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Isaac

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Why wouldn't they? I can think of several reasons why they would... They might like the company - unpredictable, quirky, and irrational as we are - or...
April 09, 2021 at 10:57
Nope. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-learning-software-learns-to-write-learning-software/
April 09, 2021 at 09:31
Yeah. I agree that deterring crime doesn't at all capture the objectives of criminal law. My concern (clearly very badly expressed) was with a style o...
April 09, 2021 at 09:25
Then why on earth did you bring it up as a counter-example to the claim/query... I've still yet to pin down who you're arguing against here. Now you'r...
April 09, 2021 at 08:59
That's what I had in mind, yes. Like if one person wanted two antagonists to stop fighting so they don't wake their sleeping baby and another just 'ca...
April 09, 2021 at 06:04
Say, for example, that laws were largely devices for those in power to manage their estates (I'm not saying that's all they are, just using it as an e...
April 08, 2021 at 17:15
Wouldn't that just be self-fulfilling anyway. If some group were not able to enforce some proscription on behaviour then by definition they wouldn't b...
April 08, 2021 at 16:15
But that's not how laws are made. Laws are drawn up by civil servants to the specification of politicians who've (usually) been mandated to do so by a...
April 08, 2021 at 13:41
Yes, indeed. @"Pfhorrest"'s system is like fitting a line to series of data points (the hedonic affects of each person in each circumstance). It relie...
April 08, 2021 at 13:35
How then? By which I mean that if law is the reinforcement of morality, what is the mechanism by which that connection is made?
April 08, 2021 at 08:40
What I'm struggling to understand here is how you're forming an argument that hedonism is the only alternative to "...because X said so", yet also arg...
April 08, 2021 at 08:20
Now that's an interesting difference. I was speculating that one could capture the extensional features of retributive justice in a sufficiently wide ...
April 07, 2021 at 14:20
Oops! My apologies for my sloppy spell-checking in that case.
April 06, 2021 at 18:17
How would that repair the damage? Large canopy trees take hundreds of years to grow so the ecosystem would certainly not be 'repaired' within one gene...
April 06, 2021 at 17:46
... confusing prevalence with risk.
April 06, 2021 at 17:29
Really? You think we could repair the damage we've done to an ecosystem like the rainforest in less than one generation? I don't think you've quite gr...
April 06, 2021 at 17:02
I understand what you're saying, but the manner in which I meant it is the manner in which your first proposition is undermined by your second. You sa...
April 06, 2021 at 16:48
I think you might be getting the wrong impression of what I meant here. I don't mean the likes of Lane-Craig or some such arguing the rationality of g...
April 06, 2021 at 16:31
Well, there's socialism... Seriously. There are, unarguably, a number of factors which help prevent the impact and spread of this, and future, pandemi...
April 06, 2021 at 14:03
The point is that if, for whatever reason, we're needed to do the replanting, we'll also be needed to do the tending. You can't invoke a self-sustaini...
April 06, 2021 at 08:04
It literally makes it a tool for extracting money from the population. That may or may not be a bad thing depending on whether that tool happens to be...
April 06, 2021 at 07:52
Well, since religious people accept their ethics on faith, not rational argument, I can't understand why you would put such effort into it. Your argum...
April 06, 2021 at 07:23
I don't know what you might mean by 'false equivalence'. Really? This is a highly technical subject and the best you can do is a Penn and Teller YouTu...
April 06, 2021 at 06:35
I meant trial data. As if that wasn't obvious... Right. I've given the data I have in previous threads from reputable journals like the BMJ and STAT. ...
April 06, 2021 at 05:52
What statistical approach would that be, and what trail data are you comparing it to?
April 05, 2021 at 20:20
Absolutely. Being anti-vax is a position that vaccination is never the solution in any circumstances . That's not the same as saying that vaccination ...
April 05, 2021 at 18:26
As yet, yes, but I live deep in a rural backwater, the decision is a different one for me than for others. I'm not particularly concerned about short-...
April 05, 2021 at 18:19
Well then why do we need to plant them? They do that themselves too you know.
April 05, 2021 at 17:21
Who, then, will tend the trees?
April 05, 2021 at 17:12
Yeah. All that @"schopenhauer1"'s argument ever seems to boil down to is that being born is a terribly bad thing for one to have happen to them - whet...
April 05, 2021 at 17:11
It's not a 'view', it's in black and white in the articles of association for the company. They are incorporated to make money for their shareholders....
April 05, 2021 at 16:52
To continue improving the fate of those who remain after your death through projects that take longer than one generation to complete.
April 05, 2021 at 16:17
Are there many other words in the English language you feel obliged to define?
April 05, 2021 at 16:08
Did the poll control for confounding factors like confidence, trust, or question misinterpretation? Did you check before concluding that it represente...
April 05, 2021 at 15:57
But of course it does, because 'we' don't discover anything, individual people do. So absolutely any method which involves applying some fact about ho...
April 05, 2021 at 11:01
It's not an adventure if we've all been there before, it's just proselytising. You pronounce things that seem to you to be the case to be "self-eviden...
April 01, 2021 at 18:30
Trouble is what's common is possibly only that they produce the same cognitive function. Other than that... The problem with any neuronal representati...
March 27, 2021 at 13:27
Just a fly-by post this, not intending to join the discussion, but you might find this paper interesting in this regard. It's not so much about brain ...
March 27, 2021 at 07:32
No, because if the whiskey were called 'Three Barrels' and I asked for 'Two Barrels', I would not be given two thirds of a whiskey, I'd just be given ...
March 17, 2021 at 19:40
May I? "Would you care for another glass of 'Two Barrels'*?" *it's a brand of Whiskey.
March 17, 2021 at 14:36
The concept 'could have done otherwise' means something different depending on whether one has a foundation of indeterminism or not, and if not whethe...
March 17, 2021 at 14:26
Leaving a fundamental flaw unresolved and pushing on with the detailed implications nonetheless seems rather like ignoring a gap in one's foundations ...
March 17, 2021 at 14:00
Backwards? How so?
March 17, 2021 at 13:51
Right. But that's the meta-ethics bit. So when you say... What you actually mean is just that you don't agree with those meta-ethical positions. After...
March 17, 2021 at 11:10
Give us an example then. What philosophical approach denies that you can find out what feels bad for others by putting yourself in their shoes?
March 17, 2021 at 08:05
Fixed it.
March 17, 2021 at 08:00
That's just a repeat of the same assertion. Why is it logically impossible for you to have another's experiences? Well no, my definition of 'your brai...
March 17, 2021 at 07:59
True to a point, but not entirely. I mean simple lesion studies can isolate broad parts of the brain associated with those things. Remove a section of...
March 17, 2021 at 07:40
Why not? What's evolution got to do with the judgement of sensations? Evolution requires that appropriate behaviours are produced in response to envir...
March 17, 2021 at 07:37
That is to have already lumped them.
March 15, 2021 at 07:59