RogueAI

This chain of logic is one of the reasons I'm not a materialist. Materialism leads to absurdities like: Pushing rocks around on an endless plain in so...

Well, let me put it this way: if you claim that people passing notes back and forth (in a certain way, I assume) will give rise to a conscious moment,...

People passing notes back and forth aren't going to create an instantiation of consciousness.

Yes, I think you're right about that. Panpsychism has been en vogue lately. Max Tegmark thinks the universe might be made of math, and that sounds ver...

It certainly seems to require SOME kind of substrate, in the materialist model of reality. Although I remember reading some scientist postulate a cons...

I think the bigger problem is explaining how a brain can process sense-data and produce a sense of awareness of our surroundings, whereas that same br...

"I'm not exactly sure, are you wondering now?" About every event having a cause? Yeah. If the event in question was the beginning of time and space......

Cosmology is going through a similar crisis. It seems that the universe might be unnatural, might be part of an infinite multiverse, and if that's the...

Are you sure about that?

You don't need a sense of wonderment to raise a scientific question. Military necessity does quite nicely.

Maybe. Maybe with more cognition, some of the stuff that stumps us may be answered. Although the problem would then be (from the point of view of the ...

They would be smarter?

Good post. I think because free will seems impossible in either a deterministic or indeterministic universe. Inwagen talks about this. But yet the int...

Yes. The ability to choose is impossible in a deterministic universe (see Inwagen's argument). I briefly talked about this. It's likely we evolved to ...

We had a functioning democracy before Gettier. Maybe consciousness will finally be figured out. Although, if it was going to be, it probably would hav...

What is important is if philosophy is meaningful to people. Plato, Socrates and Aristotle are meaningful to a lot of people. We still quote them, thou...

None of that is important. I think it is, because my degree's in it, but anyone else would be bored to tears. I've tried to explain the brilliance of ...

Maybe. I don't think anyone's done anything really important since Turing, and he wasn't even a philosopher. I think you'll see computation was the la...

I thought it was a rule that if infinite sets are countable, they're equal. No exceptions. Informative post!

Yes, you can restate principles and there's value in that, but all the foundational level work has been done.

I think everyone should have to take a couple of intro-level philo courses. My son is going into Computer Science, and he could care less about philos...

No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is. Are there any scien...

Where's the part on consciousness?

I brought up Inwagen because the person I was responding to wasn't getting what I was saying (I was making a point about choice being impossible in a ...

3.1 No Forking Paths Argument The No Forking Paths argument (van Inwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Ekstrom 2000) begins by appealing to the idea that whenev...

"And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined." These two sentences contradict each other. I'm going to just drop this part of the...

"How are there not options in a deterministic universe? Deep Blue chooses, yet everything is determined. What is the issue?" Circular reasoning. If De...

"Of course. You are determined to eat the apple But you still had the option between apple and pear." Not in a deterministic universe. How are there a...

I'm going to try and simplify my argument a little. Here's the argument: 1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of...

We're getting bogged down in semantics, but I'll address this: "There is an apple and a pear. Two choices. I choose the apple. The determinist says: t...

"Ok, but your OP doesn't talk about choices 'feely made'. It says merely that science requires that choices be made." No, I said science requires the ...

My point is an epistemological one: I'm not claiming good science isn't going on. I'm saying, how do we know that what we're doing is good science or ...

"But surely free will isn't merely the ability to 'make choices'. It surely turns instead on the nature of choice made: is the choice itself freely ch...

Suppose someone tells you your house is on fire. Let's call that evidence (A). Now you have to update your belief in the hypothesis "my house isn't on...

"IOW if one's evaluations are utterly determined they may not be based on what we think they are based on. We would also be compelled to think we are ...

How can you evaluate evidence if you can't freely determine whether it's good evidence or not? If you're simply compelled into believing a particular ...

"You are acting as though the lack of free will means no action can take place." No. In a deterministic universe, action still takes place.

Minimally, to say that an agent has free will is to say that the agent has the capacity to choose his or her course of action. https://www.iep.utm.edu...

Here's the argument: 1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence. 2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary con...

What about calling in bomb threats to schools? Should that be legal?

Government. Should there be laws regulating what adults can say to kids, or does anything go?

Should adults be allowed to say anything they want to children?

Do you think death threats/threats of physical violence/extortion should be legal?

Suppose we developed a machine that zaps your qualia away. You'll still function the same but just without any conscious experience. Would eliminative...

"I think the interesting question is: why is this taken seriously? Why is it considered a philosophical argument?" I think things like "consciousness ...

"Ask yourself this question - what does eliminative materialism eliminate? Unless you want to beat around the bush, the answer is one word: mind. The ...

Materialism's inability to explain how consciousness can arise from matter is catastrophic, imo. Every materialist explanation for consciousness I've ...

"It’s not illegal to yell fire in a crowded theatre. The principle in current first amendment theory is “immanent lawless action”." I notice you ignor...

Ah, but suppose there is something unique to our little sector of the galaxy which makes it the only habitable place for advanced life. In that case, ...

If you can't determine if the other person even exists, it's going to be hard to determine whether they're being honest or not.