Andrew4Handel

I went to a philosophy meet up and we were discussing Artificial intelligence and I was asking how A.I. could make moral judgements and similar decisi...

What don't you understand here? Are you saying that there is no notion of appropriate mental states? Mental states that might be challenged would incl...

I like the sound of this and I'll look into it thanks. The extremes seem like popular places. I am agnostic about a lot of things but I don't feel the...

What I don't understand is how people can claim people are going to hell but not be (drastically) emotionally affected by this thought. It makes me qu...

Yes. I feel the analysis of emotions has been confusing and lacking in definitions. There is increasing evidence that emotions are necessary for ratio...

Fight or flight response is a widely cited paradigm. Animals seem to function under stress and they have shown that animals in captivity can be no mor...

I don't think my therapist wants to engage in a philosophical discussion about the nature of emotions and she tries to stop me going down this type of...

You could just eliminate all negative emotions (I am not opposed to that). The problem is however that emotions seem to tell us what is likely to be r...

I very likely have Aspergers and that is associated with worrying and catastrophizing and fixating etc. (Awaiting assessment but score highly and have...

I think science is explaining and theorising about the world not describing it. We don't need a description for what is already a vivid experience. I ...

I am saying that the scenario is both implausible and impossible. The implausibility comes from the violation of laws of entropy by this incredibly im...

I don't think the Mary's room argument ascertains that there are non physical facts because I think it is based on an incoherent view of language and ...

Here is an analogy to part of the problem. Imagine I said to someone "I look just Like my brother" and the person wanted to know what "Like" meant. I ...

I disagree. I said something similar in my counterfactuals thread. The more implausible a scenario gets the further it is removed from reality and the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman "Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, near...

I have my own thought experiment that is akin to Searles Chinese room idea but with no extravagant elements. I ask people to imagine a box with a tria...

I don't agree that the new skills type argument resolves the issue at all, personally. I don't think the physics theory of colour (wave length etc) an...

I don't see how mental states in two different people can be identical because they are in different minds, bodies and in different places. The point ...

I don't see how God can be considered to care about life and children considering he lets children live in poverty, warzones and starve to death every...

I think there is a difference between individual actions and policies that devalue life and creating a weapon which you know will obliterate thousands...

The person I was arguing with was trying to defend science and technology from criticism by claiming there was a need to develop the weapons. The topi...

They could deliver no aid at all. How much aid do you want them to deliver? It is actual probably fairer trading with these countries that would help ...

It might be psychologically possible to launch a nuclear missile because of the distance between the button pusher and the victims. Also most of the d...

I was recently, briefly discussing why nuclear weapons were created in the first place. Someone said Jewish scientists helped create them because of t...

The West provides a lot of aid to poor countries. North Korea recieves a lot of Aid. But the Aid can be exploited and misdirected. Aid Agencies left N...

Communist regimes have killed millions upon millions of people without outside intervention, from Stalin's purges and deliberate famines, to Mao's sim...

Killing in self defence seems less deliberate than a pre-emptive strike. You are not seeking primarily to kill but to defend yourself. However the col...

There are billions of human beings alive. How many of them are having similar experiences? What is so radically different about your child's experienc...

I can imagine the act of heterosexual sex but not the lust and intense desire motivating it. I don't think imagining someone having sex or feeling lus...

Yhumans are only humans, with a better quality of life. They are a distinct possibility and there are yhumans in this sense here. You are resisting th...

How do you know yhumans don't exist? The universe is immensely vast. You seem to be fatalistic about this being the only possible configuration of lif...

If someone offers you either 1 million dollars or 2 Million dollars would you turn down the latter because the first was sufficient? I don't think hav...

Most of you seem to be advocating the premise that new facts should not alter your decisions. There is strong evidence that people are influenced by t...

The point I made is that the people on the other planet live for much, much longer and have much better lives in a way that is not obtainable here. If...

I didn't argue that. I asked how you could justify creating a poorer quality life. There are separate arguments easily made about why this world is ba...

I am definitely one hundred percent antinatalist and I think it is always wrong and unjustifiable to have children. I want to understand why people wo...

One area which is a puzzle to me is sexuality. I cannot imagine what it is like to be heterosexual. I appreciate women and can tell when a woman is at...

I have always been strongly of the opinion that mental illness can and probably is largely caused by society and parents. But I don't think that makes...

What I am trying to understand is how on e can be morally consistent. I think morality is hard to justify for a variety of reasons including the lack ...

I am asking, would you have children on this planet, knowing that there are a form of humans with a much better lifestyle with no suffering. Would you...

You didn't hurt my feelings. I illustrated that comment because it shows how people can use a term without knowing what it refers to and hence mischar...

But if in my scenario there is a perfect world somewhere else in the universe can we justify creating life here? It seems to me that there is no justi...

The mean problem I see is that creating someone can lead to them experiencing great harm which can be avoided by not creating them. So when you create...

I have no problem in forming images in my mind. For instance I am now imagining a large purple elephant with a banana in its trunk flying through the ...

That is simply not true. There is no reason why someone couldn't attach a word to a private sensation especially when it is very vivid to them. How di...

Yes but the problem is that some experiences are public (have an external referent) and some are private so that the words referring to our mental sta...

I can't tell you what words were on the flyer because I can't remember as it was over a decade ago. Is your question how can words about subjective me...

I came across the word social anxiety on a poster in the central library. Below the words Social Anxiety Support Group was a description of the sympto...

The Churchland's scheme of replacing words like anger with Adrenalin etc is obviously misguided to me. Changing the word you use to refer to a mental ...

When I was unconscious under general anesthetic I had no experiences and there was nothing it was like.There was no way I could know anything in that ...