Imagine two versions of the world identical with the exception of one difference. In version A, a child is being tortured, her head being slowly crush...
After more than 50 years, I can imagine being a little tired of music. Maybe doing something else and discovering something new is in order. I am just...
Creating music or art isn't simply about turning around and consuming it or just about the end-product. It isn't only about the consumptive aspect. It...
It's relevant. Whatever the theory, whether naive realist or whatever, it must take into account and explain the difference between seeing black and n...
Take care to notice that seeing black and not seeing are two very different things. Blind people don't see black. Phenomenologically, blackness is a c...
Something being good does not follow from it being natural. Consider a case of a male animal killing the young of a mate when the offspring are not hi...
I agree with much of your thinking here! It is especially helpful that you make a distinction between the different senses of the word consciousness. ...
I'm relieved! So it sounds like goodness and wisdom are conditions of happiness but not guarantors? This is beginning to sound more reasonable that wh...
Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out! That's a clever test, and it is suggestive of a loss of consciousness, but I can imag...
But is it true that this always occurs? Do good people always end up happy? Do bad people always end up unhappy? When we see people suffering, is it a...
Should we fear death? Even absent an afterlife, or maybe even especially absent an afterlife, I'd say no. Fear of death would be justified if Hell wer...
Maybe later. Addressing this matter in a satisfactory way would require some time and effort, and I am a little overwhelmed and unmotivated at the mom...
When you ask why "we" experience different things, this still sounds like it assumes multiple experiencers. Experiencer A experiences X and experience...
Have you considered Schopenhauer's position here? He was one of those who realized (correctly, in my opinion) that there is only one universal self or...
This is exactly on the mark. There is an incentive to disinform. From their standpoint, if they tell people that masks work, then everyone goes out an...
The question isn't about why this body has the form that it has, or how humans originated, how this particular human originated, or any such thing. Ou...
I was gripped by your question some years ago until I realized something that I think solves a whole host of philosophical problems in one fell swoop....
The thought occurs to me that there is a discernible difference between the two spheres that is to be found in the relative difference in location. Ea...
How about the value of truth, even if it is dark? Often, our happiness and pleasure depend on believing lies. But some choose to see the truth, even i...
Seriously? Weeks of suffering leading to death? Suppose we were to execute people that way, with weeks of suffering on the way to death. Would that fl...
A week ago, I had a dream that might have featured a similar figure. I saw an empty building complex at night, vaguely resembling my old high school. ...
How about a rough guess? Give me a number. Are you saying that since the number of known cases in US now is 4,500 and deaths 88, that if we multiply t...
Sad! I love the guy! In his devotion to the high ideals, he makes me want to be a conservative! Quite unlike the sheer ugliness of much of contemporar...
I've often wondered if a miracle cheap source of clean energy wouldn't actually make matters even worse! Energy is the means by which we turn the plan...
I think that some of the most insightful stuff I have ever read related to this topic was in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. Very interesting. An...
Good point! Yes, what you bring to mind here for me is that we, at the level of our human apprehension of things at least, are stuck with a map. We'll...
Gilbert Ryle liked to ask if there are three things in the field: two cows and a pair of cows. The problem with things, as I see it, is that they have...
Sounds pretty human to me! I'd say that true care from real humans, where a person is really concerned with another person's welfare for that person's...
Exactly. It is hard to see what consciousness adds to behavior that would provide some advantage. Suppose we have a robot that has a heat sensor on it...
It seems to me that, rather than being a feeling, consciousness is the condition for the possibility of feelings. For example, something or someone no...
Computers just execute instructions that are really themselves just high-level calls for packaged low-level logic gate operations on bits, the bits th...
You clearly didn't read my post. You didn't even have time to do so. If you read it, you might find that I agree with you. But I won't blame you if yo...
Let's look at what it means for "something" to come from "nothing". We need to clarify some matters here, especially what a thing is and how we might ...
Thank you for bringing questions about the nature of self into this. To make a distinction between my own future self and that of a person not yet bor...
No, he isn't. You seem to have just had a knee-jerk reaction when you saw the word incompleteness. Notice the colon following that. He is talking abou...
Would you mind providing the source of this quote? It would help to put it into context. George F.R. Ellis is quite conversant with the idea of emerge...
When you say, "something is present," do you have in mind that it must be a thing in the world, something extended, something finite and measurable? M...
Some of Alva Noë's work is pretty interesting and deals largely with consciousness as something that involves the body and the environment in ways tra...
I agree with most everything you've said. It seems we are mostly on the same page. I don't know if qualia is actually missing. I just think that, thou...
I would say that mind as it is structured in us is shaped by evolution. But bare consciousness at its most fundamental level a product of evolution? N...
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