Dfpolis

Once again, it is clear that we do not have enough common ground for a fruitful discussion.

Time will tell.

OK.

Being in a pecking order does not make the other's good your good. Yes, "consciousness" can mean what I call medical consciousness -- a certain state ...

Thank you for your helpful comment. I agree that many animals go through my two steps. They sense alternatives, then process and select one. They also...

The problem is, that specialized, technical uses of terms are fine in the narrow communities that employ them. However, they can be entirely misleadin...

It is clear that you do not understand physics. So, you should not use it as the basis for your theories. I have already explained that, in my view, t...

Yes, its original purpose will be reflected in its form. That is not the same as the object, itself, having an intention = being a source of intention...

It is certainly true that living beings have organic integrity and self-directed (aka immanent) activity. So, as a result of their form, organisms act...

As I have said, physical systems have material states, and intentional laws. What they do not have is an intrinsic source of intentionality. This seem...

How is it "qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter" if such responses can be wholly explained on physical principles? We underst...

There is no reason to think that most non-human creatures are conscious of anything. Positing that they are is a pure, unsupported extrapolation. It i...

I hold that purely physical systems evolve deterministically, because they have no intrinsic source of intentionality. However, we are not purely phys...

The problem is that we can see that physical processes are intentional without first assuming that God exists. In physics, we distinguish physical sta...

This is the common view. However, Galileo did not show "that bodies do not fall because of their purpose". He showed that their falling could be mathe...

Please do not give your interpretation of my position, as you do not understand it. (1) I do not hold that matter has any intent, let alone an intent ...

It seems to me that reward and punishment is the wrong paradigm for considering the quality of afterlife. I think of it in terms of getting what we ch...

Except for the reference to non-human animals, this is very Aristotelian. He characterizes the mind/intellect (nous) as nothing until it thinks someth...

Your intuitions in the first part of your response seem to align with mine. I also describe knowledge as a "projection" of reality. It is a projection...

This is far from the position I am taking. My position involves no such division. It does involve a close adherence to the principle of parsimony -- s...

Of course there are no infinite regresses of causes. Believing that there are is like believing that your Xbox will work when you plug it into an infi...

Of course, not everything can be proven, Aristotle showed that 2500 years ago. Some truths are fundamental. That does not mean that they cannot be jus...

It seems to me that you do not mean by "reality" what most of us mean by it. Most of us mean by "reality" the kind of thing that we encounter in exper...

As a theoretical physicist, I learned that whatever happens, happens for a reason, In physics, it is because there are laws of nature that make our ob...

What do you mean by "the fundamental" and why would it not interact when it acts? The only candidate I can think of is God, but there are no events in...

Thank you.

Why would you expect this? Since unobserved physical processes are deterministic, any physical effect consciousness produces has to be something that ...

I just came across this thread. Nicholas Humphrey's article is interesting, but he makes assumptions that, on the one hand, harken back to the bad old...

Not everyone is a learner. To learn, one must be willing to learn.

Thank you for your comments. I did not discuss this distinction, which I agree with. I discussed the difference between simultaneous and time-sequence...

It comes from Plato. In the Republic (509d–511e) he lays out the taxonomy of thought using the analogy of a divided line. The line is first divided in...

"All causes, both proper and accidental, may be spoken of either as potential or as actual; e.g. the cause of a house being built is either a house-bu...

I ran across these references just now. Posterior Analytics II, 12, 95a14-35 discusses simultaneous and time ordered causality. Cf. “In an essentially...

Again, you spout nonsense. See my "Evolution: Mind or Randomness?" Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 22 (1-2):32-66 (2010)

You might be interested in my "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle" Modern Schoolman 68 (3):225-244 (1991)

Clearly, you know much less about Aristotle than you would like to believe. Further, you are not open to learning. So, once again, I leave you to your...

How can an agent actualize a potential without the potential being simultaneously actualized? Perhaps there are cases in which "essential causality" i...

The completed house is a cumulative effect. The immediate effect is progress toward completion = the house being built. If there were no immediate eff...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26170042

Now you are claiming that builders are houses. Again, that is the point. Actions are identically passions from a different perspective. That does not ...

Yes, I am but I am not saying it is a completed house, but a house under construction.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/passion Def 3. You have left out the builder and the house. The builder building is the cause. The house be...

Again, you are missing the point. The necessity is not in the decision to build, but in the relation between the act of building as cause and the pass...

You need to do more research. The necessity is bilateral and in the present tense. There can be no builder building without a building being built and...

Aristotle would use his potency and act model, and answer that philosophy makes explicit (actual) what we know implicitly (potential). The world acts ...

Aristotle and the Scholastics distinguish two kinds of efficient causality: accidental, which is the time sequence by rule Hume and Kant discuss, and ...

Elementary particles can do the same. Neutrons decay with about a 13 minute half-life into a proton, electron, and electron anti-neutrino. (This impli...

This misunderstands both Aristotle and the history of science. Aristotle was wrong in part. So were Newton and Einstein. Atomism (the belief in perman...

In the Aristotelian tradition, forms are neither Platonic Ideas nor physical arrangements, but the actuality of what was potential (hyle -- poorly tra...

There are many meanings of "form" in Aristotle and Aquinas, related by an analogy of attribution. As Aquinas explains: In other words, we may call thi...