Echarmion

Causal chains are infinite, they cannot be completed without arbitrarily defining starting points. Which is why the human minds always ultimately attr...

I am just going to point out how funny it is that you criticise me for being "superficial" while your position is that anything beyond the superficial...

But that Idealism is "bizarre" is entirely your opinion. Perhaps it's worth pointing out the reason a lot of philosophy starting from the Renaissance ...

Yeah, well, more than 15 pages of debate are indicative of how uncontroversial your position is. But post-human rocks are not simple and easily unders...

I did not mean to imply that an idealist cannot imagine realist scenarios. What I wanted to point out is this: you're constructing thought experiments...

Illusions such as optical illusions are theories about the world that conflict with other observations, and are therefore inconsistent (have poor pred...

No. You are making, to use your own words, bare assertions. And I say there aren't. What now? Are we done? Sigh. If rocks are what you think rocks are...

For a statement to have a truth value, there needs to be a criterion to determine truth from falsehood, correct? It follows that we can only make true...

The argument has already been made. Until you put in some effort to actually understand it, you'll get nothing else from me. Or maybe the problem is t...

You're just wrong, full stop. Then, by definition, the majority of observers are mistaken about rocks, because that's what the word "illusion" means. ...

No, you have not. Solid, mineral, Earth. All terms that refer to observations. A rock is never not a rock. No, in that case you are under an illusion....

Given that a "rock" is defined by the way it looks like, feels like, sounds like etc. how is anyone supposed to talk about rocks? Can you provide us w...

Isn't it sufficient to observe (heh) that we have no criterion to judge the objectivity of an experience? Any such criterion would run into the proble...

But this decision is always reversible. There is no enforcement of the authority that you don't do yourself. This doesn't seem to change the fact that...

I don't see how you could conclude that a work is evil/inappropriate based solely on the source of that work without committing what amounts to a gene...

A schedule is not an external authority though. But even if we go with the AI example: if the AI functions like you programmed it to do, how is that r...

The standard arguments on how we do not have any way to establish the objectivity of our experience. But the choice of bread is either based on reason...

But since the authority is derived from your own authority, doesn't that mean that it's your will that has authority? And if it's your will that has a...

There aren't any rocks, and there have never been any rocks, outside of human minds. The history of rocks exists only in human minds, as a useful tool...

And what are the required circumstances for that to happen?

Is freedom to do things an actual, a potential or merely a theoretical ability? And do all abilities count equally towards freedom, like the ability t...

Good question. There are varying forms of freedom. There is the core impression of being an actor. There is the feeling of being free in practice. Is ...

And how does that prevent the police from targeting people wielding these guns?

I think the issue is very interesting, but the specific questions asked are impossible to answer. First of all it's not possible to know the configura...

I think they're trying to figure out whether freedom of will is an illusion, that really they could not have choosen any other option.

The issue is that making the question of the ontological reality of free will one of determinism vs. Indeterminism seems ill conceived to me. I am a c...

Well, I know perfectly well what freedom of will is as a psychological fact. What I don't know is how to go from the experience of being a free actor ...

Mostly just to avoid a semantic debate on the definition of ontological freedom. What is ontological freedom, really? Is it ontological indeterminaten...

I don't know how ontological indeterminateness is supposed to get us to a meaningful concept of freedom. How does such indeterminateness make the brai...

Ok, had a bit of tunnel vision there, sorry. I was arguing specifically against the notion that a free will requires "uncaused decisions". I am fine w...

The outcomes are phenomenally random. Whether or not it makes sense to refer to the operation of the RNG as a "decision" is a different and mostly sem...

You can randomize individual decisions, but aren't you just deciding to let the RNG decide? After all that you use a RNG for some decisions is part of...

This seems to steer very close to a purely semantic discussion. Are purely private moral rules actually moral, or rules? Depends on your definitions. ...

Are you making a general statement about belief in things and things in and of themselves or do you want to say that the idea or concept of God, speci...

I have been considering making a thread on that particular (mis-)use of mathematics that seems to be popular currently. Your post eloquently puts into...

I am aware of the reasoning behind the "fine tuning" argument. But math is not magic. It cannot generate information out of thin air. We have no idea ...

This is, in and of itself, merely a claim. Would you care to sketch the actual argument?

This is just repeating what you already said. Why does the source need a source itself?

Perhaps their definition of matter was not the current, physical interpretation of the term? Kant explicitly disagreed with Hume. I find Kant more con...

I don't think your conclusion from 2 is valid. B would take the form "This is an ought statement" and that is an "is" statement. For the same reason a...

I do not see how this follows. Why would objective reality need to be "sourced" by anything?

People experienced and studied matter and energy before Einstein. That spacetime can be better conceptualized as a non-euclidean space doesn't change ...

That would be counting indefinitely. Counting to infinity implies that you actually arrive at infinity.

On noumena, or objective reality. We don't know what exactly Noumena are. How are matter and energy not perceptual objects?

An interesting point. But it seems to me that there are areas where reason does require obedience. It can be reasonable to set up an authority. It can...

How do we know all this apparent focus on observation is not just our human pattern-matching software imagining things? It's easy to get carried away ...

You're misunderstanding that space and time are the output, not the input of that process. That is to say matter and energy are what you get after the...

I think this is a misunderstanding. The transcendental characteristics are imposed by the human mind, they are not immanent characteristics. Human min...

You asked me for my honest thoughts. I am not going to prove to you that I am right. You can consider what I said or you don't. Cursiously, though, yo...

This is not true for all transgender people though, there are those who feel like they're a genuine mix. There is also of course an interplay between ...