April 22, 2017 at 01:54
Right, it dissolves the question, since it makes little sense to ask "How do you get from ions being passed across synapses, to meaning?" when meaning...
April 18, 2017 at 06:45
Your skepticism arises from the assumption that each organism would see their own sensations instead of the objects in our shared environment. All see...
April 18, 2017 at 01:02
:-} By assuming that religion would be an integral part of the human psyche it is unsurprising that it appears to "win". But religions are cultural co...
April 17, 2017 at 22:59
April 17, 2017 at 20:28
Relatively simple and small organisms can see, recall, so it should be fairly clear that the conscious awareness that is the seeing doesn't require "a...
April 17, 2017 at 20:22
It is called 'direct' because there is nothing by way of which the objects are seen, neither a process nor a mechanism, so there are no such things to...
April 16, 2017 at 01:01
I think the bull is superfluous, because it is just a metaphorical description of what is already present at Wall Street: a bunch of aggressively ente...
April 15, 2017 at 10:19
When the appearance that you see is the external object that you see there is no gap to explain. The gap arises by assuming dualism, it was invented b...
April 14, 2017 at 22:27
Right, so why are you stuck in dualism? Direct realism is a better assumption as defended by Searle, or Putnam. Perception has no interface between th...
April 14, 2017 at 16:15
Regardless of whether we call it an organ or inner light, what signals does it use? If it is using the same signals as the visual system, then whence ...
April 14, 2017 at 14:08
I agree. It is indeed unsurprising and expected that states of the mind produce effects in the body. By thinking of a cold beer, good food, or beautif...
April 14, 2017 at 14:04
What organ is that? What signals would it use?
April 13, 2017 at 02:14
A "dead" car engine can be resurrected, not so for a dead organism it seems.
April 10, 2017 at 03:10
Sure, the light hits the retina and thereby starts a causal chain of biochemical reactions. But you say more: that the light would be turned into "som...
April 10, 2017 at 02:48
You can ascribe almost any meaning to a colour, because meanings are linguistic and social or cultural constructs. Colour experiences, however, are bi...
April 09, 2017 at 16:48
The explanatory gap arises from a failure to distinguish 'the experience of red' in its constituitive sense (i.e. the physiological events that consti...
April 09, 2017 at 16:14
If thought is referential, then all thought is at the very least a capacity to think of something else, and to think of something else is to imagine i...
April 09, 2017 at 15:28
It explains that the difference between a living cell and a dead cell is not fundamental. It makes no sense to classify swarms of atoms as dead or ali...
April 09, 2017 at 12:13
As far as I know the debate on vitalism had more or less dissolved by the 1930s, when there was genetics and a more refined understanding of bio-chemi...
April 08, 2017 at 23:41
The concept refers to many things with different definitions. Hence the lack of one clear definition. It used to refer to an assumed essence, élan vit...
April 08, 2017 at 18:07
In: Socialism  — view comment
You can have economic democracy in a company (owned by its workers) operating in a capitalist market. Likewise you can have a capitalist market in a s...
April 07, 2017 at 11:27
Some decades ago there used to be a misconception about black jazz musicians that they would only be improvising, playing by ear and so on instead of ...
April 06, 2017 at 23:27
The concept 'happiness' does not arise from there being another concept, 'suffering'. Happiness is an experience, recall, a biological phenomenon. Tha...
April 06, 2017 at 00:08
Yes. Happiness can be derivative from identifying that suffering has diminished or disappeared, for instance. But it is not necessary to suffer in ord...
April 05, 2017 at 23:15
What society has ever nurtured artists? How could anyone invent anything valuable if the values would be predetermined? Allegedly John Coltrane played...
April 04, 2017 at 02:09
So what made Rimbaud assert the necessity to be absolutely modern? I think it is fairly clear that art is an end in itself, many artists wouldn't care...
April 03, 2017 at 23:07
It is not necessary to be a Hegelian, nor a Modernist.
April 03, 2017 at 17:42
19th and early 20th century historians of art and architecture did, but they were wrong. For example, Wölfflin, Schmarzow, Gideon and others worked un...
April 03, 2017 at 00:52
. The ancient Egyptians depicted what they knew, not what they saw. As far as I know it was not until the 19th century when the very idea of art began...
April 02, 2017 at 18:26
Faked results of thought experiments! https://fauxphilnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/kripke.jpg https://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/kripke...
April 01, 2017 at 17:32
It seems to be the dubious assertion that what we mean by 'valuation' would not be set by us, nor its real occurrences in the natural world, but some ...
April 01, 2017 at 11:18
Many things, but I'll mention two: anti-intellectualism and violence. WW1 and socio-economical unrest pushed people to embrace fascism. But where did ...
March 30, 2017 at 22:48
Hi, I don't think we debate whether absolute truth exists. If you look at the premise of the archaeological method, there is an assumed ground for tho...
March 30, 2017 at 16:41
Absolutism is hypocritical in the sense that it asserts its "truth" regardless of what is true. It is indifferent to sufficient reason to believe x. I...
March 30, 2017 at 10:21
Sure, but powers beyond grammar, logic, and awareness are not part of, nor do they necessarily influence, the grammar, logic and truth of words from w...
March 28, 2017 at 20:12
Right, but I never said that he was terrible, nor that he was just reducing argument to discourse. He did many things, and perhaps he was a great guy....
March 28, 2017 at 05:52
Well, you neither amplify nor widen the explanatory power of an argument by adding the power of physical violence, for instance. We might be exposed t...
March 28, 2017 at 05:27
No, you circumvented my inference by saying that Foucault's focus on power would entail "a widening of what an argument is". That's effectively a dilu...
March 28, 2017 at 02:35
Again you attempt to merely diagnose my criticism from a superior vantage point, and assert that I'm ignorant of details in Foucault's work. What's th...
March 28, 2017 at 00:38
Authors like Foucault ain't that clear either. The context of my previous post was that obscurity of expression might be sufficient reason to skip rea...
March 28, 2017 at 00:07
Yeah I guess. :)
March 27, 2017 at 22:09