Mentalusion

I guess I don't share the intuition that it's accurate. It doesn't seem to me to be the case that if something possibly exists with property X, that t...

Sorry friend. I tend to be here when I have downtime at work...which there has not been much of the last couple days. I see you got another thread goi...

I mean, I can give a 30k ft. view, but there are whole text books that deal with developing the semantics for different modal systems. The basic idea ...

Well, it's not that it doesn't reconcile, it's just that PL isn't sophisticated enough to capture the logic of counterfactuals. That's why you have se...

I'm not sure you can quantify a counterfactual statement existentially. The nature of EQ is to assert that there is at least one object being quantifi...

I'm sympathetic to the overestimation of the degree to which machines can be intelligent in the same way humans are, however I think the definition of...

I believe that's why we have the term "artificial intelligence" (? "intelligence").

It sounds like those guys could actually benefit severely from some alternative perspectives in their lives, but no one can blame you for staying away

That's obnoxious. If you live in the US, you should see if your state has anti-bullying and/or public accommodation laws. The psychiatry comment would...

Yeah, no, I totally agree that empirically we have no evidence that there are any rational beings in addition to humans, and would not insist there ne...

I think what @"sign" is saying is that every subject (i.e. person) is an essential part of the process of meaning and signification and, to that exten...

So you think it would be impossible for rational creatures, whether human or not, to agree to a system of moral codes? Part of the question being whet...

This is different from what you had said here I supplied the emphasis here to draw attention to the gist of your original claim, the one I was respond...

It seems to me the attribution of interests in this case is an anthropomorphic displacement to your dog of YOUR understanding of interest and what the...

same here. I think those are right and that the 4th one is the 'material' cause - basically, the 'stuff' a thing is made from.

1. The equation of being capable of forming "interests" with sentience is totally unjustified and probably unjustifiable. Having an interest requires ...

why stop your slippery slope at animals? Why are we morally justified eating/exploiting plants? Maybe we shouldn't be eating anything and just letting...

I guess if you could give an example of how you think his cosmological argument is formulated, that would be helpful for making sure we're on the same...

I mean as little as possible by it so as to leave open to interpretation what it could mean. Most generally, I take just to mean "capable of being und...

I'll say that I find A's taxonomy of causes interesting and reasonable (although not rational). I think it also tells us something - maybe even a lot ...

I was merely attempting to provide a very coarse, formal outline for what I take a cosmological argument to look like and was not advocating for the s...

I don't disagree with this as a reading of what A wants to say, and in particular that he differentiates final and efficient cause (among other types ...

In terms of just Aristotelian interpretation, this is is probably as good as you're going to get. @"Mattt"

1. The whole immaterial/material thing is kind of what I mean by saying you can engage in a lot of interpretative trickery to try to get this argument...

This gets to why I didn't get into what I was calling his "technical philosophical machinery". You can restate the cosmological argument in terms of c...

wherever x is. If x is here, then here. If x is there, then there. If x is everywhere, then everywhere. In other words, at some spatio-TEMPORAL locati...

How does it matter if they are?

1. One has a memory of some thing, call it "x". 2. The thing that the memory of "x" is about or refers to is x. 3. Therefore, the memory refers to whe...

Simply put, the unmoved mover is contradictory. There is obviously a lot of technical philosophical machinery regarding causation that Aristotle devel...

at least we agree on this

1. Anything that a product of nature produces, is itself a product of nature. 2. Humans are a product of nature. 3. Humans produce factory farms. 4. T...

You keep making analogies to immoral acts committed on people to those committed on animals in the context of animal consumption. I suggested in anoth...

Here's another: 1. Necessity is determined by truth in all possible worlds 2. However, possible worlds are conceived as discrete entities 3. Discrete ...

1. Any possible world that is intelligible is such that it contains some structure and form. 1a. All possible worlds are intelligible 2. At least some...

The philosophy of science also concerns science, but it's not science. The sentence "this computer here" concerns this computer here, but it's not thi...

OK, how does that change anything I said?

meh, I think it's actually quite similar to what Leibnitz said about monads back in the day Although, yeah, it is pretty strange

My understanding is that QM is just describing physical nature. Part of that nature according to QM is that it is indeterminate, that is, there is a d...

yup, and of course, interpretation is not the exclusive prerogative of science.

here's generally what quantum indeterminacy is from Wikipedia: Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a ...

True, I guess my point was just that to the extent they start asking questions about what the purpose or goals of life are, they have, to that extent,...

I think what Says is generally correct. The Republic is essentially trying to answer the typical Socratic question "what is X?", where "X" is usually ...

scientists need to stick to science and stop trying to think of themselves as philosophers. Usually, it seems to me, their grounds for doing so rest o...

Not every language expresses the idea of 'it's raining" intransitively the same way English does, as at least @"Hanover" has also pointed out. For exa...

I think you're confusing hedonism with utilitarianism. Hedonism is the belief that I am morally justified pursuing any activity that gives me pleasure...

That might potentially change things, but as an empirical reality it is not, of course, the case with anyone that they get to make that call. Even if ...

What about the argument that since you are not responsible for making your life, it is not moral for you to destroy it. I think this gets made in prio...

It seems to me that you can justify the "exploitation" of animals on utilitarian grounds. While the way animals are treated as commodities does produc...

You haven't really identified 3 distinct things. You've only identified one thing, the number 3, and the fact that "2+1" is identical to it, or just a...

I'm not convinced that's the case. Perhaps some of the issue is that the formalized LNC, -(p & -p), doesn't have anything explicit to say about proper...