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

ChatteringMonkey

Comments

It seems to me that Poppers critique in the poverty of historicism would apply more to something like dialectical materialism and Marxism, than Michel...
May 16, 2023 at 09:24
I think, if we are willing to be somewhat charitable, and not dismiss his thesis out of hand because it doesn't fit our ideology, there's something th...
May 15, 2023 at 07:59
Are you suggesting a whole lot of people will die? Or at least our dysfunctional global monetary system will die, which probably also implies a lot of...
April 21, 2023 at 15:41
Maybe they said that, but they were wrong :-). I have actual reasons that are more that just "I feel special". I could elaborate, but this isn't reall...
April 21, 2023 at 14:58
The farther back one goes, the less relevant human organisations become for present times it seems to me... There were a lot less people and a lot mor...
April 21, 2023 at 14:47
I voted no, because I believe we do have certain tendencies that tend to certain outcomes.These are not necessarily hard limits to how we can organize...
April 21, 2023 at 14:27
Ironically Nietzsche rejected Christianity and God precisely on aesthetic grounds. And he thought most philosophy through the ages essentially boiled ...
April 11, 2023 at 15:41
The space or the matter in that space is at lower entropy? That is what is confusing to me. How can space itself be measured entropically. Isn't that ...
March 21, 2023 at 21:45
Yes this I don't understand then I suppose, because isn't equilibrium necessarily maximum entropy... If entropy always increases, it can only be in eq...
March 21, 2023 at 21:26
There are limits though, even only theoretically speaking... never mind practically.
March 21, 2023 at 20:16
No, life is perfectly compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, no antithesis or counterforce is needed. In fact life depends on the universe ...
March 21, 2023 at 19:43
Likely or unlikely, it was in a particular state, which we have no explanation for. You seem to be disagreeing with the past hypothesis, in that it wa...
March 21, 2023 at 12:43
Everything is 'ultimately' pointless since entropy is a fundamental law of the universe. Maybe it is a source of sadness/depression for them because t...
March 20, 2023 at 14:55
Base and noble in Nietzsche's conception, and in that of old (Greek) religions (where he got the idea), correspond roughly to ruled randomly by animal...
March 14, 2023 at 05:41
I'm a bit of an energy-determinist, which is maybe just another word for taking the laws of physics seriously... It's my contention that most of what ...
March 13, 2023 at 10:45
Human nature is both egalitarian and stratifying, i.e. we do have tendencies tor greed, social status seeking etc etc... but at the same time we also ...
February 27, 2023 at 18:00
I don't think we can know the results for certain. I also don't know if nature selecting is something we should necessarily aim for.... at this point ...
January 31, 2023 at 23:38
I think it's fine. If ethical restrictions should be placed on it, it should be because of negative consequences we want to avoid. Calculating consequ...
January 31, 2023 at 17:12
Though some aspects of what we could consider philosophical thinking where probably always already present and fused into the mythological and the rel...
January 27, 2023 at 09:45
I don't think so, I think Nietzsche was right in that he was tired of life and killed himself by trolling Athenian elites. Sort of like when forum mem...
January 13, 2023 at 06:22
Those that have the power to do so. Bit of a flippant answer maybe, but probably one of the more honest ones. In the world we live in it you never get...
January 12, 2023 at 21:50
Yes I can enlighten you, you seem to be under the assumption that something is only meaningful if it persists indefinitely or something is only meanin...
January 12, 2023 at 14:37
The wording was a bit of a play on your wording... what I meant is that the social aspect of how we learn was missing in your story. Trail and error o...
November 09, 2022 at 12:39
Ok fair enough. The force of my expression was probably more a reaction to current ideologies like liberal individualism completely missing the mark i...
November 08, 2022 at 17:34
Not a single source, I've read a bunch of stuff about evolution over the years. There was one guy in particular who gave me the idea of genetic evolut...
November 08, 2022 at 16:43
It would make sense, given what we know I think... but sure, hard to tell if it is true with any certainty. EDIT: To be clear I don't want to imply th...
November 08, 2022 at 15:38
Trial and error is induction basically, or maybe abduction more precisely.... we form theories about what we experience, and then refine them with new...
November 08, 2022 at 14:50
Trial and error is how we learn, yes, but not necessarily as individuals, that is to convoluted. We get most passed on by our parents, society at larg...
November 08, 2022 at 14:21
As someone philosophically inclined I like Taoism, probably the most philosophical religion of them all in that it is inspired by the same anti-tradit...
November 08, 2022 at 11:47
Mother nature is a bitch, because she never told us the rules, but she will still enforce them just the same.... And the only house rule is, if you go...
November 06, 2022 at 16:23
I agree unenlightened, at least in principle, I have no particular love for current society based on economic growth. If we were to turn back time a c...
November 06, 2022 at 15:57
What if there is no good solution? Not every problem has a solution. But ok, raising awareness and moral outrage generally does matter and can help in...
October 31, 2022 at 08:58
No there isn't, no way that isn't very costly anyway. They don't produce the majority of their energy with renewables, but the majority of their elect...
October 30, 2022 at 14:37
You can, but you shouldn't, sure, I can agree with that. Anyway, we going on a bit of a tangent here. My original point was not about morality, but ab...
October 30, 2022 at 12:03
No. Reason and rhetoric are not the same. People are hardly, if ever, convinced by reason. Sure you can, the barrel of a gun is probably one of the mo...
October 29, 2022 at 19:45
I don't think one particular thing or event will move the needle all that much. Sure it would be bad, but so are a lot of things, not in the least the...
October 29, 2022 at 18:08
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022 "The report shows that updated national pledges since COP26 – held in 2021 in Glasgow, UK – m...
October 27, 2022 at 22:21
Re-evaluation of values, is the short answer... more specifically re-evaluation of values after our belief in the Gods or the God of old had waned. Hi...
October 27, 2022 at 14:06
What is there to debate? They should be building nuclear plants en masse non stop. Winter is coming.
October 12, 2022 at 21:09
Objective and subjective on a spectrum is maybe not so bad a way of looking at it. Maybe better still is to forget about the distinction altogether, t...
October 06, 2022 at 14:11
The short answer is universalism is an invention of monotheistic religions. Yes you can be wrong by the standards of contemporary moral understanding....
October 06, 2022 at 09:46
It's not that I think the person matters for the validity of the argument, it's that I think often it's not the argument that matters in a discussion,...
September 30, 2022 at 16:47
An argument is always made by someone. While an argument in the abstract ( which is a fiction) may be impersonal, the act of making an argument is not...
September 29, 2022 at 17:16
Here's an example. Sometimes a random right winger will bring up some empirical data and statistics about racial groups in relation to crime or intell...
September 29, 2022 at 16:34
It would probably be impractical, as is any form of direct democracy. I do generally agree with this. Probably because i'm personally a bit more predi...
September 29, 2022 at 13:24
I have become nuclear absolutist, anything else is just tampering in the margins... it's the power of the atom or back to the stoneage.
September 06, 2022 at 19:23
I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that because the discourse is too extreme, politicians make their plans too ambitious to soothe the public w...
September 06, 2022 at 19:01
No problem. I have nothing against such potential solutions in principle, but I am a bit skeptical yes. Usually they can work fine as prototypes in a ...
September 06, 2022 at 14:35
I can't read the whole article, only the abstract, but it does seem to be going for more or less the same conclusion as I have been earlier, namely th...
September 06, 2022 at 06:24
I don't think anybody seriously invested in the topic is really claiming definitively that we are going to go extinct, they're just using 'existential...
September 06, 2022 at 06:18