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Pfhorrest

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Sure, and the something that is the object of that thought is the world. All the details if the world are highly dubitable, but then so are all of the...
July 14, 2020 at 15:03
And as I keep explaining, I’m not starting from the “is” that is the description of those people’s experiences, but from the “oughts” those experience...
July 14, 2020 at 14:59
I don’t disagree with that at all, I’m just not sure where you’re going with it in relation to the OP.
July 14, 2020 at 14:49
The OP is an account of my journey of changing my views in response to new reasons that challenged those views. I was implicitly a divine command theo...
July 14, 2020 at 14:43
No, I genuinely can’t remember what it’s called, and can’t google for something I don’t know the name of. I don’t think it’s either of those, but goog...
July 14, 2020 at 14:27
Except he didn’t; see Gassendi and Lichtenberg mentioned above. Or else, to the same extent that he proved that some self exists, he also proved that ...
July 14, 2020 at 05:45
Unreasonable doubt is rejecting everything until it can be proven from the ground up. This is unreasonable because nothing can be proven from the grou...
July 14, 2020 at 05:34
We can doubt every particular about the physical world, but we can't doubt that there is some physical world at all. The physical world is the stuff t...
July 14, 2020 at 04:28
I wonder if (and suspect that) this is related to the well-known psychological phenomenon where people generally blame their own failures on their env...
July 14, 2020 at 04:21
I've never heard of a "theory of music" as in a different kind of theory besides the math or science kinds. I've heard of music theory, but that's mor...
July 14, 2020 at 04:15
Roughly. But "harmful" and "bad" seem to me roughly synonyms. That is the "notion of good" that we share, and exactly why I say to appeal to hedonic e...
July 13, 2020 at 22:57
:smile: :up:
July 13, 2020 at 18:46
The OP of this very thread is full of them. A chain of reasons to abandon one position and then a new position adopted to account for those reasons an...
July 13, 2020 at 18:45
That is a good point. In practice, there are some things the exact details of which can never be encoded in any finite mind. But in principle there ar...
July 13, 2020 at 18:38
No, we need and have a system for arbitration in the former case too. That’s what rational argument is all about. We share our reasons and then togeth...
July 13, 2020 at 18:34
You can just refer to me by name if you like. :) That’s pretty much it. Not quite. If there were such a thing as angels, “I don’t know” wouldn’t be th...
July 13, 2020 at 18:22
It’s a straightforward extrapolation of things that are already very real. We have forms of entertainment that give us pleasurable experiences. A majo...
July 13, 2020 at 16:23
There is nothing special about me or moral philosophy in that regard. This is just ordinary judgement and disagreement. On every matter, everyone has ...
July 13, 2020 at 16:07
The common factor to comedy and tragedy, and what I hold makes drama (inclusive of both of those) like a mirror image of beauty, is that while beauty ...
July 13, 2020 at 05:43
Glad I could help. :-)
July 13, 2020 at 05:37
That's the use that I can see for universe simulations generally. I predict that the far future isn't going to be human beings bodily traveling the st...
July 13, 2020 at 04:41
What you're talking about there is how we've all got our own moral intuitions. There are a lot of "oughts" that we're naturally inclined to grant with...
July 12, 2020 at 23:23
Meta-ethical questions first arose in response to the logical positivists’ verificationist theory of meaning, which is very similar to what you outlin...
July 12, 2020 at 22:57
In: Koans  — view comment
July 12, 2020 at 19:48
Working sufficiently well means not being vulnerable to any reasonable criticism. Whether or not a particular solution is vulnerable to any criticism ...
July 12, 2020 at 19:03
If none of them work sufficiently well then yes. If I thought any of those was a perfect solution I wouldn’t go looking for a better one. You may as w...
July 12, 2020 at 16:56
No more than a claim of empiricism is a tautology. Which it very well could be taken to be: the claim that any supposed thing the existence or non-exi...
July 12, 2020 at 16:53
I haven’t completely rejected all non-cognitivist approaches; I think universal prescriptivism is the closest thing to right that I’ve seen. My own vi...
July 12, 2020 at 16:27
My intuition is that I would rather have a machine that gives me an unending variety of different pleasurable experiences, rather than just one big on...
July 12, 2020 at 16:14
Interesting. I had forgotten that from Kant, but then separately elsewhere (regarding free will theodicies) come up with a similar thought of my own, ...
July 12, 2020 at 09:06
I’d say it requires multidimensional time. The universal wavefunction does evolve deterministically, but that wavefunction is itself a multidimensiona...
July 12, 2020 at 07:54
Meta-ethics isn’t about whether or not that kind of thing is true, but about what it means for something like that to be true (or false). What exactly...
July 12, 2020 at 07:49
I don’t recall that phrase exactly from Kant, so can you elaborate on that? I’ve also always had a hard time figuring out Kant’s metaethics. He seems ...
July 12, 2020 at 07:47
The exact answer to that is precisely what is at question. What exactly is it that makes a moral claim different from any other (or not)? But the roug...
July 12, 2020 at 07:26
Having felt a lot like that at that age myself, I wonder if you have looked at the actual curve numbers. I was surprised to learn that as poor as I se...
July 12, 2020 at 06:26
In: Koans  — view comment
"Goats can't talk!" ...and the man was enlightened.
July 12, 2020 at 06:02
I hold that that is a strictly speaking false dilemma, between the two types of normative ethical model, although the strict answer I would give to wh...
July 12, 2020 at 05:52
:up: :ok:
July 12, 2020 at 05:48
The only reason I wouldn't plug into an experience machine is concern that there is something that might matter in actual reality that is being hidden...
July 12, 2020 at 03:51
:100: Acceptance is the opposite of rejection, where to reject is to receive disfavorably ("Why did you give me this? I don't want this! Take it back!...
July 12, 2020 at 03:43
So I'll just not express my opinion on any philosophical topic anymore because that would just be discussing "my philosophical system"? I said nothing...
July 12, 2020 at 03:39
Viewing them as ONLY objects is dehumanizing because it denies their subjectivity, their agency. But all subjects are also objects, and that’s not deh...
July 12, 2020 at 01:14
There is still the open question of what it is that makes at least some objects subjects, sure. But all that Mary’s Room proves is that there is more ...
July 12, 2020 at 01:13
Yes. Every thing is an object, persons included. At least some objects are also subjects, and it is the being-of-that-kind-of-thing-in-the-first-perso...
July 11, 2020 at 23:22
This. We cannot doubt that there is some kind of world or another that we are experiencing. But we can in principle doubt any particulars about that w...
July 11, 2020 at 23:13
Yep, that's about it. Mary knows everything about what brains seeing the color red are like, in the third person: she can look at a brain and tell you...
July 11, 2020 at 23:10
You make a good illustration of how prediction doesn't necessarily lead to chaos. I guess I would have to weaken my claim to prediction can easily lea...
July 11, 2020 at 23:05
I'm not saying anything about this has to do with humans or intelligence, merely giving humans with intelligence as an example of a predictive system....
July 11, 2020 at 20:36
I’ve had a similar thought myself. Descartes famously attempted to systematically doubt everything he could, including the reliability of experiences ...
July 11, 2020 at 20:10
That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’m talking about. I mean like how if you could send information back in time (backward causation) to show s...
July 11, 2020 at 16:18