Pfhorrest

In that they’re altruistic hedonists, and generally anti-superstitious, “materialist” pragmatists, they’ve definitely got a lot in common yeah, though...

I was just thinking earlier today that transhumanism is really sort of the ultimate manifestation of my “it may be hopeless but I’m trying anyway” phi...

:up:

That all sounds like the same thing I want, so now I'm just more confused about where any disagreement lies. I'm wondering if it's just the talk of "n...

Interesting! Without having read Midgley's article yet, I commented in another thread where Banno mentioned it in response to something I said, that: ...

Yes, that’s exactly the kind of ends I’m aiming toward. Everything else I’m on about is concerned with why things don’t end up like that already and w...

I'm really unclear what your views are now, since you seem to be simultaneously: morally defending the status quo capitalist account of who owns what ...

Not having read the article there yet, your abstract of it sounds agreeable to me, and not contrary to anything I’ve meant here. If it clears anything...

“The law” and “the police” mean the same thing in this context: someone with power says it’s the case and everyone knows they had better go along with...

On what grounds, besides that the police say so?

“A philosophy” is a set of statements or opinions about philosophy; “philosophy” is an activity or process.

You're right that everyone has those kinds of expectations. My point is that many if not most people are unhappy with those things that they expect an...

There are two different things one might mean by "wrong" here. One is about whether it has bad consequences. The answer to that is clearly yes, as any...

Yes, though I don't think it's possible to ever actually get to there, only to make indefinite progress toward there.

:up:

I think that we start in the middle of our webs of beliefs and find our way down to our respective foundations that we think underlie those middling b...

I think you mean syntax? Searle’s mantra was that syntax is not enough for semantics: being able to manipulate symbols successfully doesn’t equal unde...

Technically that is possible and leads to some weird philosophical conundrums. Google (or search this forum) for “Boltzmann brain” for a prominent exa...

Quantum mechanically, that’s pretty much the case, and such quantum randomness is the posited mechanism that spawns new “universes” on an eternal infl...

Because there is at most one complete truth about anything. The whole point of that last post of mine is that many competing philosophies are all part...

The true philosophy is one that somehow reconciles all of those different “tastes” together into a single cohesive whole. Optimistic and pessimistic i...

Not so much contracted, but slowed. All we know (or posit in our current best theories) is that around 14 billion years ago the universe was much smal...

In contemporary physics, the Big Bang is understood not as the total beginning of everything, but as the end of the inflationary epoch... which may ha...

I have nothing of use to add to this conversation other than that you sound completely correct in your OP, and Kant (via Popper) is wrong. ETA: Maybe ...

Or they'd vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene.

This is a great way of stating it! Thank you. :-) I want to rephrase it a little more consistently so the simple shift in quantification order is more...

All philosophical progress is made by splitting the right hairs.

You said things that are assumed but can't be proven. By the nature of assumptions, we don't know whether or not they are true. Whether or not it's ok...

I'm pretty sure that's not what Godel is on about at all. But on that unrelated topic, I am vociferously opposed to justificationism, the usual kind o...

What gets to me, and maybe you can clarify, is how it could be that we can “compute that it does hold” and yet not have, at some level or another, the...

Right, which is what I said a few posts back in that exchange. It's only in the meta-language, not the object language, that we can assign a truth val...

FWIW you could crudely describe my own view as "physicalism about mind and idealism about matter": minds are just functions of physical brains, and ph...

Leaving out the "definitely"s completely changes the meaning, so no, I wouldn't claim that modified sentence. We cannot know for sure ("definitely", o...

It is a good channel. Also I think he lives somewhere near me these days because I keep seeing familiar places in the backgrounds of his videos... lik...

The philosophical implications of Godel's theorems are usually very overblown. It basically just boils down to how any language capable of formulating...

I'm not clear what you mean by "a non-physical" (that seems like an adjective missing a noun to go with), but if what you're talking about is the brai...

Thanks a ton! Although my posts in this thread are all from a year ago.

I’m not sure if I understand the question correctly, but I would say that there definitely are questions which are neither within the domain of scienc...

While I agree with you about nihilism, Absurdism is not so much a cause of negative mental well-being as it is a response to it; it's sort of a respon...

It's a combination of several things. One of them is that I generally felt that most interactions here were emotionally negative already, and many peo...

Not sure if compliment or insult. (Based on past interactions with you, I'm guessing compliment; if so, thanks!)

Science is the best! Now we should apply a similar method to questions of why to do things as we've done with these questions of how to do things.

I think that a convention comes into existence when there is agreement on how to use something (be that the case of the physical use of land for produ...

What about when one never agreed to the convention (never made a promise to honor such-and-such arrangement, that they could be true to or not)? Or si...

My account of ownership does rely on convention, quite explicitly. You're then saying that my account of what counts as a convention (that a conventio...

Is it really, or is it just your convention that views on what constitutes the establishment of a convention are themselves just conventions? In which...

I'm not talking about only land the use of which is currently uncontested; in those cases there's no problem looking for a solution. I'm saying that, ...

IMO land, like all property, rightly belongs to whoever last had uncontested use of it. Uncontested use establishes convention, and then whoever break...

:100: :up:

False dilemma as already demonstrated IRL. Negative emotions can reduce motivation and positive ones increase it. Just look at depressed people who ca...