Terrapin Station

What increases is the inertial mass, or in other words, the amount of resistance it has to any change in its motion. It's just a fact about how relati...

What if you're not an essentialist? (I'm not.) Or rather, in my view, concepts are something that individuals perform--they're abstractions that indiv...

One of the core tenets of the sciences is that empirical claims are not provable, they are only provisionally verifiable in lieu of falsification. All...

Pulling is attractive, right? Pulling is towards something. Imagine you have a simple electron orbiting a proton. If the electron is being pulled on g...

The effects on mass (basically a kind of "pulling" on the mass in both cases) is a counteracting force that make changes/motions relatively slower. Th...

Alternatively, one can realize that mathematics doesn't actually occur per se in the external world, that time is just change/motion, and that change/...

How ignorant would you have to be to not be familiar with definitions of "sound" not as a sensation? "Sound is defined as "(a) Oscillation in pressure...

And what is the religious theory of time?

Unless the context is clearly religious, who would respond to "what do you believe" with a comment about gods? If the context is clearly religion, the...

He said that you're forcing something upon someone by procreating. You're not. "You're forcing something on someone by procreating" is ontological bla...

How would it make any sense to say that subjective/subjectivity refers to or necessarily implies "not the way things are"? I've said this a ton of tim...

I'd phrase that as "an understanding of the objective absolute," not as "an objective understanding," since understanding itself doesn't have the prop...

Mentality is physiological, by the way. But I wouldn't say that there's any reason to believe that a desire, per se, can be nonmental. I don't buy the...

I'm not sure what you're responding to. How else than what do I propose "someone do ethics"? Again, the way that everyone really does ethics, whether ...

No. But the metaethical facts I've been mentioning can't be just ignored when we're talking about ethics from any other angle. I explained earlier tha...

It doesn't directly impact the child prior to or even at the moment of conception. Consent is a category error because there's nothing to grant or wit...

Yes, of course. I'm just stressing the fact that it's invented, partially because you never know what someone is going to assume if you just say that ...

It's not an act of force on the child. You can't do anything to the child until it exists. It seems like that's going in one ear and out the other.

Mathematics is an invented language, initially based on how we think about relations, and then the bulk of it is akin to extrapolating how we think ab...

No, I'm not a platonist. I'm somewhere between a subjectivist and social constructivist on ontology of mathematics. And more generally I'm a nominalis...

Huh?

Dimensionality other than three dimensions (plus time if you want to consider that a dimension) isn't real. It's just a mathematical game that we can ...

Since this would only be a mathematical game, the only answer that would make sense would be based on how we're setting up the rules of the mathematic...

Of course not. Desires are mental phenomena.

If you need a desire for that then there's nothing objective about it.

Right, but there's no sense in which the child is being forced, either. It can't do anything, and we can't do anything to it, until it exists.

Yes, but that's not using force on someone.

Which is dominant? It probably depends on the exact scenario at hand, just what variables we're talking about.

You're not doing anything to anyone prior to them existing, hence you can't "force someone into existence."

Weird. That's such a basic thing to know. Objective sounds are sounds occurring external to your body. That's not at all what I'm talking about. My to...

I actually didn't say anything about that. In the post about laziness, in fact, I explicitly said, "Not for any ethical reasons." For me, re metaethic...

Well, the meaning is the act of association we perform, while the sign simply isn't capable of performing such an act. That act is necessarily a way t...

Yes. That's part of the properties of that wavelength of light/electromagnetic radiation. Why would it need to have explanatory power? And it's knowle...

Nothing is like a model or explanation. Models and explanations are words, equations, etc.

You'd have to explain that one better.

When you plug your ears, you change sound waves travel from a source to your eardrums. Why do you think that you don't directly apprehend the way that...

Re light, we just happened to have evolved that way--it had evolutionary advantages for us, but how would that suggest that we don't have direct appre...

Sure, but I don't believe that anything supports that we don't have direct apprehension of the physical world, and I'm asking for what you take to be ...

I'm asking about your belief that we don't have direct apprehension of the physical world for example.

Wait, are you saying that you believe this: "Our minds interpret sense data. We do not have direct apprehension of the physical world. It is filtered ...

No. How do you support that we do if you think you can't know what the physical world is really like?

What do you consider to support the above belief?

I don't think there is anything unchanging, I don't think there is anything that isn't physical, and I see the "noble," good, etc. as a matter of indi...

It doesn't matter if it's divvied up in particular ways re edges/boundaries for whether it's abstract or not (it's not). Remember that I'm a direct/"n...

Don't you have to desire to thrive rather than not thrive?

I don't know how much I bothered reasoning about it, though. It was more along the lines of "You can't be serious--you believe what?!? :lol: "

Just curious how, exactly, you present the idea that Columbus was "evil"? I'm not in favor of teachers making moral claims period. Why not just teach ...

I'm not sure what that is referring to. My atheism is primarily built on the fact that I was never socialized into religion. So by the time i was expo...

I'm not saying it's "beside the point." Just that it wasn't what I was talking about. "A single brain" isn't an abstraction, because I'm not talking a...

I said "that may be the case" (that "the overwhelming vast majority of atheists arrived at their position through reference to human reason"), but tha...