Pantagruel

The gist was, if you are making a normative choice, it seems more reasonable to opt for an optimistic versus a pessimistic norm. That the notion of a ...

Do you think realism constitutes a normative position? I guess pragmatism might fit?

Aha! A dispute!

I cannot be mistaken about the fact that I am thinking now.

Cogito ergo sum doesn't say thinking is the cause of existence, only evidence of it, qua certainty.

My experiences are real. My experience of my physical form is real. My experience is inclusive of everything I am. I'm an advocate of the embodied/emb...

I wouldn't know, that wasn't at issue.

I'm sorry, says who? I am something other than my experiences? Fancy that.

This doesn't explain to me how something exists and does not exist. You are talking about whether a concept is known or unknown, not whether it exists...

Dewey also applied this principle to the means-end issue. Utilitarianism presumes that certain ends can be imposed on contexts, wherein means can then...

What things would those be?

If they are inside a mind then they do....

I don't see human beings as being toto caelo different from other creatures in this respect (or many other respects, for that matter). What we call "m...

I'm in the same boat when it comes to your topic.... Just because one doesn't have a moral theory doesn't preclude one from acting morally. Things may...

Fresh air and clean water are good.

Steinbeck is brilliant. :up:

Look at Karl Popper's concept of the "metaphysical research programme". Whereby legitimate metaphysical theories can be used to "steer" scientific res...

One of my all time favourites opens the Discourse: Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself ...

I suggest you read his Meditations. It is an interesting topic to debate, but right now we are really only discussing what his opinions actually were,...

Hygienics of your example aside, Descartes' conception of doubt is as radical as it gets. Radical metaphysical doubt was how our professor characteriz...

I don't thing there is any doubt that Descartes did not feel he was indulging in "faux doubt".....

Right, which is the cogito....I know you are saying my experience is something as well. To me, it is a tautology, because you are just calling the cog...

Joseph Sirgy wrote an interesting book (called Self-congruity: Toward a theory of personality and cybernetics) which evaluates how the self-concept is...

"my reality" can't legitimately be inferred to be anything extra to what is certainly revealed by cogito ergo sum. A modern interpretation is often ge...

The individual-centric bias definitely limits our ability to think in collective-systemic terms. It is one of the great challenges of systems philosop...

Dewey remarks on the schism between the practical and moral interpretations of action. He says that the whole enterprise of classifying something as "...

Talcott Parsons - The Structure of Social Action, Volume I

I think the essence of systems thinking is that things do not boss each other around so much as they exhibit robust patterns of interconnectedness in ...

It seems to me impossible that while you are conscious of beauty you are unaware of beauty. Your approach is to suggest that you have an abstract know...

I think the whole concept of attention fits perfectly with the notion that there are degrees of awareness and consciousness. It seems that attention c...

Not to split hairs, but you can't simultaneously be conscious and unaware of the same thing. You can be conscious of some things and unaware of other ...

As I just responded to Mww, I'm of the opinion that consciousness and awareness are the same.

I personally do think awareness and consciousness are synonymous. We are in the arena of definition now, of course.

I think that there is a correspondence. It isn't adventitious that consciousness emerges along with the complexification of the central nervous system...

What is consciousness if not its content?

This is trivially not true even from an empirical perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_level_of_consciousness

What are your secondary sources? :rofl:

There is an experiment with a cat wherein it is presented with a certain atypical (for the cat) sound that is within its range of hearing. Measurement...

Most change/growth processes exhibit a rapid initial phase followed by a "decreasing gains" phase. Imagine if you had gone to work in a factory at 18,...

Are you "more conscious" now than when you were a child? I know I am. Consciousness is certainly a spectrum.

I think that my core principles should be consistent with each other and with the body of my thought as a whole. I don't attempt to enforce that from ...

Any system which stores energy essentially "violates" the second law of thermodynamics. However this is a "system local" violation. The system as a wh...

So, if a tree falls on me, and I think "I was just hit by a tree," how does my justification (that I was hit by a tree) require me to make an inferenc...

No limit. Results get sent to the wrong people. Some people conspire to steal personal health information to sell it. Everything in between. People sn...

There is an ever-increasing escalation of the importance of protecting privacy, which is reflected in evolving regulations surrounding the collection,...

Capital: Volume III

I'm a privacy officer in the medical field and privacy law is far from simple, I can assure you. Lawsuits there are aplenty.

Sybil: the Two Nations, by Benjamin Disraeli, the original novel of Victorian class struggle. Sartor Resartus was a fantastic read, I'd highly recomme...

I think the systems theoretic answer would be that it does not require a solution. It is only a paradox if you attempt to enforce either a bottom-up o...

Actually it is, that's why they use the equals sign. It's the entire essence of calculus.