Terrapin Station

In my view intelligence is ability (combined with the time required) to consciously process and utilize/adapt to information, tempered by one's intere...

What does "the future" mean to me? Any time after the present.

I keep forgetting we don't have a "like" button here--I went to hit it for your comment.

There are two senses of the term: One refers to what's known as "major depression" or "clinical depression" in the medical field. The other refers to ...

For those who have depression you mean, or for everyone? Because not everyone has depression.

This does not at all follow. The mere fact that we do something, that we think about something in some way, doesn't make it factually correct to do wh...

I'm a nominalist. You seem to be thinking that nominalists would say that it's wrong to identify someone by biological sex. That doesn't follow. That ...

Did you stop reading at that sentence? The next paragraph spelled this out for you: "Medical professionals will not necessarily be able to cure your d...

Mentality is identical to (dynamic) brain states. If you have "major" or "clinical" depression, you have specific things going on in your brain that c...

Philosophy is the other field in which I have degrees, and I did some student teaching when I was a grad student, but that's it.

I don't think that no stigma would be better. Too many people would leave it untreated in that case.

That's a classic symptom of depression, and you specifically mention depression further into your post. It sounds like you were attempting to self-med...

It's certainly natural, and I think the view that it's always harmful is ridiculous. Can it be removed from your life if you're prone to the reaction,...

LOL . . . that's not at all my view.

Being flabbergasted is partly emotional, sure. And any reaction involving interpretations will be at least partly based on experience. Both of those s...

I agree with that. It's just that "some" is "a lot" in my view.

What's to explain? It's very straightforward.

I'm a bit surprised "theism' was as high as 14.6%.

Because thinking that it's easily summarized in "a picture" is stupid.

For one, it would involve not thinking that it would be easily summarized in "a picture."

That was the case for me, too. I was raised so that there was no mention of religion at all, and I didn't have any religious friends--at least not whe...

It doesn't seem that our brains, while alive, are able to operate below a particular activity threshold for very long normally, at least not without a...

I've been studying it for over 45 years now, and again, I think that a lot of it is stupid. There are a lot of stupid arguments within it, many of whi...

How is the word "greater" even being used there? What is that saying, exactly, about the relationship of causes and effects?

For one, the definitions you gave didn't imply that we're perceiving ethics.

Are moral truths accessible? No. Because there are no moral truths.

I think that a lot of it is stupid, and that opinion has only strengthened as I've gotten older and further away from concerns with philosophy as a ca...

Re the comments about people making 80k per year struggling, it can be a challenge to live on that income in some parts of the U.S., especially in met...

I work as a musician, composer and arranger. I have degrees in two fields, one of them music theory/composition. So yes, my job utilizes part of my ed...

You could think about existents, or represent them, as members of a set, but I'd be careful to avoid saying that set membership is what it is to exist...

You can't. The entire notion of that is a category error.

I'm a philosophical naturalist, but a couple big problems were apparent to me with your argument, in its merits as an argument, with just a quick glan...

I'm an atheist. I have some fondness for Zen Buddhism, but purely as kind of a loose, pragmatic pop philosophy a la, say Joe Hyams' Zen in the Martial...

I don't know how to answer. My political views are extremely idiosyncratic. I've yet to meet someone else who already has the same views, and I've yet...

There's no way for you to know that if you don't read Plato. ;-)

The more philosophy that you read, the more you'll have a handle on these sorts of issues. You really need to read it to begin to understand it.

You don't need a lot of mathematics or logic unless you're going into a philosophy field directly related to them. Certainly nothing more than what's ...

My view as well is that life--and everything else for that matter--is a physical or material thing.

I don't disagree with that, really, but I'd simply say that we don't need a "theory" of it. People are simply not going to confuse videogames with thi...

Only as something imagined in my opinion. It would include non-material things, spiritual things, etc. if those things existed. But they don't.

Extremely important point that's often overlooked. Too many arguments seem to hinge on language and how we conceptualize things, and it's ridiculous t...

I think it's ridiculous to say that actions in games in any way translate to real life, or that games in any way "encourage" anything outside of playi...

You seem to be thinking of material things as something that would be static rather than dynamic, and you seem to be ignoring relations. A living cow ...

I'd say that we shouldn't assume that they're voluntary, and we shouldn't assume that they've been caused by the "manipulative agent" either. We don't...

The idea is that truth-value is a judgment that individuals make about the relation of propositions to something else. The something else can vary, be...

The analogy is useful to me because that's what I mean by something being causal. If every mind has a unique configuration so that plenty of times spe...

Because the way that causality works, if x is causal to y, then unless something unusual is interceding, when x happens, y will follow. If that doesn'...

To demonstrate in a controlled experiment that speech can be causal. You can't just run the experment once and reach a conclusion.

This was probably mentioned by others already, but typically, the demarcation criteria for life consist of things like some overarching organization/s...

I think I'll stick with my definition of truth, which is this: ‘P’ is true for S iff S judges ‘P’ to have relation R to either S’s phenomenal P, and/o...