Pfhorrest

:grin: :cool:

To be fair to Dawkins re your last paragraph, "evolutionary altruism" is a different thing from just "altruism" simpliciter. I wrote an essay on it fo...

Mary knew everything that could be known in the third person about color vision. She did not know what it was like to experience color vision in the f...

On my account, reproducing the function will necessarily reproduce the experience, because the experience of anything correlates completely with its f...

Agreed on point 1, but completely disagreed on point 2. The capacity for experience is exactly the capacity to experience qualia. Qualia just are are ...

:up:

From a genetic standpoint, the rapist benefits iff there are viable offspring iff the victim benefits too. IOW if rape passes on the rapists’ genes it...

Whether or not something is conservative depends on when and where you're talking about. Equality before the law has only been a conservative value in...

I have recently, in another conversation, realized there is some similarity between an epiphenomenal view and my own view, in that on an epiphenomenal...

wrong thread?

That’s the part where my panpsychism comes in. Whatever it is besides mere function that human consciousness involves, I hold that EVERYTHING already ...

I mentioned that in the OP: I agree, and thing it is possible. The same way a human does: by instantiating the same function as a human, and so having...

I remember Bush, and that he was an idiot, but even though I hated his policies he seemed like a kind of charming innocent doofus, aesthetically speak...

So were gods.

Basically everything the alt-right accuses the left of is usually a projection of something they themselves are guilty of, so even without the details...

Yup. The movie “Unbreakable” made this point too.

Russian-fabricated documents mention actual (unspecified) person who will swear that they are true. Film at 11.

It’s not the discreteness of any change at all that distinguishes strong emergence from weak emergence, but the sudden appearance of something irreduc...

True, because its configuration now enables all of those inanimate objects to interact in a certain way. But the kind of actions they do to each other...

Thanks for pointing that out! I haven't done much web dev in nearly a decade and am just now in the process of polishing up my site for job-search pur...

Thanks! :smile: :up:

No. Also no to the OP.

Except they don’t. All you’ve described here is weak emergence. Strong emergence is something beyond that. Something that doesn’t happen, but we have ...

So the dictionary weakly emerges from the behavior of the scrabble tiles, which as I said is fine by me.

Where did the dictionary come from? That’s where the magic happens. It’s not just building up from things inherent in the tiles, bottom-up: something ...

Strong emergence definitionally differs from weak emergence. Things that meet the criteria for strong emergence are “like magic”; things that only mee...

Did you even read the rest of that wikilink? There is a definitional difference between strong and weak emergentism that you’re ignoring. See the part...

Someone PM'd me a question about this thread, I don't know why they didn't just post here, but I thought my response to them might be illustrative for...

You're not talking about strong emergence. Strong emergence is definitionally "like magic". If you can take constituent parts, and the things they do,...

Simple, just suppose there was some super-sensitive “monster” who needs inordinate amounts of care and gentle handling or else it easily suffers immen...

Minds definitely age. They scar and otherwise accrue damage over time, and deteriorate in function as the brain deteriorates with the rest of the body...

No, but sexual reproduction is not anything more than a complicated process of atoms interacting in the way that atoms do. Nowhere in that process is ...

Do you think sexual reproduction involves any processes that are not built up out of the processes of the cells that are built up out of molecules tha...

That's the terminology that the philosophers discussing the issue are using though, so if I want to communicate with them I need to talk about the sam...

You should really read that previous thread on the web of reality. I'm not an idealist, but I am a phenomenalist. Things exist independent of minds, b...

I think you're misreading "access" as "active" here. In any case, access consciousness is the topic of the easy problem. There is no mystery there. Ac...

Basically, it's magic. Weakly emergent phenomena build up out of more fundamental phenomena. The kinds of emergent phenomena that Kenosha lists are th...

I still think it would be a good idea to aim for exactly one new justice per presidential term, regardless of vacancies, so that the court always refl...

I would make that exactly 1, no more no less, regardless of vacancies. Otherwise the Senate could just block appointment like they did to Obama.

I thought this thread was going to be about flags representing various philosophies. If I were to design a flag for my country — as in the land, not t...

I think Trump did even that job poorly. I’ve never seen a president so obviously go off script and then get “handled” back on track by the people with...

I’m mostly using psychological terminology for phenomenal consciousness just because that’s the terminology already used for it, but I can see the his...

Thanks for the response! I think the short answer to both of your questions lies in the ontology of my web of reality, wherein it's explained how I vi...

No, I mean that even if I believed that there existed such a god, I could not find hope in that possibility, because of the problem of evil. An all po...

Even if a god existed, that wouldn’t help with my kind of existential crises.

Yes. Yes. No. They should be treated the same as other drugs.

That’s another good analogy. There are a lot of mutations that are possible, caused by tiny random environmental factors, but most mutations either do...

I saw that video when it came out and found that penrose tiling fascinating. I don’t know why you think it sounds so wrong but I look forward to discu...

The content of the hard drives is analogous to mental content — your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc. That stuff can and does change, which is the wh...