Yep, but if or when there are, they will be physical and treat of physical events which are not spatiotemporal, so @"Uber" is right that his idea of t...
Ah, I kind of agree with that. I think functionalists would tend, however, to say that ultimately there simply is no hard problem in the sense that we...
Sorry, but that sounds like a long winded way of saying that we gain knowledge about emergence by assuming there is emergence. At some point the expla...
Isn't the point that the idea that we are gaining any knowledge about emergence is what is in question? What Seth and the like are at most doing (unde...
You don't need necessary connections. The basic idea behind most of cognitive neuroscience these days is the functionalist one that what a mental stat...
This is interesting. Have you read Hart's The Engines of the Soul? He supports Cartesian dualism and does so along with the incorporation of the idea ...
It will definitely help you identify valid and invalid arguments - it probably won't help you much in identifying the sound ones amongst the former th...
So tom, seems you are wrong about this: And for at least two connected reasons: 1) There are differential equations used in physics which are not inva...
If nihilism is supposed to be the idea that there can be no such things as values, then Nietzche was very definitely not an explicit nihilist. But as ...
I think we should take this onto a different thread as it is getting way off the point. As I follow things the debate starts off being about the role ...
Point taken, and thanks for clarifying. Personally I don't think anything is riding on whether invariance under time reversal is true for all laws, th...
As @"Wayfarer" indicates, my understanding was that Berkeley has God doing all the hard work of keeping things moving along smoothly, Mill and the log...
What cluelessness is MetaphysicsNow manifesting? I was under the impression that time-reversal symmetry in physics was precisely the idea that given i...
This betrays a very deep misunderstanding of what idealism is (in all its varieties). Even Berkeley's pretty brute idealism insists on a distinction b...
You have strongly held opinions. Where does mathematics and its objects figure in your view of things? Physical and causal? Non-causal, non-physical a...
One kind of materialism is mind-brain materialism, I think that is consistent with the belief that there are non-physical (i.e. abstract) things (numb...
Medieaval philosophy isn't as popular as it was a thousand years ago. Maybe you should try contacting by email a philosophy faculty member with an exp...
This seems to miss the point of Wittgenstein's challenge regarding rule following (at least under Kripke's interpretation of it) - it merely pushes th...
So your metaphysics includes both non-if-then-facts and if-then-facts. For the former, their truth consists in some kind of relationship to the way th...
I do not need experimental evidence to know that I have experience. Indeed, the very idea of experimental evidence presupposes the idea that someone h...
I think the point is that Shakespeare may have been inspired in this scene by some kind of philosophical dispute current at the time concerning percep...
OK, well in that case, what would be interesting would be to see if that greatest of Elizabethan philosophers, Francis Bacon, had anything to say on t...
Whitehead was right that it is probably more important in philosophy to be interesting than it is to be true, but even Whitehead gave truth a signific...
Seems to me that we just have Shakespeare having the smart-arse Gloucester using a fairly humdrum fact (that you have to be taught the meaning of colo...
Relations also relate hypothetical, nonexistent things to eachother. Are Slitheytoves and Jaberwockeys existent things? Of course not, and there are n...
Other than what? Other than a system of relations? Relations relate things to other things, so the physical world - whatever else it is - certainly in...
Precisely. So, in order to get 2+2=4 out of this system of axioms for the real numbers, you need already a recursive definition of addition, otherwise...
Now we are getting somewhere. Idealists and anti-realists more generally can (and have) made the distinction between substantive truth and logical tru...
Well, I don't want to turn this into a thread about mathematical logic, but Peano arithmetic is one of the standard ways of defining the natural numbe...
Three question marks - does that indicate that you are not aware of the proof for 1+1=2 within Peano arithmetic? Sorry. Here's a straightforward prese...
The proofs that I've seen of 1+1=2 do require all the axioms of the number system being used, since the axioms together define what a natural number i...
I think the point is that nobody can really tell what your premises are. I suppose one of them must be "There are if-then facts" But when you give exa...
No, I asked you for premises and a sound argument (and all sound arguments are logically valid ones by the way), and you said you would provide at lea...
Calm down, I didn't say that "wheen" meant what "wean" means. There is a word used in Scotland "wheen" which means "small amount of something" - I thi...
@"StreetlightX" When it comes to how the Greeks dealt with the notion of an irrational number the term "history" is a little bit misleading I think - ...
To the first question, what connection are you asking me about being arbitrary? The connection between physical models and an independently existing n...
Group theory itself not arbitrary: given the Group axioms and classical laws of inference, all sorts of theorems follow of logical necessity - I used ...
It would depend what you mean. The standard model has its problems and its alternatives/adaptations, and the existence of "gravitons" is contentious (...
Really? You are reduced to counting spelling mistakes? Metaphysicsnow has revealed his Scottish roots.:wink: I've been away a while and just skim read...
Maths deals with symmetries in Group theory, and those mathematical tools are used by physicists and other scientists to model reality and this or tha...
Depends who you ask - I know the Cambridge faculty of philosophy (at least at one time) would have rejected any claim to the effect that Derrida was a...
I think LD Sanders was responding to the wrong person, and had me in mind when he threw the "theory of value is false" in your face. Having said that,...
I agree to some extent, the PSR, whatever it is, is not a fact of the garden variety scientific or non-scientific kind. However, if the following two ...
I have to agree with @"MetaphysicsNow" - looks to me like you are confounding a few things (such as facts and propositions) that should be kept apart ...
Presumably the idea is that there is a sound argument with metaphysical premises (i.e. premises which concern existence) which are acceptable to all a...
Wrong yet again. A non-sequitur is a proposition/statement that purports to, but in fact does not, follow from previously given propositions/statement...
I can't believe MetaphysicsNow let this one go - he is being too gentle with you. This is another non-sequitur - you are clearly really fond of them. ...
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