Only in behavioralist terms. It is not evidence that your dog is subjectively aware of what it is doing. My account of consciousness has no theologica...
Is there a real difference? If they are invariant, they are necessary. It is irrational to suppose that processes have invariant ways of acting withou...
That does not change the the potential nature of his substance -- which means that from an Aristotelian perspective, it is a kind of matter, though no...
I said the work on "self"-organization apples the laws, not nature. It doesn't. It behaves in response to it. There is no need for you to participate ...
I know. Not quite. Since descriptions that are not grounded in reality are fictions, we need to accept that the Laws of Physics are approximate descri...
Right! But, one makes an explanation possible, and the other does not. Abandoning dualism is only removing an obstacle, not an explanation. The reason...
Contemplating fixed content requires no change once it has begun. You told me what you think. You did not cite Aristotle and you did not lead me to re...
The work being done on "self"-organization does not falsify the existence of actual laws of nature. it applies them. It is on the basis of the laws di...
But isn't this just saying that the one substance has the potential to be any of the things we experience? And what has the potential to take on vario...
Putting aside that matter does not organize itself (the laws of nature do), this does nothing to explain human intentional acts, such as awareness of ...
All ideas, being actions (humans thinking of something) inhere in the persons thinking them, and are therefore accidents in the sense of predicables. ...
Yes, classically, substance/ousia refers to true reality. What I mean is that for Spinoza, there is one substance, and what we see as things are its "...
Thinking of matter in a different in terms of self-organization and systems (rather than extension) neither rejects nor replaces the dualist conceptua...
To continue: Primary substances are the things from which we abstract the concepts of species and genera. This is done by sensation and the actualizat...
No. Because if you start with the false premise that the human mind and body are two things, you miss the fact that one thing, a human being, can act ...
We are debating the truth of the claim, not what Wafarer said, which we call all read for our selves. If you think ideas exist as particulars, then yo...
He did not posit, but recognized, that individual things were the basis of our concept of reality. That is why he said that ousia is tode ti (=this so...
Yes, it is. But, it is a critical datum that species are not eternal and unchanging, but evolve. It means that particulars do not instantiate Platonic...
You are misrepresenting what Wayfarer said. Ideas exist only in minds, not as particular substances, even though they may be about particulars. The la...
Interaction requires two or more things to interact. If we are one thing, which seems pretty obvious, this mis-states the question, and bad questions ...
If you mean biological minds, then, yes, I think a mindless universe is possible and that this was such a universe for a long time. On the other hand,...
I am a moderate realist. That means I think universals do not have a separate existence, but do have a foundation in reality. Yes. There are volumes o...
No. You cannot have an interaction between a prior intention and its instantiation anymore than a line can interact with its terminal point. First, th...
Well, chatGPT can almost pass the Turing test, but as Turing said, his test is just a game. It does not prove that machines have consciousness, just t...
Of course, more is required. Still acorns grow into mature oaks, not pines or oats. The problem is that there are two traditions about souls. One is d...
Indeed it does, but a being's own form/actuality cannot be a prior cause because nothing is actual until it exists. What is prior is a being's matter,...
If it were a separate entity, we would have dualism. It is not. A "principle" is the source (arche) of a concept. Consider the actuality and potential...
Aristotle defines the soul is the first actuality of a potentially living body (De Anima ii, 1, 412b28). ("First actuality" is being operational. "Sec...
Thank you for commenting. In the paper I published in January, I take the position you suggest, offering hylomorphism as providing a better conceptual...
Well, not most people (they're more sensible), but most philosophers of mind are monists. I was not saying they are dualists, but that they use Cartes...
As Aristotle defined it, the agent intellect has one function: to make intelligibility actually known. I am identifying this with the act of awareness...
Not at all. I am articulating a common and accepted view, viz. that people are capable of self-deception. Cf. Zengdan Jian, Wenjie Zhang, Ling Tian, W...
In statistical mechanics, entropy measures how many microscopic states could underlie a macroscopic state. It is only defined for closed systems. For ...
That was the reason for my hesitation. That was Lamarck's theory. It is not the current view. As I argued in my article, there is no reason to think t...
They both cannot know what they claim, so what kind of act do you see engendering belief? And, when they each believe what they believe, is that not t...
Perhaps not, but either atheists will themselves to believe there is no God, or theists will themselves to believe there is a God. Both cannot know th...
I suspect so, but we need a good definition of order to do the analysis. Again, I think this is putting the cart before the horse. We need to go throu...
The problem with this is that the sequence begins by the child knowing they are hungry. Being convinced they are not is an abusive consequence of that...
I agree that this is possible and likely. Still, the possibility that Trump may have convinced even himself (self-deluded) is all that I need to show ...
He certainly lied. The sign of commitment is subsequent behavior, not a clear conscience. I could distinguish sincere and insincere commitment, and sa...
I do not understand the contradiction. Of course, it is not. We do not will p to be true. We will to act as if p is true (or false). While commitment ...
Yes, generating initial options for consideration is an action, but it need not be rational in the sense that the options result from judgement. Judge...
How does that contradict what I said? I am simply further specifying the "attitude" as commitment. Isn't "taking" p to be true the same as committing ...
Believing it adds a commitment to its truth. Suppose a child is hungry and says so. An abusive parent says, "You're not hungry, you just want to compl...
Sure. The need is to reduce the many potential plans contemplated to one line of action. The act doing this is not the result of contemplating its own...
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