Terrapin Station

??? Knowledge is a qualified type of belief: it's belief for which we have some justification and which we judge to be true.

A couple big problems with it: * Agnosticism isn't a stance about proof. * It seems to conflate knowledge and proof. * It seems ignorant of the fact t...

In other words, if we make up some incoherent gobbledygook . . .

If you wanted to work as an actor this year, an airline pilot next year, a marine biology researcher the following year, etc. that's not really possib...

I'd simply allow people to work whatever jobs they want to work, with there being no barrier to them being able to work those jobs. Of course, they'd ...

What happens when space bends? Nothing. Space isn't a thing in itself that can bend. Space supervenes on the extensions of matter and the extensional ...

Democracy is often a goal that people reach for in itself. As I've often commented, though, I really couldn't care less what the structure of the gove...

Why do we have 2-3 threads per week on the same topics, over and over and over?

It's just the problem, because there's no reason to believe that time (or space for that matter) works just like our concepts re numbers.

Holy crap is that awful writing.

Me on the other hand . . . haha

I don't think that many people really intend to be lazy, for example.

That's convoluted, too. The basic idea is that if you didn't take normal, "reasonable" precautions, you're going to have some degree of liability due ...

Yes, but it was written in such a convoluted way that I didn't catch that you were acknowledging negligence.

That's not necessarily the case. The could be liable due to negligence. It depends on the situation. Basically, you're not off the hook no matter what...

At which point we should try to figure out what the ontological facts about time are supposed to have to do with the concept of numbers.

I found a columnist claiming that "All politics is identity politics"--Eleanor Penny, in an article for New Statesman America. She says, "But those wh...

You've seemed to have about 25-30 different points in this thread, none of which seem to be the same as anything you've explicitly said. It's too bad ...

Or as I said on page 2, "So this seems like one of those silly 'I can make moves to interpret anything as x' games." "Well, if we define identity in t...

If change isn't possible, how are people responding to this thread?

<---wonders how we're still discussing this when he gave the definition a couple pages ago.

I thought this was going to be a thread about a pair of Indian ladies.

While this isn't the only option, laws are basically a way of describing observations. Then you set up experiments to further test that the descriptio...

This, as well as your paragraph after it, is something he already alluded to: What's being agreed on there is whether Kant, Hegel, Heidegger et al are...

Well, unless we were talking about an eternalist (re philosophy of time). Eternalism/presentism and nominalism (including conceptualist nominalism) ha...

Are you talking about conceptualists? They reject that abstracts and universals (types) are external to mind. Not other things.

What? What's internal to mind? What does the word "aspect" refer to in this context? And what does "retrospect" have to do with it?

Citation? (with info about how many people were surveyed and how they were chosen)

:-\ :-/ It's an ontological statement, about what (or rather who, in this case) exists at time Tx. You can't perform an act on a nonexistent at time T...

How are you getting past/present from that?

I don't think he was wondering about that sense of "infinity." He seemed to be thinking of the mathematical sense.

I don't agree with a lot of your premises, and I'm one of many people who wouldn't. So, things like "Sexual betrayal seems ethically worse than financ...

Where are you getting that from?

Again, this seems a bit misleading. I'm an example of a conceptualist nominalist (so that's a type of nominalism), and while I'd say that counterfactu...

No. Morals stem from humans having innate/instinctual dispositions about interpersonal behavior, and the reason we have that is that it was evolutiona...

beep

lol okay. Great conversation like usual.

Wasn't that what my first post was about? :-\ :-/

Are you relaying koans?

Do you think it's possible to talk about a particle where we're talking about a concrete fact? Again, by the way, I'm in no way appealing to any conve...

Well, so there's no absence of free will and no need for a devil in that scenario. And yeah, I think it would be the most ethical choice. (Personally ...

Yeah, but the plot sucks.

:-/ :-\ Do you think that particle A is a concrete fact?

If you've procreated, so that you've made a child come into existence, something can happen to that child at a later time. That's fine. The point is t...

Reagan didn't really do anything in the vein of libertarianism.

Think of it simply as a logical possibility at the moment. So whether it's consistent with what's commonly accepted in the sciences is irrelevant for ...

I don't really understand the article. "Neoliberalism" is often characterized as essentially libertarianism, but libertarians aren't conservatives, an...

Right. I don't see how it's better to allow murder, violent rape, wars, genocide, etc.

Yeah, "not a robot" is better, but wouldn't you rather have both (a) not a robot, and (b) a guarantee that the not-a-robot won't murder you in your sl...

No, your first universe has no free will. I'm saying you could have a universe that has free will, but where evil is not possible because god sets up ...