That's more-or-less a statement of liberal ethics. But not everyone is a liberal, as you well know, and no amount of reasoning will convince a non-lib...
Meh, Trump should be A-ok with assuming guilt without due process. After all, he has extended an invitation to the White House to Rodrigo Duterte, a m...
Heh, Finland has a cause for worry indeed: it was once a part of the Russian empire, and Stalin carved off a good chunk of it at the beginning of WWII...
Close to 100%? I think the genuine worry is not the plight of the Crimean people but a major land grab in Europe, something we haven't seen since the ...
Through history? How is that a relevant comparison? I would assume that participants of this forum are our contemporaries - most of them, anyway. This...
As ssu says, you just need to take a look at the timeline of the events, which Russian officialdom now largely acknowledges, even if they don't like t...
Present-day offshore oil and gas production that Russia seized from Ukraine doesn't amount to much (which is why Ukraine largely relied on energy impo...
It wasn't. There wasn't anything like a real referendum, such as what the Scots had. Before Russia made its play, there wasn't even much of a separati...
That's your conjecture. There were a number of plausible reasons for the Russians to support Trump during the election, him being some sort of a Russi...
If you are into "mind-trip" movies, I would add Being John Malkovich and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that's been mentioned below. These ...
Yeah, I don't understand the significance of being a member of some set. If some means any, then anything you can name is a member of any number of se...
I read Jewish and Christian scriptures for the first time in full at a fairly mature age. While I did not expect a religious conversion, I was actuall...
Unlike many atheists here, I was raised secular. Religion wasn't much discussed inside or outside the home. My father, as I later realized, while bein...
This quite unfairly implies that those who self-identify as atheists are not open to arguments. One can be an atheist (in the common sense of not beli...
Didn't Trump pretty much out his motive right in the letter of dismissal? http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170509181301-james-comey-fired-lett...
This is a good question and the answer is not so obvious, unless you take certain positions for granted, such as utilitarian ethics. This is a good ca...
In the proper reference frame of a point on the edge the entire disk, including the center, is stationary. But it is, as you note, non-inertial, which...
The causal connection is what is missing, according to Davidson and other externalists like him. Obviously, this won't matter to those who don't const...
By this definition, we cannot then say that Mary knew everything there was to know about red before she left the room, so the problem is resolved eith...
That's how I understand Davidson's position as well. And the next logical step is to conclude that the copy is not the same person as the original (be...
Right, assume a spherical cow observer in vacuum :) I think what this thought experiment shows is that Leibniz's construal of identity cannot work wit...
There are other reasons to deny identity of a duplicate - take Davidson's view of the Swampman, for instance. According to Davidson, who is an externa...
I don't understand the point you are trying to make. First, are you saying that the Swampman scenario is nomologically impossible, or just less probab...
A thermal fluctuation is not out of the realm of possibility, at least from the point of view of classical thermodynamics (recall Boltzmann's Brain, f...
We have a much greater impact on our own environment. At earlier times this feedback was much weaker. In addition to exhausting easily extractable res...
lol, another thing to worry about. Yeah, I am pretty sure that a population and civilization collapse is imminent, most likely due to a confluence of ...
Right, I don't understand this what/why distinction and how you relate it to explanation and causation. Also, I am not sure whether you think you are ...
Physics constructs intelligible models (what else?), and some of these models happen to be probabilistic (stochastic). Quantum physics is not the firs...
Your quest to reconceptualize causation is a little misguided, I think, in that the concept you are looking for is just explanation. Explanation is a ...
You seem to understand the premise (vague as it is) just fine. The only thing your reformulation does is it adds to the original premise an odd depend...
I don't know if that was intended to be ironic, but seriously, I am not sure what to make of it. I get a feeling that he may be missing the point, or ...
That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce su...
But that's all this is: playing with words in order to finagle a cheap semantic victory. So subjective experiences are not objective physical facts, a...
I am no expert, but AFAIK behaviorists see behavior (understood more or less generally - possibly even including neuronal events) as the explanatory t...
Without some qualia, you mean. But then, our mental functioning differs in many ways as it is, so perhaps we should just talk about individual variabi...
Ex hypothesi, the existence of p-zombies (partial or not) cannot be demonstrated, because empirically (behaviorally) they are indistinguishable from p...
I am not aware of any version of Zeno's paradoxes that assumes that some distance is covered instantaneously, or that makes any extraordinary assumpti...
There are two somewhat distinct questions that can be discussed in connection with the OP. A historical, philological question concerns Kant's own not...
It's odd how often the placebo effect is trotted out as evidence against "materialism" of some description. Perhaps there is some argument to be made ...
Adiabatic =/= reversible (in the classic problem of a gas filling an evacuated partition the process is adiabatic and irreversible). But you are right...
In the early, radiation-dominated universe gravitational collapse could not occur (because reasons). The universe then was close to a (local) thermody...
Sorry, that explanation was both too clipped and too dense for me to make sense of. Yeah, the universe had better begin with a low(er) entropy, but I ...
You can just bookmark the Categories page and it will look pretty much like the old forum. On the old forum I only looked in certain categories that i...
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason you find these things "transparently obvious" is because your understanding of them is very superfici...
Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the development of new scientific theories is mere curve-fitting. Philosophical and even esthetic consideration...
There is a fundamental difference between the sort of reasoning exemplified by these Vedic philosophers - or for that matter by ancient atomists - and...
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