hypericin

I just wanted to highlight this again. With greater voting power comes greater responsibility. Particularly if you choose to give a negative vote, we ...

:up: Unfortunately Amity is taking a break from the site. Her contributions will indeed be missed.

This example doesn't work. The "ought" isn't derived from the is, it is an implicit part of the statement itself.

To me love is the identification of the self in the other. In true, reciprocal love, a kind of shared, communal creature is born, not existing solely ...

Especially since it is explicable why such an illusion might arise and persist. Personhood is embedded in language, with such words as "I", "you", "pe...

Hey Javi! Thanks for pointing out the definition, actually. I'm a computer guy, and I've always presumed the computing definition was the predominant ...

There is only one solution: the acknowledgement that personal Identity is a concept, a heuristic, not an objective feature of reality.

This is easily dismissed. The question is no different than any other. What is meant by "poodle"? What do you mean by "what is meant by poodle"? Each ...

This one seems trivial. There are two senses of "knowing what you are looking for", which you might label the "question" sense and "answer" sense. Que...

Sorry for the late reply. If you are still interested: I don't want to deny that the kind of holistic analysis you suggest is wrong, or can't be done,...

I would be the last person to doubt that, or to speak about "eternal relations" when discussing a language. The signs and rules of a language are utte...

Moreover, not every statement is true or false. Commands are the obvious example. Opinions, "coffee tastes good", another. But I think statements of p...

MLK's life had meaning to people. But to call a life a "sign" takes too much license with the word. From Merriam-Webster: Signs are just one thing tha...

It was prompted by another thread: there is no meaning of life There are a few common and contradictory kinds of responses to this sort of question. T...

I feel correlation is close, but it is missing something. Clearly correlation itself is not enough. The word "peanut" correlates with the word "butter...

A look and poem, I suppose so, yes. An action? Unless it is an act of communication, it wouldn't seem so. The same for a life, I don't see how a human...

The problem is that people use the word otherwise. Quite a lot of incompetent language users, if you are right. So for instance, is Victor Frankl's "M...

How do you account for something like a stop sign? If a foreigner asks you what it means, and you say, it is a spiritual recommendation to stop, medit...

I agree, a look, and action, a poem, a life may contain meaning, not just signs. I am arguing that meaning is to that which conveys it as the signifie...

I think it is something like this. Not signs and signifiers themselves, but the relationship between signs and signifiers: X points to Y, but Y does n...

Except, we have both been arguing, convincingly I believe, that it is not a moral issue, prohibition has no moral basis. Whether or not the state does...

I do not argue against regulation, but rather prohibition.

I think this is somewhat true now, but not true when attitudes against drug users hardened. What about my other points?

I think there are several reasons: There is a general contempt for drug users, especially among the upper class, in part because primarily the lower c...

You misread, I said that this was the mistake OP was making.

I would suggest that his formula is "@niki wonoto means nothing", and that the form of meaning is X means Y. The delusion that meaning, if it is to be...

Today I am walking around a local lake. This seems to be an objectively meaningless activity, after all I end up where I started. Yet the moments of t...

Yes, I think so. My point is that the act of choosing in itself is not enough. What is chosen must stand in some "meaningful" relationship to oneself,...

Almost certainly they are just depressed.

They lack the conceptual capacity. Only man is so blessed and cursed, afawk, with the ability to add concepts onto what is.

i'm not sure if one's life meaning can necessarily be chosen. Do we really have that much agency? Many meanings we might choose will turn out to be fa...

Regarding the positioning I doubt that is considered. Remember that even closely related species can have very different numbers of chromosomes, let a...

But what is similar between us and bananas (60% similarity) is not physiology but basic cellular machinery and communication. Are there a lot of genet...

I don't think it is. Our genetic code isn't a product of mere chance, more like a directed stochastic process. It might be that the basic cellular mac...

A 30% genetic difference is HUGE. No mammal is so genetically remote from humans. This number is closer to the difference between humans and reptiles....

Sounds pretty unaesthetic to me. If it comes to that I might prefer MWI.

:chin: :chin: :chin: It's the right question, and a doozy... I'll have to get back to you on that one!

So, Alice and Bob are 11 and 10 light seconds away respectively from a dual photon emission. Charles is at the emission site, and Dave is travelling a...

Yes. I retract my amendment, my theory as originally stated stands: the virtual worlds collapse immediately. I think the word "causality" is misused w...

:chin: Lemme think about it. Feel free to elaborate if you like, you've got a real knack for it, I love your lucid explanations.

In that case, I hereby modify my "theory", the virtual world collapsing also happens at the speed of causality (aka light?) :P This means that MW and ...

Interesting. Does MW "solve" this somehow?

:up: I'm not sure. Intuitively it might seem so, but this is a domain that is far far away from that where our intuitions were formed. God may or may ...

If it is Copenhagen, does this slant make it any more agreeable to you?

Cool, I don't know either if this meaningfully diverges from Copenhagen or not.

I think so, yes.

When particles s,t are emitted, there are infinite virtual worlds where s,t can have any allowable spin. But crucially, these are the same virtual wor...

To me MW is only palatable if the "worlds" are virtual, not actual. The universe consists of a finite set of resolved state and an infinite, virtual, ...

That is what it entails. What it means, in common use, is that two objects are physically adjacent, so that a surface of one is in contact with a surf...

I've appreciated your comments here, thanks for that. Frankly I feel like he is flailing without knowing what he is talking about.