Andrew M

By thinking about how the term mind and other related terms (like thinking) function in everyday communication. The answer is that it's a way of talki...

OK. By intentional, I mean directing one's focus towards something (i.e., the thing she is intentionally talking about or acting on). When Alice point...

Yes, but Kant also assumes this in positing the thing-in-itself. What I'm saying is that the object itself is what my judgement is about, not a Kantia...

An alternative possibility to consider is that the mind/body problem (and subject/object dualism generally) is the result of a category mistake.

That's essentially what it is for Kant, except that the "intrinsic qualities of objects" (Lockean primary qualities) are also part of the appearance/r...

So I agree with Kant's conclusion here as against Berkeley: Where I disagree with Kant is his idea that an object that we point to, such as a tree or ...

However the Earth itself is curved in spacetime due to its mass. So there is no Euclidean straight line from NYC to Hong-Kong through the Earth. (Unle...

Yes, in the context of this thread, the idea of mind comes to mind. Yes, though I would note that Aristotle didn't seem to be motivated by faith.

For Aristotle, it's the celestial spheres that move in a circular motion (as moved by the Unmoved Mover). The Unmoved Mover, per its name, doesn't mov...

Though that would seem to be a failure of a person to understand how the language terms function rather than a problem with the language itself. :up: ...

Yes. He had no reason to notice, perhaps. But the discrepancies are there and we've subsequently discovered, per Relativity, that the geometry of spac...

That particular definition notwithstanding (which is a modern one, btw), I don't think naturalism presupposes an answer about God one way or the other...

Given the above distinction, what conceptual problem remains? There are still plenty of problems to solve even with that assumption (including philoso...

Cool. So my suggestion is that this should similarly apply to absolute space/time and relativistic spacetime. That is, through experience, Einstein's ...

No, because there's a key difference in how Kant construes the perspectival nature of knowledge and that is in his understanding of appearance. Here's...

They comprise the (contingently) prior background against which observations are interpreted and judgments are made. That prior background can be repr...

What I mean by abstraction in this context is "A particular way in which a thing exists or appears." (Lexico, form) An electromagnetic dynamo is a thi...

Thanks for that apt reference. It's well worth quoting the original passage in full.

It doesn't terminate. Here's the expansion: 1. If this sentence is true, then Germany borders China expands to 2. If 'If this sentence is true, then G...

I like the template and mold ways of thinking of it. However I'd like to suggest that the a priori - the template or mold - is itself fluid. Consider ...

Probably not. But Descartes set the stage for thinkers that came after him. See, for example, the passage from Magee's book on Schopenhauer that inclu...

On naturalism, there is no "reality of appearances". We're not trapped in Plato's cave. Yes, they remain possible. Naturalism doesn't confer certainty...

What I mean by terminating self-reference is that there exists a method for evaluating the sentence in a finite number of steps. Consider the followin...

Yes, I agree those are linguistic conventions. But they don't assume dualism. On the ordinary use, it is the human being that thinks (and is the refer...

Actually I was referring to Descartes' substance dualism there, not cogito ergo sum. As Gilbert Ryle has argued, Cartesian dualism is a category mista...

Not so. The viewpoint of modern science today is that the Earth orbited the Sun a billion years ago. But there was no viewpoint a billion years ago. W...

Thanks for replying. I'm reading your comments below as an application of Kant's system. As we've discussed before, observer in its physics sense does...

Just to inject a few words about linguistic convention... ;-) Linguistic convention allows us to talk about basketballs and humans (grammatically inte...

Computers can handle self-reference as long as the self-reference eventually terminates. The Curry sentence is not well-defined due to the non-termina...

That is there simply to make the return values explicit (per the truth table for p --> q) and doesn't affect the logic. But if you prefer, the algorit...

An interpretation-neutral term that captures that is counterfactual definiteness (i.e., the ability to speak "meaningfully" of the definiteness of the...

By constructing an algorithm for evaluating it. Here's a Curry sentence from Wikipedia: If this sentence is true, then Germany borders China. The sent...

Original post, or original poster. In this case, you. :-)

OK, but per consciousness, almost everybody in quantum mechanics denies that consciousness causes collapse. Here are the definitions of subject and ob...

In terms of Kant's philosophy, that's my conclusion as well (his specifically scientific contributions notwithstanding as Mww mentions).

Per symmetry, a measurement is simply an interaction between two quantum systems (with no implication of consciousness or subjectivity in either syste...

You're just plugging in values to see what happens. That's not the same as evaluating the sentence. It has the same issue as the Liar and Truth Teller...

The problem with the Curry sentence is that it's not evaluable and thus not truth-apt. The truth value of the antecedent depends on the truth value of...

That's an interesting statement in the context of this thread. The relevant question is whether it points to a subject/object duality or to an underly...

I think Special Relativity provides a useful model here. Things can have different properties in different reference frames (and one can translate bet...

There is the obvious sense in which a human being is needed to propose a scientific theory. Also any theory will be in human language, both ordinary a...

That science is a human enterprise conducted from a human perspective is entirely consistent with naturalism. The "view from nowhere" is just how a du...

Can you be more specific? How does falsifiability and paradigm shift, for example, imply a subject/object dualism? Fair enough - I agree that dualism ...

A crisis in philosophy perhaps, not so much in modern science. :-)

Substance dualism? On your view, how do Popper and Kuhn presuppose it?

I don't think so. I think the issue arises due to a philosophical conflict between dualism and naturalism, an issue that exercised pre-moderns as much...

It seems you're asking whether others see things differently from Cartesian dualism and/or Kant's transcendental idealism. And, further, that they see...

Yes, exactly. So the ordinary language distinctions seem to have been rejected. The thesis seems to involve an amalgamation of Cartesian substance dua...

If we reframe the question to be about photons instead of angels, it turns out an unlimited number can because particles with integer spin, such as ph...

Yes, as you know, Mermin was referring to Bell's Theorem which shows that the predictions of quantum mechanics are inconsistent with local realism (wh...