SophistiCat

Here is one that has an actual philosophical background. Serenade after Plato's Symposium is probably my favorite of Leonard Bernstein's works. Though...

Welcome to the forum! It is only exponential if the rate remains constant, and even then it will never become infinite. Anyway, if your point is that ...

No problem, and thank you for your response (I am not usually so impatient...). I have listened to some of Emerson's podcasts before, even though I am...

'Artificial' is not the same as 'unnatural' or 'supernatural', even though all of these words are contrasted to 'natural'. Artificial means made by hu...

Since the OP won't answer my question, can anyone else explain what he is talking about? @"Count Timothy von Icarus"? What does it mean for an experie...

And this "Notturno" is just impossibly gorgeous... https://youtu.be/-kq4GcsIG5w?si=4mL2TVikaYtWPhR0

Huh, I was just listening to Chopin's nocturnes in Sokolov's rendition the other day: https://youtu.be/R26K_gn5Sv8?si=2paqVAALgCIJfpuO

You ask us to assume this for the sake of an argument, but the rest of your post proceeds as if this was the only live option, save for "two unsatisfy...

I am not seeing your point, but whatever. You are entitled to your prejudices.

Unlike handing it to a human editor, which is what authors have been doing for yonks?

Well, it looks like you've already gone deep into the rabbit hole. There is a disturbingly rapid accumulation of reports of "AI psychosis", in which A...

Welcome to the forum! Don't be discouraged by the lack of prompt feedback - you are not being "shadow-banned," it's just that not all threads attract ...

I'll leave it to you to figure out. But first, you need to understand that if your definition implies that you perform a miracle every time you tie yo...

I believe that I can prove that a pig is a kind of dog. A dog is an animal with four legs and a tail. A pig is an animal with four legs and a tail. Th...

Of course, but the point I was trying to make was that the question of cognitivism vs non-cognitivism is an analytical question that does not really g...

When asked their opinion on an ethical question, non-cognitivists do not literally say "boo!" or "hurray!" do they? In any event, whatever language th...

You are right, this is a very personal list. Not even a recommendation, more like a fact of Calvino's biography. For that reason, it doesn't sit well ...

I think emotivism can meet the open question challenge. A straightforward response would be to cache it out in terms of degrees of belief. That is to ...

OK, but I don't see how this follows: What do you mean by "me becoming human"? Before you were born, was there Dogbert protoconsciousness inhabiting n...

Likelihood, in its usual sense, is the probability of something being the case given a theory of how things work. So, for instance, the likelihood of ...

The question in the OP is much too broad to be interesting, since the word "system" has multiple meanings, and those meanings are in turn quite genera...

Well, as I said, "social physics" may be a new discipline, but the phenomena that it studies and the uses to which it is put are as old as society its...

It is not clear to me what your worry is: is it simply the fact that our choices can be predictable, or is it that this predictability can be exploite...

I was just citing a perfect cipher as a proof of concept. Regardless of the intention of the sender, when all you have is a single message, it is enti...

The message need not even be nonsense to be indecipherable. There is such a thing as a perfect cipher, e.g. a one-time pad.

It occurred to me that there is a parallel here with some realist and anti-realist positions in metaethics. One influential but controversial position...

To my mind, identity is a concept with fuzzy boundaries, but at the same time, invariance over time and space is an important part of it; identity is ...

We all go through an imperfect transporter, literally every moment of our lives. Your body is not physically identical to itself from one moment to an...

Not what I asked.

"Fake" is not a negation. The negation of "is a painting" would be "is not a painting," rather than "is a fake painting." What does "fake fake" mean, ...

In fact, we never do ask such a question. That's not a speculative thesis, but an observation about actual causal talk. Under normal conditions, ice f...

Don't feed the troll spammer.

First of all, Aristotle and Darwin were not answering the same question. Aristotle was offering a broad and rough classification of different types of...

Yes, in the most general sense, "cause" and "reason" can be used interchangeably, and Aristotle's four causes are better understood as a classificatio...

Causation is a useful everyday notion, but it is perhaps best thought of as a heuristic shortcut, rather than a sharp feature of the world. If you ask...

There are established usages of the word 'causation', both in ordinary language and in specialized domains. Capturing these usages in a single, all-en...

Mass shootings aren't a real problem. Well, not compared to all the other shootings. If you wave a magic wand and end all mass shootings in the US onc...

https://images.saatchiart.com/saatchi/63358/art/10709871/9772341-NMUMKGQV-7.jpg Not this (or so it says :))

I think you are jumping to answers too quickly. Let us slow down and try to understand the question first. The mark of higher consciousness (as distin...

Hello and welcome to the forum! This is a meaty first post, but I would like to start with a clarifying question. Just what do you mean by a choice be...

What are you expecting from this discussion? The position that you outlined is pretty much orthodox contemporary panpsychism. You could have just writ...

Not sure what your wiki reference is supposed to add here. So, it's a Hong Kong newspaper with a dubious reputation. The journo is referencing anonymo...

It would, yes, but the contention that China's top diplomat made such a blunt and frank declaration to the EU's top diplomat sounds extremely implausi...

So, what happens if nature violates its laws? Does it get a ticket? This obvious parallel with human-instituted laws is unfortunate (and it's probably...

I know that, but I note that you keep evading the questions that challenge that thesis. That's not the criticism, at least not from me. The criticism ...

We do, of course, actively discover order when we look for it, be it in our natural environment or in artificial constructs. But the other kind of pat...

I don't think that the question of determinism vs indeterminism is relevant to teleology. Again, if you think of the most ordinary examples, although ...

Yes, I meant it in the way the OP problematized the issue: "no particular outcome is necessary." A species may experience selective pressures, but its...

I wonder why you picked astrology as an example, rather than astronomy? Would you consider them more-or-less on the same footing, and if not, why not?

I understand that this is your view, and this is what prompted my questions above (and likewise, @"Patterner"'s questions). Do you have any thoughts o...