Pfhorrest

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenome...

Definitely including political philosophy. That is part of the area I see progress still remaining to be made, because progress there has historically...

Science.

We eat things to get those chemicals. In principles our brains and bodies could survive just fine on synthesized versions of all the appropriate chemi...

So you think that while a philosopher can make progress on themselves, philosophy as a field is no better today than it was thousands of years ago? No...

Thank you for the opportunity. On a slight tangent from this discussion, I've started sort of a sequel to this thread, on the subject of progress in p...

It’s pretty common: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_mundi

Also, I’m not sure if Syamsu believes this, but if I were building a system like this, I would draw an analogy between the relationship between God an...

Off the topic still going on here, I just wanted to say that I find Syamsu’s weird philosophical system kind of anthropologically interesting, and I’m...

“Baseless” is maybe a bit too harsh, but the point is that Democritus wasn’t presenting something that we today would call a scientific theory, with p...

No, it’s completely relevant. Democritus was doing stuff under the name of “philosophy” that was both primitive science and primitive philosophy becau...

As it was foretold, so too it has come to pass.

No. The entire reason I started posting here again was to day no to that. I don’t know how much clearer I can be. Democritus lived in a time before ph...

I wanted to say something similar. People go against science all the time... when they have some kind of tribalistic, religious or politics agenda tha...

An “ism” isn’t the same thing as a religion. That’s the point.

In other words, science, which no longer falls under the umbrella of philosophy. No, that’s just science, presuming they aim for the things they specu...

The method of thinking about the question, possibly looking for evidence, and then coming to the best conclusion they can? What other method would you...

I’m only partially following this conversation so I can’t speak for David, but I agree with him that there is a clear line between science and philoso...

The general principle I'm operating under here is: it's not okay to achieve good ends via bad means. Both the ends and the means must be good. Bad end...

So you think not saving someone is impermissible (you have to save them if you can), but killing someone is permissible (you can kill them if you have...

Look at it in symbolic logic. Deontic modal logic uses the same symbols as alethic model logic: P => Q P => R Q []~R .: []~P (from 2 and 4 modus tolle...

Shifting the track does both of those things. One is supererogatorily good: saving peope. The other is impermissibly bad: killing someone. That makes ...

Anaximander had it right in two. The fundamental stuff of reality is boundless, formless, until it is bound and formed into particular things. Today w...

To be is to do. An object is just a bundle of attributes and each attribute is just a propensity to do something in some circumstances. Nothing can ex...

No, I’m not saying anything about things with no causal power.

I’m a big Whitehead fan, and I like to take this individual-society metaphor in the other direction too. I analogize a society’s educational and gover...

I’m not sure how to say more clearly than I already have. The process in question is the one whereby your practical or moral reasoning directs your be...

This one? Why? (I’m already familiar with it.)

Only as meaningless as any other moral claim. If someone grievously harms someone else and nobody stops it, does it become meaningless to say it was w...

I think you missed the point. You said all religions follow an ideology, and concluded that any ideology is a religion. The first says that ideology i...

Just existing somewhere has some effect on everything around you, so you’re always “doing something” in a super strict pedantic sense. But someone sta...

Both of those are just the simple negation of doing something. Of course, to be is to do, so everyone is always doing something to some degree just by...

Reflexive means self-referential. Reflexivity is what access consciousness is all about: having access to information about your own mental states, se...

As I see it, consciousness as we experience is what it’s like (phenomenal consciousness) to be a reflexively aware (access conscious) thing of the typ...

“Not doing anything” and “doing nothing” are the same thing. I rephrased specifically to avoid this confusion.

There’s all kinds of stuff on the borders of physics and philosophy that makes all sorts of things out of QM’s observer-dependence. A lot of it is pur...

Quantum mechanics is already like that. The catch is, anything counts as an “observer”. In other words, something like panpsychism.

No, there are lots of supererogatory goods that someone can do to be better than morally neutral, they just aren’t obligatory. Like how saying conting...

:up: :100:

Yes.

Yes, but in ruling it out, they’re not proposing that the weird thing happens. (But they’re also denying the most ordinary familiar thing, by conflati...

The point is that if you are not doing anything (“doing nothing”), then you are not doing anything that could be wrong. Bad things may still happen, b...

There’s nothing better than heaven. But a ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore a ham sandwich is better than heaven?

I, as a panpsychism, think it is. It’s only emergentism that makes it out to be anything metaphysically weird. The panpsycist, in taking “phenomenal c...

Those diagrams make me think of a way of visualizing transfinite numbers I’d thought of before, which I realize now could also be used to visualize in...

You are defining “free will” as freedom from determinism. If you don’t define it that way, you don’t have that problem.

If you’re doing nothing, you’re doing nothing wrong.

I think I just did. If “free will” doesn’t mean “free from determinism”, then determinism can be true and people can still have free will. Basically, ...

It depends on the physicist’s philosophical views. If he’s an eliminativist then no, he denies that there is such a thing. If he’s an emergentist then...