SophistiCat

It is trivially true that you can only experience what you can experience, but your thoughts and attitudes can be directed at either yourself or at ot...

Ah well, that's that sorted out then :roll:

But plenty of whine! :razz: :party: :heart:

I don't see why not, unless you have very specific methodological requirements for such understanding. Taking "mind" in its ordinary sense, we certain...

I would understand "I am my mind" as saying something about your concept of personal identity, i.e. "'I' (my self) is nothing other than my mind (what...

How would your analysis differ if its object was (what is usually thought of as) a physical entity or process?

That is more-or-less the ordinary language meaning of free will, and it is how P. F. Strawson, A. J. Ayer and some of the other compatibilists interpr...

Well, you yourself used the word foundation (or ground - same thing). That foundation doesn't have to take the form of an indubitable fact, like Desca...

I am sympathetic to this line of thought, although I think that ground - ground of all being, or ground of all knowledge - would be a more appropriate...

It could be both, couldn't it? But to answer your question, yes, I think this is a legitimate criticism. If mind is truly apart from the corporeal wor...

What Descartes' precise beliefs about mind-body interaction were is still argued over by scholars (which suggests that said beliefs were far from prec...

Ah, I see that I've mistaken a statement of personal belief for an argument or a proposal. Carry on then.

Of course not. But the argument that the article cites is not confined to restating Descartes definitions. Did you read any further than that opening ...

I don't see any evidence of that in your OP, nor in most of the discussion.The thread follows the dismal pattern of all such free will discussions, wh...

You know why that is? Because people who take part in these discussions fail to do the most basic philosopher's due diligence, like asking themselves ...

You mean, when someone is trying to sell you something, whether a product or a point of view, they'll do whatever they can to persuade you? Well, of c...

Well, both positions, as stated, are stupid caricatures. Or the first one is a caricature; the second is just stupid.

Funny, I just heard another unsourced version of this factoid: as the story went, there was a law in Sparta (rather than Athens) concerning political ...

This is the same crank whose banning you were lamenting earlier because (he says) he is a physicist and we should be grateful for him being here to ed...

I'll take the bow on behalf of the late Jerry Fodor :)

By the way, I am afraid that when they talk about "Fodors’s anxieties" they are misrepresenting him. Perhaps they mistook a rhetorical setup for his a...

Yeah, I think imagination, curiosity and play are underestimated in these reductionist accounts of mathematics, even though they are as much a feature...

In the quoted passage Brown and Ladyman give only a brief outline of a solution; do they go on to say more? From this one paragraph it's difficult to ...

There is an article on supervenience in the SEP - probably more than you want to know, but relevant to this topic. Here is a handy definition from the...

The idea of naturalizing mathematics is not new. It is how the thesis that mathematics and mathematical truth are discovered (as opposed to constructe...

Well, the paper doesn't give any detail about the causal continuity theory beyond what you've summarized here, and I don't feel like delving into Budd...

Looks like TiredThinker is trying to usurp TMF's position in his absence. Agent Smith, on the other hand, looks all too familiar... I do hope TMF is w...

I don't really have a stake in this argument, since I don't subscribe to the causal continuity theory of personal identity. As a metaphysical theory, ...

This cracked me up. So you want to write a fugue... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHW1I8T0caI Written (yes, written) by Glenn Gould.

Can you plain this a bit more? "Not irreducible" = reducible? To what? And has anything been proposed as an alternative to a mathematical language?

I must admit that I was kind of playing devil's advocate here. I do not honestly believe that we systematically confabulate structure where none exist...

I was just loosely referencing the idea of a clockwork universe, structured world, mathematics being "embedded" in the world - however you want to exp...

Nonsense! I love vegans, especially those health-conscious, exercise- and diet-obsessed ones. They taste like high-end gourmet pork.

You make like you are objecting to the OP, but here you are just restating the same thesis. Yes, the game analogy is a bit awkward, but the idea is th...

Split personality?

To be honest, I thought it was rather the opposite: the game analogy is overly complicated for the point it is making, which is that the world has a c...

Topical: "I am here for my 5th shot because of the 3rd wave..." "...or the other way around."

This is assuming that there is a strict mapping from code to meaning (a surjection in this case). In reality, of course, the interpretation of a text ...

Your question is odd. Surely, if causality is more than an idle fantasy that we are making up here on the spot, then the question of whether causality...

JTB is posited not as a dictionary definition of the word 'knowledge' but as a specialist philosophical definition. Like you though, I am not sure how...

The thing is that ordinary use varies, and there is a sense of knowledge that answers the JTB criteria. The truth criterion is justified by locutions ...

It's the difference between living with your spouse and prostituting him/her.

The thing is that when you reduce a theory to very general and rough slogans, like "minimizing surprise" or "survival of the fittest," you will readil...

This - not so much this article, but your complaint that PP/PEM seems to have an explanation for everything - reminds me of a common creationists' com...

You picked a rather peripheral article, a comment. Friston's background is in fMRI and computational neuroscience, and that is the inspiration and the...

When I read that sentence I immediately thought of Friston (who is indeed the lead author). Sean Carroll had a podcast with him, where they touched up...

I still don't get the point. Yes, most people don't have the background to understand a complex scientific theory, and popularizations can be misleadi...

First, I am a bit puzzled by your choice of the words "identity" and "placeholder": I don't think I've seen them used like this before. From the conte...

Do you know of any theory in physics or other sufficiently mathematized science that doesn't do exactly that? So... MWI then?

How about "natural rock formation"? Why is it that some people can't wrap their head around the fact that words can have multiple meanings/uses? Have ...