Just want to comment that I am also looking for that non-antagonistic, collegial, cooperative, enjoyable, friendly environment of mutual learners. And...
I see no logical incompatibility between them. I was about to say that epiphenomenslism kinda renders it pointless to suppose that everything has a mi...
I had the exact opposite experience. I was raised in a dirt poor home (but didn't realize it at the time), picked up libertarian ideals from friends o...
I think he’s not saying “idealistic” in a sense opposed to “materialistic”, but a sense meaning “naively optimistic”, or “not skeptical enough”. He’s ...
I forgot to include something else in the OP: Traditionally, both alethic and deontic modal logics write their core functions, either necessity and po...
Select the text, and a little "quote" button will pop up next to it. Press that and it will copy the text into quote tags wherever the insertion point...
I think they've made a mistake, but I don't know that they can be reasoned with. It seems to me completely analogous to someone like a solipsist, or a...
Yes, and liberalism was considered a leftist endeavor, until the redefinition of left and right post Marx. The original socialists and the original li...
This really depends on how we construct the left-right spectrum. In its earliest form, the left was for the liberty and equality of the commoners, aga...
As I understand it, the Standard Model uses U, SU(2) and SU(3) to model all the fundamental fields besides gravity, so you could build a gravity-free ...
Suppose you have some nonphysical things, and these nonphysical things bear an ordered relation to each other: each one has a unique "previous" and "n...
Logic is a subset of language, but yes, natural language is not usually as rigorous. The reason for inventing systems of logic is to have a more rigor...
I just want to chime in here that my view on creativity and the invention/discovery of ideas in no way hinges on the kind of platonism that Tristan is...
I can vouch for this. When I was going through an existential crisis last year, one day in July I took a walk down the street, and stopped in a little...
The overarching question I start with in the OP is whether creativity requires nondeterminism. My answer is that it does not, but instead requires a c...
Nope, I just claim that creativity doesn't lie in non-determinism, for reasons that hinge on there not being a clear division between invention and di...
This is more or less what I was trying to get at with my post in the intro thread that spawned this one, which I assumed would be moved over here in t...
Sure, but the bit that I responded to was the crux of it; the rest hangs on that misunderstanding. There's what something is useful for. This is purpo...
No, I said what it's useful for. You can use something in a way that it's not very useful. Obviously it has to be at least a little bit useful otherwi...
The reason I would not say a spoon’s purpose is to cut bread is precisely that a spoon is not very good for / not very useful for cutting bread. It is...
I think to “have“ a purpose is the same thing as to “be useful for” a purpose, and so if a thing is not useful to some purpose, that is not a purpose ...
I think a purpose (there can be more than one) is what something is useful for, and the use that the creator of something had in mind is but one case ...
What then is the difference between behaviorism and functionalism? Since functionalism also looks only at behavior for data. Maybe this conversation s...
You can’t just look at the income difference, you need to look at the expenses too. Someone who owns no land and works at McDonalds sees the vast majo...
I never said I was avoiding teleology, just that teleology isn’t all about what good the creator of something had in mind when they created it, just w...
I think the problem causing all the fuss about teleology is taking it to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. A thing’s purpose is whatever it is...
Sometimes materialist and physicalist mean the same thing. When they differ, it’s either just to explicitly expand the set of things believed in to ph...
By "different" I mean numerically not the same idea. In the way that Alice and Bob might drive "the same car" as in the same year make model and condi...
I don’t mean just visual images, but the all-sensory sense of “image” used in the very way you just said “IMAGined” smell etc. Here you’re using “idea...
It seems hard to imagine the proletariat could possibly ever be a minority, as that would mean that a property-owning majority was somehow getting by ...
Ideas as I speak of them are images of possible, yes; the claim that reality matches one of those images is something beyond a mere idea, it is someth...
Yes. And giving money to those who need it more than you is good, but it's totally okay if you don't. I don't think that helping others is always bett...
I don't know how to figure out the route from a given starting point to a given end point. But if sqrt(2)-1 has a(n infinite) decimal expansion, as I ...
Like I said, you’re the mathematician here, not me, so you tell me where I’m going wrong. I’m working directly from Cantor’s proof that the reals are ...
Do they really though? Most people don’t own a place to live and could scarcely dream of ever having enough money to. Most people are less than a mont...
I think in that first Rawls quote, he is not endorsing all of the things he lists, but simply listing common well-known examples of “major institution...
I think you don’t understand what a configuration space is. It’s also called a state space or phase space. I think this is the most straight article o...
You have that implication backwards. If ideas were their instantiations or thought-events, then two people couldn’t independently come up with the sam...
The absurdity you imply doesn't stem from the thought-event and the idea being identical; that's just one possibility, and you've made it clear that's...
Cantor’s diagonalization starts with supposing you have a list of all real numbers (you really can’t), and then goes on to show how to make a new real...
By saying that the act of coming up with an idea creates that idea, YOU imply that two separate acts of coming up with something must result in two se...
The original position view on marriage would be the that any kind of marriage between any number of consenting individuals is permissible. Including p...
You’re the mathematician, so you’d know better than me. It seems though that since Cantor has the diagonalization method of aways coming up with a new...
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