Pfhorrest

I wanted to follow up on 's good reply but beat me to it. Everything, including everyone, is an object. But at least some objects are also subjects, p...

There's your first problem. You can't have a perfect vacuum. Even if you could build a container out of material that didn't give off any molecules in...

I got a strong sense of hostility in your post, which was perhaps a mistake on my part. If so, my apologies. I don’t see those as different in kind, b...

I don't think you could create sapient strong AI without making it sentient along the way -- which I think you could do in principle, NB, as sentience...

I feel like I shouldn’t even respond to this, but I don’t mean that mere sapience is all it takes to do philosophy WELL. Just that people who do philo...

No, because you trimmed off the part where I said I’m not using the word in its Latin sense, but in the sense that another non-human life form might b...

That is a good addition. Parallel to the notion of courage, I think curiosity might be another good addition too. I don’t understand this sentence. I ...

The scary question is, how can we know if this isn't how anesthetics already work? The patient is paralyzed during the surgery, and forms no memories,...

People who argue that universals don't exist sure seem to think that the concept of them is just a philosophical confusion.

Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

You realize that by this account all of the other supposedly meaningless philosophical questions discussed in this thread also become meaningful empir...

You do get that my entire point is about differentiating between exactly those two things? That there isn't a disagreement about the observed phenomen...

I'm not saying that (in this example) it's completely independent of empirical evidence, just that both sides of the debate accept the same empirical ...

This article you linked is a great example of metaphysics (or philosophy in general) done right. What that author is arguing is essentially that “spec...

The mods, obviously, but I think your actual question is "what are the criteria for philosophy?", and I think the answer to that is "is it just expres...

It literally has “honor” in it: On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at a...

That’s not so much theism as it is divine command theory. Not all theists subscribe to that.

...and their arrangements? A 200lb pile of graphite and a 200lb solid diamond grandfather clock are both just 200lbs of carbon atoms, but the arrangem...

Yeah, reductivism has to be monistic, so it rules out substance dualist accounts of mind, vitalist accounts of life, etc. But in saying that chemistry...

Reductionism is not eliminativism. Saying that mind is reducible to matter isn't saying that mind doesn't exist, any more than saying that you can con...

But you said earlier that "Whether an event is wholly determined, wholly random, or a combination of the two, it robs the will of all freedom to creat...

Nope, my response would have been the same. Did you see my tip for how to edit earlier? Click the little pencil icon below and to the left of your pos...

That conclusion suggests you’re employing an incoherent notion of “freedom” that doesn’t actually distinguish some possibilities from others, since in...

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you push the ship the ship pushes back on you. The force applied to it and to you are the same. ...

The first I heard of them was in the opening of the first episode of the Watchmen TV show. At first I assumed it was a historical difference in the al...

I just mean that it doesn’t matter how well determined the process is, how much randomness features in it; it doesn’t matter for the purpose of freedo...

Just do the math in your own equation. F = ma, correct. If F and m are nonzero, then a is nonzero. Plug in whatever force you can apply with your fing...

Yes, absolutely, but because the force would be small and the mass large, the acceleration would be very small. But it would still be something: in th...

A variety of complicated psychological and neurological reasons, that aren't especially relevant at this stage of discussion. (They become relevant in...

Will basically is just desire, specifically whichever desire it is that ultimately moves you to act. Free will is the ability to control what you desi...

Interesting! Roe v Wade and unleaded gas started the same year.

Data across counties for a single year doesn’t help, we need data over time, for anywhere besides the US, or for the world globally. The point of all ...

So no actual data on whether international crime rates correlate with atmospheric lead like US crime rates do?

So where is your claim that crime rates have not gone down elsewhere coming from?

A general graph of international rates would be fine, that’s what I was trying and failing to find.

Share some graphs of crime rates in other places please, I can only find US data.

Maybe if you actually read the linked article you would see plenty of people far more talented than me have already pretty rigorously established caus...

I’m curious your thoughts on my phone buying habits. I’ve discovered that when a model of iPhone gets discontinued, I can get one of those just-discon...

I was originally going to be end my post with exactly that joke and a comment about correlation and causation, but then I thought it would undermine m...

Crime rate also correlates with atmospheric lead, which has been decreasing steadily since the 1970s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypot...

This is exactly what I was refuting in the quoted bit. I suspect maybe the word “phase” is leading you to this conclusion, because a phase implies a t...

My point though is that being a participant in an institution the state tries to coopt does not make you a state agent. The state tries to coopt every...

Tony Gibson was an English psychologist and anarchist. (First google result for anarchist psychologists.) As an anarchist he obviously didn’t believe ...

Short version is I am also anti-foundationalist like Sellars, and not trying to push foundationalism in the part you quoted. Experiences are not opini...

I think you're missing the point of where I'm going with this. A phase space, or configuration space, doesn't have to imply anything about time being ...

Well it's either that or sort of like a ball of timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly... stuff.

The dimension across which that gradient occurs is a dimension of the phase-space. The gradient gives directionality to a span across that phase-space...

Time is a local entropic anisometry in the phase space of possible worlds.

I thought you were replying to Judaka's post about "economic redistribution based on race", the point of which was, I thought, that economic redistrib...

Weren’t you just agreeing the other day that class-focused amelioration of poverty regardless of race is fine, since race correlates with class and so...