So I was thinking about this some more on my evening walk tonight, and remembered that the reason I brought this up in the first place is because I've...
I wasn't thinking that it did, but rather, that the creation of new energy that comes along with the expansion of space makes the universe an open sys...
Evening Kenosha (I'm falling asleep in bed; you must be Australian). I was thinking of dark energy, particularly the inflaton field. I'm a little uncl...
That sounds like it’s just reason to doubt premise 2. Which of course is the actual case in the real world prior to the election: it’s not certain tha...
But it’s not, which is my point. If there is good reason to believe those premises, then there is reason (even good reason) to believe the conclusion....
The quote in the OP is not just about whether someone believes things, but about whether they have good reason to believe them. That's also what logic...
I think you're erroneously reading in a modal operator (and which one are you reading in?) The claim is that the proposition If a Republican wins the ...
That is logically equivalent to “Reagan or Anderson wins the election”. Given that a Republican wins the election, it is valid to conclude that Reagan...
I can give one example off the top of my head, though it's probably not useful to Isaac's point: proprioception, our internal sensation of where our b...
I like that there isn't a downvote option. If there was I would definitely say get rid of it. I've felt slightly displeased by its existence, but deci...
An inorganic security camera can sit around for ages keeping a record of the things that happened in front of it. I expect you'll object that a human ...
I don't see how that's an anti-reductionist claim. That's a difference in form and consequent function between living and non-living things, which of ...
I do really appreciate it, as I've been feeling rather unappreciated elsewhere in philosophy and life lately. I'm not the one who started talking abou...
If what you're talking about is not 'what exists', 'objects', 'stuff', etc, then what you're saying is not in disagreement with anything I'm saying. I...
If the options are: 1) Not tax billionaires, 2) Tax them and use the money for harm reduction, or 3) Not have billionaires or people in need of harm r...
Yep. Food poisoning is totally a thing (getting poisoned by your food), and this is the reverse of that (getting fed by your poison). No. It is intend...
That's the grammatical gender of the words for "table" in those languages, not the gender-as-in-not-quite-sex of the actual table. What is the "materi...
What is the gender of a table? Physical things have different properties than other physical things, but they’re still all physical properties, so poi...
This is just form and substance again. Nobody is denying that there is a difference between those. The disagreement is about whether there’s more than...
I'm not saying that there's literally a conflict over the meaning of a word here, but that use-of-a-thing-defining-what-it-is is analogous to use-of-a...
I didn't say that those were the roles of subject and object specifically, but they are nevertheless roles in an interaction, in the usual way that ch...
In chemistry we do that all the time: whether something is an acid or base, for instance, is defined by its role in an interaction with another substa...
No, that quote of me tracks perfectly with what I just said. You had one intent, but a different effect occurred, so you used it with one intent, but ...
I think either intent or effect can be used as the criteria to define it, as I said just above in response to your question "When you use something fo...
A map is a compressed copy of the territory: a map stores information about the territory in a smaller amount of space. This can be literally smaller ...
I completely recognize the object-subject distinction, I just don't think it's a distinction between kinds of stuff but rather roles in an interaction...
That's not peculiar at all, but it also makes perfect sense if "being" is taken to mean "thing that exists", rather than... "transcendent subject of e...
Not an ontological difference, no; not a difference in the kind of stuff they're made out of. (I'm ignoring for our purposes here your peculiar use of...
Sure, but the camera is also not part of the picture, so "not being part of the picture" doesn't have to mean being of an ontologically different kind...
Both, in different senses. This reminds me of a post about whether speakers mean things or the words they say mean things, that I made in another thre...
You meant to use it as poison, but you ended up using it as food. So something you meant to be poison was instead food. It was also bad poison (ineffe...
A camera does not film itself; you can't see the camera on film. Does that require that the camera be an ontologically different kind of thing than th...
I thought you said transcendence was a straw man? If you now agree that dualism is transcendent, see the rest of my earlier argument against transcend...
I think "meaning" is very much like "implication", as in, "to mean" something works the same way as "to imply" something. Viz: by saying something to ...
I don't have a strong belief about it either way, but that was my initial expectation, yeah. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that it was wro...
That's neither substance dualism nor property dualism, which are the things under discussion here. If you want to make up a different thing and call i...
That raises the complication of whose intent we’re taking about, since I expect usually the people ingesting poison themselves are not intending to ha...
I'll sketch the argument for you, at least; I don't feel like spending a lot more time on this discussion. - Dualism implies some kind of transcendent...
You ignore the emphasized phrase "in that sense". We were discussing what it is to be biologically alive, and to be successful at doing that, i.e. to ...
Are you asking for an argument against dualism in particular, or an account of how brains can know anything in general? In any case, am I misrememberi...
You asked for an explanation of how non-living matter can become living, not an argument that that must be what happened. I'm happy to explain the vie...
Life is matter, and I explained already how that matter takes on the form of life. "Forms of matter that are better at living become more common over ...
A heat death only necessarily applies to an energetically closed universe (where no energy is created or destroyed); only in a closed system must entr...
Better or worse structure and thus function of the really complicated systems built out of them. Is a better car (a thing better at doing what a car i...
I’d say it’s something being used for that purpose. If it’s not actually useful to that purpose, it’s a bad thing of that kind, but still a thing of t...
Physicalism, but sure, close enough. I think what you actually mean to ask is how life arises from non-life. Organic matter is just carbon-based matte...
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