Banno

Intuition pump #3: the inverted spectrum. Meh. Undergrad speculation. Add Intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine. Qualia gain no traction here, eit...

Intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine. As a tool for convincing those who disagree, this strikes me as singularly useless. Dennett will say ther...

Intuition pump #1: watching you eat cauliflower. There is a way this cauliflower tastes to you right now. Well, no. the taste changes even as you eat ...

Philosophy and jigsaw puzzles... If it is a system, isn't it codified? But perhaps you could ask if philosophy must be systematic? If not, what would ...

What's the matter with materialism? Matter is stuff; it has volume and mass. It has location, and hence velocity and acceleration. There is another ty...

What? Do you mean that he reifies qualia? Treats them as if they were more concrete than theyare?

God, being imaginary, can be whatever one might imagine. That's nothing especially profound. Or useful.

This, from here: Not a bad argument for reading Hegel; but there's plenty of other stuff to read first.

turgid prose... And probably wrong in its supposition that language was first used to express mental states. It would have first been used to coordina...

In all seriousness, get out and do some volunteer work. More philosophically, Sartre's stare is the best solution to your quandary. Go for a walk thro...

(from Strawson's reply...) Strawson has surely made his point here; much as I dislike use of the term qualia, there is a difference between having a p...

...a signpost pointing up the philosophical garden path. Real as opposed to what? It's a real painting or coin as opposed to a forgery. It's a real po...

Yes, it is. A pain in a dream is still a pain. Your use of "know" is curious. Do you require a justified true belief in order to "know" you are in pai...

Interesting how Strawson writes by quotation. The Consciousness Deniers.

Then he is wrong, since an illusion of pain is indeed a pain.

After this thread I started reading Mary Midgley. An aspect of philosophy to which she drew attention is the error of excepting al; the pieces to fit ...

...a neat portrayal of what happens when one mixes language games.

:roll:

Hard determinism...? Cheers. You take care, now. Bye.

Even if a moral law were indisputably laid down by the good lord, it would remain open for people to choose to obey or not. So no, the choice is yours...

Here's the rub of the OP: belief in god accrues no virtue.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/463717

So a personal insult is an improvement on special pleading in your moral system. Nice, that. Shows its power.

What? Special Pleading "...but not when it hurts my position." ....moral principle can only be sourced from within as personal opinion, except for the...

Ah, thank you for the condescension. So '...the believer actually believes he will be held responsible for every decision...' - you only do the right ...

Yeah, that's really about you, I suspect.

Well... That sounds more like Davidson than Wittgenstein.

Nope. It just argues that anything you can talk about is, more or less by definition, not private.

No, he didn't. So there's your problem, right there.

Think of banning as a mute button. Stops the rabid rabbiting.

Ah... yes... I see... Thank you. You have expressed the essence of the issue.

It's more a coffee pot than a billycan. What's sad is that my devastatingly succinct reply, the one that elicited the meme, is lost to history. Tragic...

What does he mean by the rest of the quote, while you are at it. That's like being against motherhood. No one actually believes it, it's what folk say...

That was faster that I expected, but the outcome was clear from the outset.

Self-serving crap. Pews set out their method clearly. They know what they are doing.

Why isn't this equally true of the believer? They also have a choice, to believe or no. But in their case they pretend that they hand the responsibili...

What you miss in this analysis is that the religious person still has to choose. They are not in a different position to the non-religious in that reg...

This is not a good thing. Saying that your country's response to a different virus was poor is not an argument in favour of your government acting poo...

Oh , Tully, you missed the point. Can't you see the plasmoids clearly emblazoned in the guts of your cat etching?

You all havin' fun? Back to cats. Or rather, to the genes of Toxoplasma gondii. This little plasmid is responsible for the rise of civilisation, which...

But further, and this should bother anyone here who has read even a modicum of ethics, even if our behaviour is best explained by genetic imperatives,...

There are those - not us, of course - who when asked any question that is at all disconcerting, answer that it is the will of god. Their faith is such...

I have goldfish and chooks. The fish do fuck all. It would certainly be easier to buy eggs than to keep chickens. Girl has a pet lizard. I grow poppie...

Perhaps that my caring for a cat that is not a close genetic match is a sort of peacock's tail - showing off my caring and supportive nature in order ...

@"Kenosha Kid"... I'm not all that closely related to my cat, yet I feed it, even going out of my way to the pet shop to buy it a special diet recomme...

Most. Going to church can allow one to pretend one is not morally responsible. Belief in a religion is handing your own moral responsibility over to o...

Not me. Never heard of her.

So for you, and unfortunately for so many others, the choice is between god and relativism. As if the entire body of ethical thought never happened! A...

People believe being moral is about punishing the wicked? That would go along with the lack of education bit... Again, being taught that you will be p...

That's a lot of people. What I find interesting is that they tend to die more in countries with mad right-leaning irrational leaders. Curious.