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Isaac

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I'll do my best. 1. Beliefs are not propositions. Beliefs are states of mind equivalent to a tendency to act as if... As such it is a) not possible to...
November 12, 2020 at 12:55
That's fine, but then all you've got is the intent behind the expression, but we're talking about ontological commitments here. "Harry Potter" is used...
November 12, 2020 at 10:27
How would you do that when the sensory input resulting from that detail fired the relevant neurons many minutes ago? How can you 'notice' the detail a...
November 12, 2020 at 10:20
I'm not sure what your ability to imagine that something might be the case has to do with a discussion about whether something is in fact the case. Ho...
November 11, 2020 at 08:25
Because it's important that you specify. Imagine we we're arguing about the nature of 'true believers', back and forth for pages, only to find out tha...
November 11, 2020 at 08:04
I really don't know what to say. Your claim is that X is associated with Y, I show and example of X without Y and you say it's irrelevant. I don't kno...
November 11, 2020 at 07:38
By 'an experience' I assumed Yuan meant some conscious awareness of mental states, otherwise I've no idea what you mean by the term. No. I could imagi...
November 10, 2020 at 08:39
Why not? It's really super useful to assent to things you don't believe. It greases the wheels of social interaction, it bonds social groups, it might...
November 10, 2020 at 07:54
No we haven't. Activation of Brodmann's area precedes signals being sent to the working memory. You literally start forming the word 'red' in response...
November 10, 2020 at 07:27
None of those things would be properties of mental processes, they might at best be categories of mental processes, as in "this particular set neural ...
November 09, 2020 at 18:34
Just because we can see what someone means by identifying something, doesn't mean it exists. I can understand the idea of an ordinary zombie animated ...
November 09, 2020 at 18:24
Why not?
November 09, 2020 at 16:52
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Neither I nor Dennett are arguing that all things are the same as all other things, so you being ...
November 09, 2020 at 16:51
And one last thing. Global vaccine take-up hovers around the 80% mark with well-trusted, widely distributed vaccines whose patents have either run out...
November 09, 2020 at 14:00
Oh, and also...we already have a way of slowing the spread of coronavirus. Test, trace, isolate, mask, hand-wash. It's nothing short of criminal that ...
November 09, 2020 at 13:46
I'm not saying vaccines don't work, but seriously...if this happened in any other field we'd be up in arms - oil industry, pestcides, arms sales, bank...
November 09, 2020 at 13:37
According to the industry with hundreds of proven (and thousands of suspected) cases of lying about the results of its trials, lying about the procedu...
November 09, 2020 at 13:19
I presume you're referring to I don't really agree or disagree here. I think the concept is too poorly defined. If by 'reality of conscious experience...
November 09, 2020 at 13:09
...and this is supposed to be good news? Has the narrative so easily been rewritten? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/pfizer-flynn-pha...
November 09, 2020 at 12:51
No. Whilst I agree with Dennett about rejecting the purported properties of qualia, I also reject that there is such a thing as the 'redness' of a flo...
November 09, 2020 at 08:56
Yes, that might be better, but I would say that a word with no proper referent has no consistent meaning (use) and so it's involvement in technical fi...
November 09, 2020 at 08:33
Cool. I have no objection to that. I ask because the majority view from 'hard problemers' seems to be that Dennett is somehow 'not even addressing the...
November 09, 2020 at 08:22
How does logic tell us what sets the things we label belong to? Are you saying that Hesperus and Phosphorus are two different things, despite both bei...
November 09, 2020 at 08:18
Funnily enough, I spent a good 15 years of my academic career studying the differences between "tendencies to act as if..." and "propositions one woul...
November 09, 2020 at 08:13
Yes, I don't think your position was unclear the first time so a fourth or fifth repetition isn't helping. What I was asking was, if the separateness ...
November 08, 2020 at 22:50
...which is begging the question already. As I said earlier, the debate is about these assumptions, discussion is pointless if you're going to start f...
November 08, 2020 at 21:20
Tiffany books. Absolute classics.
November 08, 2020 at 20:01
If the sort of answer which is appropriate for noses is also appropriate for consciousness, then we've made loads of progress. We've got some really g...
November 08, 2020 at 18:45
I've asked this on another thread, but for you, what would an answer to this question look like?. If I ask "why do we have noses" an evolutionary, or ...
November 08, 2020 at 17:16
This doesn't make sense. How can the mere fact that we're doubting prove we're having an experience with 'being a p-zombie' as the alternative? If the...
November 08, 2020 at 17:10
Ha! A much simpler refutation than mine.
November 08, 2020 at 10:45
Yep. That's exactly the point I'm making to @"Pfhorrest".
November 08, 2020 at 10:23
Just noticed this edit. Interesting. Personally, I think it fails on the third criteria - 'meaning'. I think Dennett's account here shows that the ter...
November 08, 2020 at 10:21
Well, you needn't use infinite regress as logic is a formal language and so self-reference can be dealt with using Tarskian meta-languages, but that's...
November 08, 2020 at 09:17
He's talking about the word itself. The word exists. I suppose on way to put it if you want to maintain that all words we use must, by that use, have ...
November 08, 2020 at 08:41
Like the belief in the truth-preserving property of logic? Right, so that at least entails a judgement, as I said earlier, that a significant number o...
November 07, 2020 at 10:40
There's an excellent paper on this. Obviously Hacker's https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/is-there-anything-it-is-like-to-be-a...
November 07, 2020 at 08:50
Yes, to an extent. If we can (in theory) agree intersubjectively on the sources of sensory inputs, and on the responses to those sensory input, then w...
November 07, 2020 at 08:31
No, that's just the first matter to be eliminated in 8. He then goes on to eliminate matters relating to current qualia, the sipping of the coffee rig...
November 07, 2020 at 08:21
Not on my reading of it it isn't. Reformed epistemology is just saying that belief in God might be a basic immutable belief (like we've already agreed...
November 07, 2020 at 08:03
I meant that if science could modify it such as to give us the wiring in response to sonar, that the bat would have developed over it's lifetime. I'm ...
November 06, 2020 at 08:25
No, the intuition pumps 8-12 show that we cannot access these 'qualia'. If we could, then we'd be able to tell which pathway had bee tampered with. As...
November 06, 2020 at 08:22
This begs the question. Science only "can't" tell us that if you assume your conclusion that such sensations are private and intrinsic. If you don't, ...
November 06, 2020 at 08:20
Yes. I should have written sensory input. Sorry - I've edited back, so thanks for that. Any reaction that indicates we've had some sensory input, coul...
November 06, 2020 at 08:18
Yes. That's what they're theorised to be in order to distinguish us from wine-tasting machines. But theorised that way, they can't also be private, in...
November 06, 2020 at 08:15
Yeah, I'd be tempted to agree with you here on a pragmatic level. But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. As you say, the...
November 06, 2020 at 08:13
That's the point of the though experiments. The only thing we can say we end up with is a relation between the sources of sensation and the response, ...
November 06, 2020 at 08:04
In order to advocate it you must at least have judged that there exist people which do not follow this method, otherwise it's like advocating breathin...
November 06, 2020 at 08:01
The first section of the article does seem to cause a lot of confusion, maybe Dennett could have been clearer. What he does in intuition pumps one to ...
November 06, 2020 at 07:50
I never said they did. You asked about whether they provided knowledge of out puts. They do. This seems a common theme of misunderstanding, also in @"...
November 06, 2020 at 07:26