Pfhorrest

Yep. Glad I could help.

Nuclear weapons are mostly bad because of the climate change they would effect, which is in turn bad because of the poverty it would cause.

Logicism failed, but set theory is nevertheless the foundations of contemporary mathematics. That's not identical with logicism.

Tell that to Galen Strawson.

I would be very interested in reading it, but I doubt I have the competence to contribute to it.

I am both a functionalist and a panpsychist, and have been pretty explicit about that this whole time. There are two “problems of” or types of conscio...

Maybe “libertarian” is a good place to start then. Originally, “liberal” meant the same thing that “libertarian” in the Rand sense means now. That pos...

I finally snuck in enough time to read your excellent posts, though I’m still on a phone so my reply will have to be short. While your posts were a fa...

Yup.

I see no difficulty reconciling Aristotelian actualization of potential with eternalism (“b-theory”). It just means that things have more of their pot...

I was torn between either climate change, poverty, or inequality, but ultimately chose poverty because the problem with inequality is that it leaves m...

Panpsychism is exactly the opposite of that: whatever is metaphysically going on in human brains is nothing special, it’s just a normal facet of every...

Computers can simulate physical systems. Human brains are physical systems. Human brains are conscious. So a simulation of a human brain will be consc...

In the US, liberal does mean leftist. Around the whole world, liberal USED to mean leftist too. Then the old (feudal) right largely lost, and a new (s...

It also says that ancient Greek philosophy didn’t even have separate words with which to make the distinction, which makes the whole thing seem like a...

That’s just panpsychism, and contemporary versions of it are a lot more innocuous than it might seem, being basically what is left over after you have...

Will do once I have time to read them. When I’m away from home I only have brief moment like bathroom breaks to read and write short things like this.

Yeah basically the idea of this game is to start with as little as possible and then build everything up from there. You don’t have to limit yourself ...

If we’re talking about functional definitions then those are roughly fine I guess, but then if were talking about functional definitions there’s no re...

Wow that’s a lot more detail than I was expecting! I’m away for the weekend now so I won’t have time to read up until a few days from now.

No, we'll get to those eventually... if anybody actually plays the game instead of arguing about the premise of it. I mean, I can build you the intege...

This statement seems confused. First-order logic is a form of predicate logic: the first form of it, before you get to higher-order predicate logics. ...

Someone else please check this because I don't trust alcontali's word on this for various reasons, and my understanding is that from set theory you ca...

Thank you, that article is very helpful in translating this language. I hadn't connected Wayf's sense of "being" with "essence", and though I was awar...

That is not metaphysically strange. That is a notable development in the physical behavior of stuff, sure, but there's nothing philosophically, ontolo...

It's heartening that I'm not the only one here scratching my head about this supposed difference between "being" and "existing". Wayf, we all get that...

I'm curious where you live that's not the USA and still uses "liberal" to mean "leftist". Originally there was that association, which is why the left...

I think you meant to quote the part where I wrote "And the complement of the empty set, all that is not nothing, is everything. The end." That part wa...

If by "experience" you mean some kind of mechanical thing happening in the subject, as you seem to, then there is no question. Simulate the mechanical...

That makes a good, analogous point. Simulated universes are not only necessarily younger, but also necessarily smaller, than their parent universes. S...

At first glance I expected this to be an argument that we would notice time running more slowly if we were in a simulated universe, and was all gearin...

If you read the OP you’d see that that’s just the midpoint. We build up to something like QFT, and then build from there to something like a human. I’...

Thanks for the explanation. I guess I have superficialist leanings myself. I don’t find that first argument particularly persuasive (there’s no reason...

It suggests that a lot, if not most, of people who pray have disagreed with you, and thought begging was an adequate description of what they were doi...

Starting mathematics from the natural numbers is pretty natural. If you begin with nothing but the empty set and the sole sufficient operator of joint...

We’ll need a bit more to go on than that, but the first thing that comes to mind is Plato’s “Form of the Good”.

Not really. Historically and in most of the world outside America today, “liberal” means what in America is usually called “libertarian”, because “lib...

Checking up on this thread months later, I am surprised to see that atheists for whom that's a core part of their philosophy are now the second-larges...

Why is this thread in the "About TPF" section?

Close. Mereology is the study of part-whole relations; or as I like to say, the study of "things and stuff", because "things" is the technical term fo...

:100: :clap: :party: :victory:

So you're saying that, to you at least, the difference between a theist and an atheist isn't what they believe, but that the theist does something tha...

An atheist says “God does not exist.” You agree, “Yep, God does not exist.” “So you’re an atheist too then?” the atheist asks. “No,” you say, “because...

That's needlessly pedantic. There is... whatever God is. That's not to say that God is an individual in some set that contains more than himself. I ju...

To the extent that mechanics is necessary and sufficient for the explanation of a particular kind of subjective experience, simulating those mechanics...

Thanks! Happy New Year to you too, and best of luck on your own summa project.

I have been asking about this for a while too. This also seems to underlie Wayfarer's theism somehow, where he holds that "God does not exist" but tha...

This was the point I was trying to make before, less bluntly. Thanks.

Finally up to the last of my own set of questions from two months ago: "Meaning" in general means important or significance, so this question is askin...

"Subject" and "object" are an indispensable part of our conceptual framework, but it's entirely possible (and I'd argue necessarily true) that all sub...