I did explain briefly why it was not self-contradictory before moving on to a different approach, but since you're so hung up on it I can explain in m...
This is a non-problem if you don't conceive of "qualia" as something that material things need to "produce", but just as an aspect of the being of all...
As I recall my math education, the concept of the "real numbers" wasn't even introduced until we got to "imaginary numbers" to juxtapose them with. We...
"Miracles" and the "supernatural" cannot be relative to the current state of scientific understanding, unless you want to concede that modern westerne...
Etymologically, "reason" comes from a root that means "to put in order", or "to fit together", which suggests that "reason" is fundamentally about und...
Thanks for that. Looking up the root of that, it appears to come from a word that meant "praise". The audible similarity of that to "pray" makes me wo...
The catch is, we also know that it is nearly impossible for “nobody” to be “looking”, because anything at all counts as “somebody” and any kind of int...
Philosophy is the application of abstract tools from language, mathematics, and the arts, tools like logic and rhetoric, to the job of creating the to...
Over the past year I was struck by a physical illness of unknown cause that then caused severe mental disturbance (anxiety and dread) that coincided w...
The sense of the word “pray” meaning to ask or beg is older than the narrower religious sense. Why do you think it is that the religious activity came...
That sounds to me like a rhetorical or incredulous question meant to convey Einstein's opinion that he thinks the moon does exist when it's not looked...
It’s an open question in philosophy whether people are actually capable of acting in ways they think is immoral. Socrates famously argues that all wro...
This just goes back to how having all of something just means there are none you don’t have. If there are zero things, and you have zero of them, then...
My changes happened for different reasons. I just kinda grew out of my religious views in the same way I grew out of Santa Claus, influenced by variou...
It sounds like you reject all but the linguistic meaning of “meaning”, which is itself just linguistically false. When someone asks about the meaning ...
My vague memory is something more in this vein. May have also (or instead) involved using algae, and possibly turning the biochemical product of that ...
Meaning is significance or importance. All of those words have linguistic senses (the meaning of a word is what it signifies, what its import it, in t...
I don't remember what it was now, because my retention is shot this year thanks to anxiety, but there was some news story about something, a carbon se...
Helping and teaching others is half the meaning of life (the other half being learning and helping yourself), inasmuch as meaningfulness means being i...
All actions are driven by a combination of belief and intention, so no matter what you’re trying to do, half the battle of doing it successfully is ha...
This is why I brought up the "vanished from existence" factor in an earlier post in this thread. If the Drowning Man still would have drowned even if ...
Everything. Infinite regress arguments I learned about in philosophy classes seemed to have gone completely unanswered. Here were these arguments show...
I was raised in a religious family (evangelical, even), identified as a communist in my early adolescence, then as a libertarian by the time I reached...
That's not inaction, that's indirect action. If the people wouldn't have been murdered had Manson spontaneously vanished from existence before issuing...
You might have any number of reasons not to save the drowning man. They might not be great reasons, but they are your reasons and your choice and you’...
Yeah I’m strongly opposed to that whole no-such-thing-as-inaction deal on principle. If you’re doing nothing, then you’re doing nothing wrong. You’re ...
Sounds plausible to me and is a thought I’ve had before too. But then I’m pansexual so only being attracted to one sex has always seemed a little “unn...
That’s funny, cause the western interpretation of nirvana I was exposed to before studying Buddhism was that it was a place, like heaven, and the stat...
Nirvana is a state of mind. My very western very modern philosophy has an equivalent of it. It’s also the equivalent of a noncognitivist conception of...
If you’re fine with Buddhism’s “nothing is permanent” being a permanent truth, why then is a modern western philosophy that says the same not permanen...
There are a lot of different proposals for how an anarchic society could be structured. You can read my ideas on that in my essay On Politics, Governa...
This is a half-formed thought of mine as I'm about to pass out in bed, but: as a left-libertarian myself who loves to hear Chomsky speak (haven't read...
I feel like I should give reasons for my earlier recommendations, because looking back on my earlier post I realize it just sounds like a list of auth...
That's correct, provided we can take "younger than 15 billion years" to be equivalent to "no older than 15 billion years". (Technically we can't, beca...
Big bad things are relatively rare and so are newsworthy. Little good things are everywhere. Little bad things are dealt with. Big good things are exc...
No, same sense. If you want to say nothing is older than 15 billion years in formal logic, you’d use the same symbols (either not-something or everyth...
That is also true on the modern account. Because “everything” is equivalent to “nothing not”: nothing is not red if and only if everything is red. Tha...
Yes, that's exactly the kind of case. I brought it up to make a logical point, but in practice (hence practically unused) when do we ever talk about h...
Aristotle had a problem with that as well, but modern logicians have generally agreed that it's really not a problem because practically speaking we n...
By talking about incentives, I mean exactly making sure that the market price accurately reflects the real costs. If non-renewables are causing a publ...
If Alice says she's anti-man because she hates straw and men are all made of straw, and Bob corrects her that generally men are not actually made of s...
That is an unresolved question in contemporary physics. General relativity treats space as continuous, while quantum mechanics treats everything as di...
Are you saying that theists actually agree with atheists, and atheists just falsely believe that theists disagree with them? Because atheists are sayi...
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