I wish you a long, happy and healthy life. If you end up having one I don't imagine it will be to do directly with my wishing you it. But every little...
Sorry - the quote marks meant it was a summary of the point I was addressing. The lack of your name afterwards meant that they were not your words. If...
I think the asymmetry is this: Scenario A. Person exists: Presence of benefit = good, Presence of harm = bad Scenario B. Person does not exist: Absenc...
Benatar's argument is subtle and doesn't depend on the idea that life may be generally crap. Even if a life is 99.9% full of joy there will be some su...
I think Benatar's asymmetry holds water (roughly as @"Agent Smith" summarised). But it is an incomplete calculation of cost and benefit. It ignores or...
I am more wonderful than this post. I was not designed*. I created this post. OK, all conditions met, all set. Here's the conclusion: It is not improb...
There used to be a fashion for denying that Shakespeare existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question Rather careless of them...
I think I see the argument. They got people to join their cult for the sport of persecuting them for being in it. Three hundred years later they made ...
I bet the Romans kicked themselves when people started believing it and refused to recognise the divinity of the Emperor. "Guys, guys, we made the who...
Easy. The elephant is hanging over the cliff secured by stout and strong cables and also with its tail tied to a daisy. The question is not "How is th...
If there is no God then they can both be ruled out. If God is of necessity good then they can both be ruled in. (Compare: are two lines parallel becau...
So when they went door to door hunting down Jews it wasn't about race? Well, I never knew that. I don't think I know it even now. I cannot see how it ...
@"Banno" @"Sam26" I think the idea is that hinge propositions are not used in deductive logic. They are the background against which deductive logic a...
That is interesting. But we know there are causes. Bridges collapse - engineers investigate - causes are identified and reported. The concept of cause...
If everything that's true of apples is true of elementary particles, then that is indeed so. If you can pick up apples for sixty pence a pound in Tesc...
If we eat the apple and the table is still there, then we're done. Suppose someone (it might be G E Moore) chanced upon me writing this post. What exp...
I wonder what successful science he had in mind, in which causal laws have been replaced? "What caused X?" seems to be a common form of research quest...
Just a small caveat. If you are Henry the Eighth You Are then you cannot also be One of the Ruins that Cromwell Knocked About a Bit. You can't have it...
It's like this: (1) Some X was west of some Y at time t (2) At time t there were no minds (1) is not logically inconsistent with (2). You can have bot...
If some X had not been west of some Y on an earth with no minds, then there would not have been a suitable environment for terrestrial mammals with mi...
OK, let's suppose the position to be defended is that 'being west of' is a relation and it exists and it is not to be found in any city. That's not a ...
It isn't. Ask any city what it's aware of - if you can work out how to ask things of cities - and you will draw a blank. Perhaps I did need to go on a...
I did not mention minds. Perhaps I should have. I think if anyone tries to determine something in the sense of 'decide whether something is or is not ...
Indeed, but let's have a go. First, let's distinguish ontological existence from other merely everyday kinds of existence. Now 'ontological' means, ro...
Oh, ok. Well, let's suppose that the answer to the underlying question is - "No, nothing that we typically think of as existing does actually exist." ...
This objection shows that lego will help me learn the difference between single objects and stuck-together objects but that molecules and atoms will n...
I think T Clark's question is also a valid philosophical question, if we read it as a question rather than a rhetorical dismissal of the OP's question...
Tegmark on his website does not directly address the question of the opening post. But he does address this curious query: To spare unnecessary anxiet...
But don't put yourself down, @"Stoycho", we are all struggling and as soon as a person strays outside the safe zone of 'Name That Fallacy' style of Cr...
I think you are looking at a useful distinction between simple 'identity' (sameness of things) and 'personal identity' (sameness of us and people like...
It's an interesting question. Here's a sum for our early years arithmetic class: 3 + 5 = ? The expected answer is '8'. But suppose we write: 3 + 5 = 5...
Stipulated means it's a given in Reid's scenario. Here's a more everyday scenario: Just after breakfast, I remember what I ate for breakfast. At lunch...
It is stipulated in the thought experiment that boy/soldier/general are the same person. No establishing of fact is needed. You might object that no s...
I suppose that if there is no God then the problem doesn't arise. Maybe the problem doesn't arise even if there is a God. For what it's worth, I think...
I think you accept Reid's argument that they are not the same person according to Locke's theory. We know that they are the same person, because the w...
The example was about the intension (with an 's') of an act, roughly, how we would describe and think of the act given our current state of knowledge....
I think you say this because the one who took the standard remembers the flogging and the one who was made a general does not remember it. So the stan...
That's very interesting and I did not know. But in the Netherlands isn't the country's Parliament sovereign? I mean, the law-makers can decide that it...
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