SophistiCat

Yeah, I figured his posts were too lame and deranged to even qualify as dangerous misinformation. One would have to work to be misinformed by them. Co...

I don't think "females" is incel language. I don't like the word myself (but I am not a native speaker, so what do I know); however, I think it is mor...

So Obama got the Nobel peace price basically for not being Dubya. How are they going to top that with Biden now? The bad news is that the bar has been...

Agreed.

Only once the virus infects the organism and starts to reproduce and possibly (a) sicken the individual, (b) develop an advantageous mutation, (c) inf...

People aren't "removers" of the virus. Once it is out of its host, a virus dies on its own if it doesn't find a new host, which is nearly always. You ...

You don't understand how to use analogies. An analogy can illustrate an unfamiliar scenario in more familiar terms to provide an intuitive feel for it...

So then you are not denying that @"jamalrob" is putin? I knew it!

Physicalism is not a theory of everything, so you are severely misguided if you think you can "pound" physicalists with such questions. They'll tell y...

Physicalism isn't married to the third-person perspective. If physicalism is compatible with the existence of first-person perspectives in general (it...

I just mean that there is a diversity of opinion when it comes to exotic imaginary scenarios involving personal identity. Our intuitions don't seem to...

That is certainly true with more complex arguments (or else mathematics would start and end with setting out axioms). Or the other way around, dependi...

Thought experiments involving cloning or teletransporting differ in an important detail: they start with there being a single person, who then undergo...

Wow. That took an unexpected turn. OK, I think we are done here.

That's your dualistic premise-conclusion right there. For someone who doesn't already accept dualism there is no you that is independently assignable ...

Thanks for the recommendation. Here is the web page for the podcast (had to google it). The first season was very interesting, listening to the second...

As has already been pointed out in the very first response, an assertion is all you have going. You postulate a dualistic premise, then illustrate it ...

Deductive arguments, especially simple ones, are all subject to this seeming challenge: if you had good reasons to accept all the premises, then you s...

It seems that your reasoning would apply equally to any argument (including your own!) Did you pick the Moral argument as an illustration, or do you t...

There was the Tea Party (remember the Tea Party?), there was Trump in 2016, who at the outset was opposed by many in the Republican establishment - th...

This sounds a lot like the old idea of a "philosopher king" - or "philosopher kings." There is a reason why this naive patriarchal fantasy was never a...

I can order them any way I want. Nothing wrong with ?* order type.

Well, the only way you could fail to find counterarguments to common versions of the cosmological argument is if you didn't look. But as for your form...

Well, it is an answer, but why is it the answer? Why one object and not two or 42 or all of them? Why do you elect to be a lumper and not a splitter? ...

Not really, you just restated what you already wrote earlier. Assuming you are speaking from experience, can you give a specific example where scienti...

I am not sure I understand what you have in mind. Can you elaborate a little further, give a more specific example?

Reich was new for me. I've been listening to his music for the past ten days or so. My favorites so far (+ Proverb): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f...

The relevance of relativity is not towards the relativity of duration, but towards the relativity of simultaneity. Your "snapshot" presumably includes...

I am not sure what you are asking. Are the two balls identical? Yes, because that is a given. Are there two balls rather than one? Yes, that is also a...

You would have to assume an absolute time for that, that is, something like a Newtonian universe. In a relativistic universe there is no fact of the m...

I don't understand why you use modal language if you don't mean it. And if you eschew modality, then what is left of your definition? If we plug 'actu...

No, I am afraid you've lost the thread. Remember, you were trying to define causality:

I don't see any conceptual problems with a timeless world. We routinely construct such worlds in our minds. One of the subfields of mechanics is actua...

No, this won't work. Suppose A was caused by B, but it could alternatively have been caused by C. Neither B nor C are necessary for A to occur. This i...

Well, this place may be slightly more expert than the general population, on average, but only slightly. There are hardly any professionals here, a fe...

This sounds like science fiction. Where are you getting your info? Since when is the effectiveness of anything is "solidly established" in vitro? When...

Curious, why would you want to solicit opinions from a few random people on the Internet? If you want to know who the best known or most influential m...

A bona fide philosophical piece: Steve Reich gives an appropriately minimalistic treatment to a quote from Wittgenstein: "How small a thought it takes...

Having read through the discussion, I still don't really know what you are getting at with all these Capital T's and Absolutes and so forth. Some exam...

The reason you trust past experiences is that you believe that the future will be very much like the past. If tomorrow things start falling up instead...

Everyone thinks, and people of intellectual professions - such as engineers and managers - can think their way through certain kinds of problems bette...

We learn how to use moral language from other people, but we don't necessarily learn how to be moral in the same way (although there is an overlap bet...

Can you elaborate on the contrast that you are drawing between an empirical and a phenomenological account? (I am not even going to ask about "metaphy...

Whether this is a relevant objection depends on what one is trying to achieve. If your goal is to describe how moral reasoning functions in general, t...

The SEP article on Medieval Philosophy gives a short overview. I would start here. If you like podcasts, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has a ...

Yeah, OK, that does sound reductionist. But I must confess that there is a lot of muddle and controversy in this bundle of concepts: reductionism, eme...

That's not the same thing. This would be reductionism, which is a much stronger position than just holding that the universe can be described with mat...

For there to be any kind of emergence, the universe must be "mathematical" in the weaker sense of having an all-pervading structure. The varieties of ...

Tegmark was on Carroll's podcast, but I don't think Carroll has endorsed his idea. Carroll is a good interviewer, in that he is receptive to all ideas...

Ah, how wonderful it is to be a self-assured fool. Everything is crystal-clear, and no question requires more than two seconds of contemplation.