Terrapin Station

I'm not asking you anything about explanations about conscious experience at the moment. Let me explain what I'm asking you better. Okay, so let's tak...

"Subconscious" is usually a less formal term for "unconscious," not a distinct thing. In my view we're conscious of dreams if we're dreaming.

No, they are not. Sure, it will be more difficult to understand someone if they're very unconventional. I mention that in the post you're responding t...

The rules are simply conventions. Conventions aren't correct or incorrect. It's not incorrect to be unconventional. If you're too unconventional in th...

If only, in my opinion, that answered either question I asked you.

The problem is that I don't think it's coherent to say that we have x joules of energy if we're saying that it's ONLY x joules of energy. Energy has t...

Well, first, not everything is developed as a tool for some other purpose. Supervenience is handy as a way of talking about a certain kind of dependen...

People, or the entire Earth, could disappear. That's not just imaginary in the sense of fantastical, it could easily happen for a number of different ...

Why would you believe that? What led to that belief for you, in other words? Also, do you believe that that's the standard view in physics, for exampl...

Personally I can't figure out how that would be coherent. :meh:

One obvious set of properties that you're overlooking, by the way, is shape and extension.

Properties aren't the same thing as abilities. So listing abilities doesn't exhaust property-talk. In a hypothetical universe with just one particle, ...

When particles are in relations with other particles, so that they form atoms, molecules, etc. all the way up to things like shoes, ships, sealing wax...

First off, if particles have properties, then that's something about them that's additional to the ability to move each other. (That's not the end of ...

That part is nonsensical. First, objects aren't in motion "by definition," They're in motion by empirical fact. Next,"at time t1 01 will be in positio...

So you'd say that in physics, particles don't have properties, for example?

What sorts of constraints are you talking about? Could you give some examples?

I'd agree that there's an objective fact a la x only happened because of y, where y is the result of a decision that some subject made, and informatio...

I'd be careful how you're using "arbitrary" there. Something being conventional or subjective doesn't imply that it's "arbitrary" in the sense of "ran...

I would say that mental, aesthetic, etc. properties supervene on physical properties, but in that I am not saying that mental, aesthetic etc. properti...

No, you're not getting the idea. If there's a supervenience relation, one can't obtain without the other. Planets could still exist if we didn't.

The argument would have to not be incredibly poor, as that premise is. It's not as if just any arbitrary argument, no matter how ridiculous outside of...

If you started leading us and suggested that, I missed it and apologize for that. Yeah, people dont have to, but that's how these sorts of threads wor...

Well, and for some of us, our sometimes crappy memory. :razz: Yeah, sometimes I get the (extremely distasteful) impression of some philosophers treati...

I've participated in a lot of reading group and a lot of listening group threads. (Re the latter, where we do something like go through a musical arti...

Again, why are we doing "reading group" threads where no one is leading them via directing just what we're going to discuss as we systematically go th...

Well, or maybe like the patronizing leading the patronizing. Which is what the entire board is like sometimes. Why we get a parade of people through h...

If it's not subjective, then it obtains independently of what anyone thinks about it. What would be the evidence of that?

Yeah, the old joke is that "Betty majored in psychology in order to try to figure out what's wrong with her."

Also, environmental causes are often things like diet, or toxic contaminants in buildings, soil, etc. It can be interactions with other people, too, o...

Your view on this doesn't really make any sense, because it can't be just environment. In other words, it's almost as if you're trying to remove the a...

No, there is no supervenience between us and planets. You need to read more of the supervenience entry: Supervenience claims do not merely say that it...

If you're doing traditional formal logic and the logic in question is a bivalent, T or F system, then whatever is assigned to p, T or F, will be rever...

If negative utilitarians think that only suffering matters, if they think that all suffering, no matter how slight, matters, and if they think that an...

That sounds like you're a representationalist. I don't at all agree with representationalism. I'm a direct realist. I don't believe that the idea of o...

What I was getting at is that you'd need an argument that doesn't exist as far as I know to support "it is impossible for these particles to give rise...

I don't understand what you're saying there.

That's fine. But I'm asking you if you think that it's physical. You're thinking that changing = disappearing???

If we assume that something is right, then under that assumption, it's right.

Wel, you think that molecules are physical, right? Do you think that motion is physical? What's the difference between the unique state of the objects...

Re this for example, it doesn't sound like something I'd call "exploitation" . . . and I also don't think there's anything inherently preferable to de...

Well, and also it is okay to steal insofar as people feel it's okay. Morality isn't something different than what people feel. Yeah, I agree with that...

What sort of exploitation are you talking about? (I'm curious because a lot of exploitation I don't at all think is something negative.)

I like, by the way, how they don't even bother to ask the people who they're worried about--ask them whether they think it's worth it.

What I get from that with respect to your question is that the "criteria of transworld identity," which isn't something we need to figure out first (t...

All objects, aside from elementary particles at least, are dynamic--they're things in motion. And even elementary particles are in motion relative to ...

I don't know why you'd think that's mysterious. Presumably you believe that temperature is physical, for example. Can temperature be hard? What would ...

Just some.

I just saw your earlier post, including the comment that this thread is the first you've ever heard of the idea of "empty names." Here's the beginning...

? Not that I agree with the idea of "empty names" in the first place (as I stated earlier, I think the whole notion of there being a problem stems fro...