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SophistiCat

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I take your point that as any pursuit that depends largely on public support, philosophy has a burden of justifying its existence. But as I think you ...
September 28, 2020 at 20:46
Well, this is true for a lot of academic disciplines, both in humanities and in physical sciences. Exactly. This demand for (whatever) philosophy to j...
September 28, 2020 at 18:39
In: Gotcha!  — view comment
Likewise, if your response to any push-back is that you are obviously right and there's no value to a different view, then it is very easy to come up ...
September 28, 2020 at 08:00
Obviously not. Most of the things that we hold as true are not verifiable in practice or even in theory. If you were consistent in your skepticism, yo...
September 27, 2020 at 08:21
How is this issue different from not having a first-person experience of another person's consciousness? Unless your real issue is that it's a compute...
September 26, 2020 at 16:54
I think Searle's thought experiment was rather a reaction to reductive takes on consciousness, particularly computational, functionalist ones: There a...
September 26, 2020 at 15:36
Well, that is generally true of specialists. You will find the same with black holes or medieval French literature. But as for your general question, ...
September 26, 2020 at 11:45
Was it ever a thing? Is "analytic philosophy" a meaningful and useful designation? I think philosophers tend to answer in the negative. (And the same ...
September 26, 2020 at 07:37
If you identify logic with classical logic, or something with a close family resemblance, then yes. But formal logic in general is less specific than ...
September 26, 2020 at 07:30
I think you make a good point here: But this is if you look at quantum logic as making an absolute metaphysical statement about quantum mechanics, rat...
September 25, 2020 at 07:06
Please, put this sorry thread out of its misery.
September 25, 2020 at 06:29
And of course there's heaps from the philosophy of physics side. Reviews and anthologies alone will probably fill a shelf or three, e.g. Tim Maudlin's...
September 24, 2020 at 18:38
Rather than speculate in the abstract, do yourself a favor and google "philosophy of space." You'd be surprised at what scientists and philosophers ha...
September 24, 2020 at 17:41
Right, I am just saying that bringing up the fact that a conscious being is always involved in QM experiments as a last-ditch defense of a mentalist t...
September 23, 2020 at 17:50
You are talking about the mind interpreting the world. Mentalist interpretations of QM imply the mind directly affecting the world, e.g. reaching out ...
September 23, 2020 at 16:18
Oh, you want boobies? Why didn't you just say so? :) Anyway, to your point that an experimenter has to be involved, that's true of literally everythin...
September 23, 2020 at 13:45
You don't have to use quantum logic in quantum mechanics either; classical logic works perfectly well there - it's just one way of thinking about QM t...
September 23, 2020 at 08:33
Right, that would be the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation: the electron interacts with the detector and the wavefunction collapses from a superposit...
September 23, 2020 at 07:54
It can, with some footwork, but at the cost of metaphysical extravagance. But then mind/matter dualism is already pretty extravagant, and if you've al...
September 22, 2020 at 18:48
What @"khaled" attributes (inexplicably) to the Copenhagen interpretation sounds like the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation, in which only minds have ...
September 22, 2020 at 15:15
That doesn't follow.
September 22, 2020 at 07:21
Which is when the collapse allegedly occurs: when the (classical) measuring system interacts with the quantum system to produce a measurement. Measure...
September 21, 2020 at 11:58
This is theology, not general philosophy. Wrong forum.
September 21, 2020 at 08:51
This is not accurate. There are interpretations of quantum mechanics that involve the mind (e.g. Neumann–Wigner), but as Kenosha Kid says, the Copenha...
September 21, 2020 at 07:29
Thanks for your candid explanation. As I suspected, what is at issue here is not the original question, which is easy enough to answer, but how you fr...
September 21, 2020 at 07:16
:up: Welcome to the forum!
September 21, 2020 at 06:29
The 2020 IgNobels are in.
September 20, 2020 at 15:14
You seem to be using the forum as a personal blog or scratchpad. There are better platforms for this. The point of posting on a forum is conversation....
September 20, 2020 at 07:06
Causality in general is an informal concept. We have intuitions and practices related to causality; theories (plural) of causality attempt to capture ...
September 20, 2020 at 06:51
Sweden? On a different, more hopeful note, it has long been a puzzle why Covid morbidity/mortality seems to differ significantly in different parts of...
September 18, 2020 at 19:41
No, probability won't help you. You are confused.
September 18, 2020 at 16:34
If you have no idea whether or not you exist, then I would say you are confused. But other than that, absent certainty, probability is the obvious nex...
September 18, 2020 at 15:35
Pew: U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites...
September 18, 2020 at 13:30
One can make an argument by way of analogy for a kind of teleology inherent in homeostasis and biological adaptation, but this "teleology" does not po...
September 16, 2020 at 16:37
That's a lot of words for a basic appeal to popularity. Was that in reaction to anything specific? If you want to complain about the running of the fo...
September 16, 2020 at 16:27
This all just comes down to whatever we believe ought to be the case ought to be the case - a truism. The halfhearted proper-functionalism with which ...
September 16, 2020 at 07:20
Not this old chestnut again :roll: Why anyone would say something so obviously untrue is puzzling, but how this inanity gets to be repeated over and o...
September 15, 2020 at 08:08
No.
September 14, 2020 at 20:36
No need to get angry. I am trying to engage with your ideas, but you aren't being very forthcoming. I realize that I may be pushing in a direction tha...
September 13, 2020 at 14:14
As a minor note, the argument is not that the universe could not have existed if it lacked some feature, but that it would have been lifeless if its f...
September 13, 2020 at 10:56
You are misreading this expression. In game theory, economic theory and such, the self and the interest in "rational self-interest" are taken for gran...
September 13, 2020 at 10:50
I am still not sure what you are trying to say here, but this struck me as bizarre. I get a feeling that you are working within a rationalist framewor...
September 12, 2020 at 20:34
1.0 :cool: (whatever that means)
September 12, 2020 at 13:33
Just wanted to link this critical review of recent experimental meta-ethics research: Empirical research on folk moral objectivism (2019). Some intere...
September 12, 2020 at 13:31
This site uses Google Analytics, which places a tracking code on every page, so that every time you visit a page, Google knows about it. Google also i...
September 12, 2020 at 12:00
True, official statistics underestimates COVID mortality almost everywhere, for various reasons (not necessarily nefarious), but the extent of underco...
September 12, 2020 at 08:24
Obviously, not by counting or measuring directly. We don't hold a stopwatch to measure the age of the earth either - we use other measurements to esta...
September 12, 2020 at 07:54
https://5b0988e595225.cdn.sohucs.com/images/20180206/e455f81150d34a34b6b707f44c18a565.jpeg
September 11, 2020 at 18:18
Same way as how we establish anything in science: that Earth is ~4.5 Gyr old ("How could you possibly know? Were you there?!"), that pulsars are neutr...
September 11, 2020 at 16:04
But whether these things are deemed to be material or not (I don't much care), the boundaries of perception are still ises, they are facts about the p...
September 11, 2020 at 08:19