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Isaac

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Well, I did use far too many negations in that paragraph. Let me try again. Let's take as our null hypothesis that value and insight (using the terms ...
September 13, 2019 at 18:04
To be honest, this is where the interest lies with this discussion. We have the OP dismissing theology as mere 'verbiage' but insisting that continent...
September 13, 2019 at 12:13
So dismissing an entire field as incoherent (not just as a personal opinion, but as a property of the field itself) is "peachy"? Do you not think any ...
September 13, 2019 at 11:42
So when Bertrand Russell, for example, said of Hegel... ...he was what? Wrong by virtue of being outvoted? No, this is exactly the view I'm arguing ag...
September 13, 2019 at 09:00
I'm asking you for that argument. You said "it is arguably because...", not "it is in my opinion because..." Your rhetoric suggests that there exists ...
September 13, 2019 at 07:33
By what argument are you supporting this 'arguable' assertion, then? As I said to Coben, if there is disagreement among epistemic peers as to the mean...
September 13, 2019 at 06:50
I think I might not have been clear enough (the initial comment was meant to be somewhat facetious, I didn't take the thread too seriously). The philo...
September 12, 2019 at 20:26
I was alluding to the tendency here to equate a dismissal of some quarters of philosophy with a failure to understand, rather than a legitimate decisi...
September 12, 2019 at 15:56
I'd count Hegel and Heidegger certainly, even Kant, to a degree. Yes, I've read some of their writing (mostly secondary analysis, though). Have I made...
September 12, 2019 at 06:53
It's because religion, idealism and continental philosophy are all easy to waffle on about for ages and sound cleverer than your less literate interlo...
September 11, 2019 at 07:20
We already allow such a thing in science by necessity. A scientist investigating pain must ask his patient about the pain they're feeling, he cannot m...
September 10, 2019 at 06:32
Yes, and we can. With the addition that we ask the experiencers what they just experienced and they report it to us. Which is exactly what happens in ...
September 09, 2019 at 08:21
But I maintain that they can see all this, in the same way as you can see the sun. When you look at the sun, you're not seeing it at all, you're seein...
September 09, 2019 at 07:26
By 'spooky' I mean non-physical, it's an expression I picked up from physicists talking about the way woo-merchants misuse quantum uncertainty as if i...
September 09, 2019 at 06:19
I can see difficulties too, so can almost all of neuroscience, I'm sure. The claim made here (which is the only one I'm arguing against) is that neuro...
September 09, 2019 at 06:14
Maybe, it's a long thread with a lot of transgressions. We were talking about defining consciousness, right? So that whole sub-thread came about becau...
September 09, 2019 at 06:08
OK, but none of that is 'spooky' stuff. Me being aware of the fact that my taste receptors have just started neural chain reaction is no less a sensor...
September 08, 2019 at 15:30
The only thing I've experienced is my life. I've just experienced eating an apple, which involved tastes, memories, me being aware that all that's goi...
September 08, 2019 at 12:42
"Useful"? - yes. But no one here was arguing about 'useful'. The claim was that neuroscience could not fully investigate consciousness, at all. Not th...
September 08, 2019 at 11:02
Furthermore, the expression in question was "will it give us any understanding at all of what it's like to be a conscious human being?" So presuming '...
September 06, 2019 at 17:16
Right. Which brings us back to the beginning of our conversation. My comments (which you responded to) were about the meaning of the word 'like'. The ...
September 06, 2019 at 16:47
Great, well, you've got the dictionary right there (literally the compendium of accomplished English use), so indulge my lack of linguistic accomplish...
September 06, 2019 at 16:36
Not according to the ECtHR... "Freedom of expression…is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as in...
September 06, 2019 at 16:03
Hard to get the drift of a lot of what you're saying I'm afraid, but I'll have a go. Yes, there must be something to distinguish, otherwise we'd have ...
September 06, 2019 at 15:01
Who said it was? Because it is a premise in a reasoned argument. People may agree with all the foundational premises of an argument but disagree with ...
September 05, 2019 at 17:36
As I've said before, I'm not interested in the least bit in your opinion. I'm interested in the solidity of my opinion. I'm using you (or others in th...
September 05, 2019 at 10:41
Firstly, I work on the presumption that being a normal human you share foundational stances on basic things that most humans do. As I said earlier, yo...
September 05, 2019 at 10:26
OK, we'll try it a fifth time. Normatives are determined by individuals on the basis of what they consider to be good and bad. We are having a discuss...
September 05, 2019 at 10:22
For the fourth time, just to be sure. If you don't share any foundational views about what is good or bad with your interlocutors, there is no point i...
September 05, 2019 at 10:20
It is a normative question, that's just the definition of normative. The fact that most people consider it to have no benefit impacts on the fruitfuln...
September 05, 2019 at 10:18
Again, as I mentioned above, there is little to no point in normative discussions without at least some shared foundational views about what constitut...
September 05, 2019 at 10:15
They don't. I never suggested they did. I said there little to no point in normative discussions without at least some shared foundational views of wh...
September 05, 2019 at 10:11
No, that is almost exactly what I'm saying, with the caveat that I think there are other ways of averaging heterogeneous opinion than simply majority,...
September 05, 2019 at 10:09
The question is whether hate speech "should" be allowed, which is a normative question. It would be stupid to approach it, on a public forum, as a rel...
September 05, 2019 at 10:03
That would make the word 'benefit' meaningless, and I don't, as a general rule, like defining words away. Anything which has survived thousands of yea...
September 05, 2019 at 09:55
And another for good measure. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00119 "we find that the proportion of discrimination that is targeted is associated with...
September 05, 2019 at 07:58
That people can distinguish it does not mean it is distinguished in reality (by which I mean all that is actually the case). People can distinguish un...
September 05, 2019 at 07:33
Firstly, this is a really weird way of putting it that makes me wary of continuing, but as I've not read many of your posts, I'll give you the benefit...
September 05, 2019 at 07:19
Because if they don't act, or continue to converse in any way as if they were on the moon with Chevy Chase, then it's unlikely that they believe that ...
September 04, 2019 at 12:49
Of course you can. If, after saying "I'm off down the pub for a drink" someone proceeds to walk towards the pub and orders a drink it's a pretty safe ...
September 04, 2019 at 12:13
I thought Chevy wasn't as funny in real life as I was expecting... ...and he keeps banging on about stars...
September 04, 2019 at 10:20
A sample of me saying... ... was what I asked for. Not a sample of me talking about the arguments being presented here. Ah, and we're back to the clas...
September 04, 2019 at 09:04
Of course they could, but the sun 'could' explode in the next three seconds, we 'could' all suddenly lose the ability to read... But we don't act as i...
September 04, 2019 at 07:46
What ideas would you be referring to here? Certainly in traditional hunter-gatherers, justice is variably treated as either definitional of the commun...
September 04, 2019 at 07:39
Simply that a thing must be identical to itself - but... In order for the proposition to not be a tautology, the thing referred to must be a specific ...
September 04, 2019 at 07:20
Where have I made such a statement? How so? This doesn't follow at all as far as I can see. Why would the communal agreement on terms make science imp...
September 04, 2019 at 07:05
I don't understand what either of these points have to do with the argument. You said "Until it's possible to cause identical observations with identi...
September 04, 2019 at 07:03
How are you concluding arationality? Rationality is a property of an argument, or a chain of thought, how is it a property of a notion? Things clearly...
September 03, 2019 at 17:16
Well, that's a great start. Which of those definitions did you mean when you said "will it give us any understanding at all of what it's like to be a ...
September 03, 2019 at 16:21
Then if you don't have the words to define it, how do you determine that the words neuroscience uses aren't it? What measure are you comparing potenti...
September 03, 2019 at 15:11