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

Metaphysician Undercover

Comments

How does this make any sense to you? It's like saying 'if what I tell you is true, then it is unreasonable for you not to believe me'. But of course y...
October 27, 2019 at 01:56
The conclusion does not involve the prior assumption of "no other source of order". That is the conclusion, and this comes about from understanding th...
October 27, 2019 at 01:42
Just as I explained. That X is good, because it is efficient for bringing about the desired effect Y, is not a real justification, it's an illusion of...
October 27, 2019 at 00:04
This may be true, but strategies are applied as the means to ends. We still need to judge the ends themselves, to produce a true justification, a just...
October 26, 2019 at 12:02
You mean inedible?
October 26, 2019 at 11:32
You keep saying things like this. And when we find out that you were wrong you just go on to some other falsities. Colluded? He's a fucking puppet. Th...
October 26, 2019 at 03:25
I don't see how the argument is circular. You accept that it is a "conclusion", therefore there is logic behind it. One of the most useful aspects of ...
October 26, 2019 at 02:56
This is the problem with such exclusive definitions. It is quite possible, and probable, that acts which fulfill the requirements for "religious acts"...
October 25, 2019 at 11:05
I was not denying 2, I was critical of anyone who would say that absolute rest is impossible, without first defining what "absolute rest" means. Now y...
October 25, 2019 at 01:59
You are refusing to acknowledge the equivocation in your use of "AND" in the rule. In the case of "A is married to B", quoted above, "AND" is used as ...
October 25, 2019 at 01:39
I assume then, that you still do not understand the distinction I made between what a symbol means, and what it refers to, or stands for. Perhaps if y...
October 24, 2019 at 11:16
There's a further aspect which I explained earlier, which you don't seem to be accounting for, and that is that it is impossible that we will ever fin...
October 23, 2019 at 11:15
But we see design in plants as well, so design is not limited to animals. It's not the argument which is ridiculous, it's the way you interpret it whi...
October 23, 2019 at 02:00
There is no need to prove that. The person who claims that all motion is relative needs to prove that there is no such object as absolute rest. Until ...
October 23, 2019 at 01:13
You asked for an example, so I gave it. What objects do the two 4s in "4+4=8" refer to in the example, if not the group of chairs here, and the other ...
October 23, 2019 at 01:05
I demonstrated that your so-called "reasons" are unreasonable, so why are you falling back on this unreasonableness? Let's look again. You now agree t...
October 23, 2019 at 00:35
How the particles move is an unknown. Some aspects of their movements are predictable, but that only means that the movements are orderly. The capacit...
October 21, 2019 at 11:13
This is the lesson of the Theatetus, to start with a definition is to be mislead by that definition. They start out with a preconceived notion (a sort...
October 21, 2019 at 01:04
OK, but now it's clear that you and I have completely different views of "order". I think order is something that the physical world exhibits to us, y...
October 21, 2019 at 00:33
Actually, we do not really know these mechanisms. We can describe these processes to an extent, provide a partial description of them, but not enough ...
October 20, 2019 at 17:05
You're missing the point of the criticism. What is "concealed", is the fact that half of S is married to the other half of S. In the case of A and B, ...
October 20, 2019 at 14:25
You are the one who wants to talk about "personhood". I think this digression of yours is nonsensical. If you can come up with an ontologically based ...
October 20, 2019 at 13:58
I don't think we can talk of sets here, because set theory already premises that "4" in one set refers to the same object as "4" in another set, and t...
October 19, 2019 at 13:06
Clearly that order arose by design. You specified the desired order, you threw the dice intentionally to create that order, and succeeded in creating ...
October 19, 2019 at 12:08
Consider the definition of order: "a specified sequence". Without the "specified" part, the sequence might appear to be ordered, but it is not. So the...
October 19, 2019 at 02:13
Let me explain what I mean by the difference between what "4" means and what it refers to. What "4" means to me is that there is four objects signifie...
October 19, 2019 at 01:29
That's an odd description. I've never seen a cause, and the way I understand "cause" it would be impossible to see a cause, so I reject that claim as ...
October 18, 2019 at 10:59
That one ball stops having kinetic energy, and the other one starts, does not mean that kinetic energy was transferred. It could only be a transfer if...
October 18, 2019 at 01:20
What I consider the most common, a person is an individual human being.
October 18, 2019 at 00:32
I'll take a look at this for you. First, we cannot say that the ball "is" kinetic energy, because a ball is more than just that, and the fact that it ...
October 18, 2019 at 00:30
Actually I wouldn't be inclined to make such a distinction, it appears like if it is ordered, it must have been designed, so there is no need for that...
October 17, 2019 at 23:57
You seem to understand the difference between "force" and "kinetic energy", so why insist that kinetic energy is a force? Do you not recognize that fo...
October 17, 2019 at 17:38
Did I say that? It seems you do not know how to read. Either you haven't read Newton's laws, or you're just demonstrating further, that you do not kno...
October 17, 2019 at 11:43
No, there's a very big difference here. Force is equal to mass times acceleration. And momentum is equal to mass times velocity. "Kinetic energy" was ...
October 17, 2019 at 11:16
Observe: Newton's first law, a body will remain at rest, or in uniform motion unless acted upon by a force. Therefore, when we observe that a body's m...
October 17, 2019 at 02:48
Actually, in Newton's terms we would call this third thing a "force". But "force" is arguably entirely imaginary. Just like Hume said, its a concept d...
October 17, 2019 at 02:34
The question of the thread is how to tell the difference between design and no design. You refer to personhood; something can only have been designed ...
October 17, 2019 at 01:39
The problem is that when you think about the past, you are not really in the past, just imagining the past. So your claims about changing the past are...
October 16, 2019 at 10:46
For example: "The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties..." Said properties are left undisc...
October 16, 2019 at 02:10
The problem is that in self-organization theory, "disorder" is not defined in any rigorous way. For something to be a "system" requires some form of o...
October 15, 2019 at 10:46
So let me see if I understand you. You are saying that we know whether or not something was produced by design, by knowing whether or not it was produ...
October 15, 2019 at 02:13
OK, now the question here is why does "2" represent one object, and not two objects. Intuitively I would say that the first "1" in "1+1=2" represents ...
October 15, 2019 at 01:36
OK, what defines "a person"? Is a beaver a person, or a bird a person? Is a rock a person? Now I understand why we might find ourselves to be wrong. W...
October 14, 2019 at 12:10
This is somewhat incorrect, "outside of space" can be found with the appropriate conceptions. The problem here is that "mathematical singularity" is r...
October 14, 2019 at 11:57
There is nothing wrong with the criticism, because the one (if it is correct) excludes the possibility of the other. So you could say that each of the...
October 14, 2019 at 11:09
As tim points out, #1 is the correct form. But this simple argument is rather pointless without including the difficult part, which is to demonstrate ...
October 14, 2019 at 00:55
How could you ever get info that you're wrong though? If, being created by design required , by definition, that the thing be created by a human being...
October 14, 2019 at 00:41
The point though, is that there is a number of problems with your approach. The first problem is that if it requires that we see a person making the t...
October 13, 2019 at 13:36
Thanks for the reference Zuhair, but I really can't read the symbols used. It's like learning a new language for me, and it's a type of language which...
October 13, 2019 at 12:43
As I said, there is no scientific validity to such a distinction. Human beings are natural and so are the things created by human beings. The "artific...
October 12, 2019 at 18:13