Terrapin Station

Having a child is not the action that harmed you.

No, it has to be a direct action that you took. If a bomb goes off in a concert hall, the guy who let you in to the concert hall didn't do anything to...

I wasn't saying anything about risks. The bomb example has to do with if the bomb goes off. You don't have to be directly touching someone to do physi...

(Also I need to do something at the moment, so if you don't want to have to wait for a response you need to be quick about it)

Before we even get to that, I was going to bring this up: you're saying that conceiving children is physically harming them, right? (Re the bomb analo...

" consent where (a) someone normally capable of granting or withholding consent is required, " If I write that that's required, it doesn't imply that ...

So all that morality is is one's personal dispositions (of approval and disapproval) regarding interpersonal behavior that one considers to be more si...

Well, for example, you said that "Logic is as it is because, to be salve veritate (truth preserving), it has to reflect the nature of being." So you t...

I wouldn't say either way. I don't think there's any plausible way to quantitatively compare two different persons' suffering.

Right. So the point was that with that sort of claim, we need a quantification for each in order to make a comparison. Whereas with the other statemen...

Compare it with this: say that we're human resources employees looking at candidates' job experience. We say the following two sentences: "Joe's exper...

Okay, but the point was that I was addressing what the first sentence says, because that's what you had written. I wasn't addressing the different thi...

Man this is frustrating because it should be such a simple discussion. I'm saying if you write "the degree to which the people that really want to hav...

How would it have qualitative experiences if it's not aware?

So it's not something that you think actually happens with creatures that are conscious? How would AI have a qualitative experience of something if it...

Being is some way(s) rather than other ways, no?

What determines the nature of being--God, or.something else?

You're missing the point that this isn't just about explanations of consciousness. If we're critiquing something in terms of whether there's an explan...

This keeps getting longer and longer and I hate when that happens, so let's do one thing at a time. I do want to get to the rest, but I don't want pos...

You're certainly safe for William Tell purposes.

I did. That's what started this tangent. I didn't give one. But my analysis would stress the subjectivity of counting/not counting as an explanation. ...

Did you mean that the other way around? At any rate, what I was questioning re quantification was what I quoted: "the degree to which the people that ...

Good points.

How would we measure such things? There's no way to know this for any person until the person is around to ask them. You're not assuming that everyone...

What I'm rather doing is highlighting what the real problem is when it comes to the "hard problem." A real problem that no one wants to address.

So explanations of how automobile engines work, for example, or how to make toast, etc. have something to do with the difference between being awake a...

Unfortunately, "you know it when you see it" won't cut it for something highly disputatious where we're trying to avoid biases/prejudices that folks h...

He was always posting stuff that read like newspaper editorials from 30, 40 years ago.

So, first let's make clear then that you apparently don't even have a view about just what counts or doesn't count as an explanation in general, inclu...

I was just pointing out that it's not the case that no one might be harmed when no one has kids. You've pointed out before that the "calculus" you'd u...

What about the people who really want to have children? Aren't they affected by not having them?

For someone to have a chance against Trump, among other things, they need to be different enough from him to be appealing--they have to depart from th...

Sure, so let's start with how you'd characterize explanations in general. What are they? What do they do?

I can. but we're going to go over (so that we agree on) what explanations are and what they can and can't do first, so that you don't just say, "That'...

Yes, there's often a connotation to it that it's directed awareness, rather than not being directed. You can be aware that the radio is on, for exampl...

That's fine that you think that, but that you do is a combo of the reasons I explained. Including that you are confused in thinking that it's a catego...

Goddammit man, I just explained why there's a "hard problem."

Ohhhhkay . . . and? (That trope is typically a misunderstanding of something, by the way--it's not actually about the words "square" and "circle" as i...

Ability to make a claim is "based on talk" in the sense that it's talk and one has to use recognizable language to make an intelligible claim. What's ...

You're saying that what ontology is about, what it's addressing, somehow hinges on the conventional language used in the ontological arguments we make...

Prove that there is an objective reality? No. Empirical claims are not provable. But yes, obviously reality is a certain way regardless of how one per...

Does consciousness = Awareness/Attention? Awareness, yes. Attention, no, since "attention" connotes directed awareness. Re this: You'd have to try to ...

The problem is that it's not a category error. The mistake is thinking that they're "two different domains." That's very addled thinking that has no j...

You're not being an Aspie about the word "seen" there, are you?

The point is precisely that you don't see all things as "somethings." There's no way that you perceive hundreds of things at the same time as "somethi...

As it is, over the last few decades we have a wealth of mapping a la, for example, fMRI correlations with mental events and general mental status (it ...

Sure. So consent is an issue with respect to people who exist as they go into a park and what they encounter there.

3 billion years ago there were only single-celled organisms. So how would anything be already interpreted then?

That's referring to one's concept of the thing in question, one's interest in it, etc. Again, that's thought about it, and that's not at all necessari...

Yeah, it is.