Terrapin Station

What makes a cause adequate or not?

Sure. Here's one example of evidence: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a27102/read-thoughts-with-brain-scan/

I can't answer some of those questions under Marxism because I just don't know (or remember if I knew at some point) enough about Marxism to know the ...

How do we conclude what we "feel"? Introspection. What does it mean when we claim a feeling that we're not currently experiencing? That in the relevan...

The broader senses of "contradiction" that you're referring to are more vague than the very specific sense that I mentioned.

Even in Ancient Greece they would have simply been wrong to figure that there was anything unchanging.

First, metaphysics isn't just Aristotelianism qua Aristotelianism. Even it were, Aristotle didn't use the word himself. He didn't name the book that. ...

Metaphysics (the "book") was actually named that because it was placed after the "book" named physics in an Aristotle compendium. There's no reason to...

Why would we take "being" to refer to something unchanging? Re "metaphysical," it's a mistake to see it as distinct from physical things in my view, a...

You're still going to need structural hierarchies in some situations to produce things, but one thing that could be done is to rotate people in and ou...

We know that we're (as individuals) conscious because of our first-person experience. We know from a lot of evidence that consciousness is a property ...

Which makes no sense, because it has to be true that at least the "illusion" changes. My reason tells me that things interact, but they're not just on...

Not that I'm a Marxist, so I'm not trying to argue in support of Marxism, but just in terms of this logically, if the workers are all getting an equal...

Are "vague" and "more vague" the same thing?

The big bang is one of the causes of everything, isn't it? You can't have humans if the big bang didn't happen. So why would that be any less the sour...

Because "contradiction" is useful, especially in philosophy, as a very specific idea. Making the usage more vague doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

You didn't deal with either point I made. (1) "Source" doesn't conventionally denote "causes of x that aren't themselves x" and (2) Given the way you'...

What I consider a contradiction is a non-equivocated instance of P & not-P (although I'd not require that a real contradiction is a literal propositio...

An example. Just one would be fine. A "conflict" isn't the same thing as a contradiction, is it?

What's an example of that?

You can try to be careful about avoiding contradictions, but they can creep up unexpectedly. The more complex any "system" is, the more likely it is t...

Sets are just ideas. They're something we made up. Can we make up ideas that run into consistency problems? Sure. And then we can make up modification...

Do you believe that someone can just so happen to feel the same way that the rules have something?

The source of a river is a common term of art in the Earth sciences. I guess you're not familiar with that. As that term of art, it refers to the poin...

So do you agree that "living creatively" involves breaking rules rather than following them?

Because there was confusion about this earlier with someone else, are you using "source" to refer to where morals arise as morals? An analogy would be...

It seems like you're appealing to something like the normal artistic sense of "creative" there and not simply defining it as "living so that one break...

So in short, what was the non-neurobiological source in all of that?

Can you be a bit more specific. What would be an example of this?

What do you figure is a non-neurobiological source?

I can't even begin to imagine how confused you must be, or how you could have ended up that confused, if you think something above has some implicatio...

Debates about whether something is explained, goofball.

And what implication do you see that having for metaphysics?

My porn appetite isn't very limited. ;-)

In other words, let's say that it's a rule that you should help disabled people when you can. And then let's say that Joe comes along, and Joe really ...

As the term is conventionally defined in philosophy, why aren't physics claims metaphysical claims?

Limited ability to understand things, though? How do we know what, if anything, other species are understanding?

But the majority of porn doesn't have uncomfortable positions. Maybe you're watching a pretty limited selection of stereotypical porn? There's a ton o...

I see needs as necessarily hinging on wants/desires. Some people have curiosity about the "furniture of the world" so to speak. So they're going to un...

I'm of the view that there's no way to determine likelihood for these sorts of things. I think what people are usually referring to by "likelihood" is...

Maybe this is because I'm reading your comment out of context, but I don't know what the heck you could be doing when it comes to sex that's not repre...

I'd definitely say that it's possible that there are things (and/or that things have a nature) that we can't really understand. I don't see how we cou...

Which begins, "The premise is that Heidegger remained a phenomenologist from beginning to end and that phenomenology is exclusively about meaningand i...

What could be our grounds for positing that there are things, or that there could be a "nature" to some things, that don't make sense to us, though? H...

Maybe we should have made this thread: "Do we need metaphysics? (Be sure to tell us just what you believe metaphysics to be when you give your answer)...

What a baffling thing to claim.

What questions would you say that doesn't describe?

I was certainly never talking about anything like that, a fortiori because I refuse to do "explanation" discussions (a la "is this explained?") withou...

Sounds like one of the more sensible suggestions I've seen you make. ;-)

Maybe the relevant difference is not in the suffering, not the type of suffering, but in how one parses and deals with suffering. If that's the case, ...