Pfhorrest

"We have not done it" is not the same as "it cannot be done". Of course in that case we're still not certain as empirical facts can be that it can be ...

Thanks fdrake for helping clarify baker's motives/perceptions to me. I don't know how to avoid those misperceptions in the future without just refrain...

:up: But FWIW, I'm not talking about anything like fuzzy logic or such when I talk about "degrees of truth" here. I'm talking about how one can be con...

That doesn't answer the question at all. Of course we've identified laws of genetics. The question is: if we perfectly modeled the molecules that, whe...

Just a small note on the topic of the OP and a few replies I’ve seen here: no evidence directly indicates that the universe as a whole was any smaller...

Truth needn’t be absolute. It’s important to know that the car is actually a car and not something to else, even if you don’t need to know all the det...

I need to learn to respond to people like him in the succinct way you do, instead of wasting my time on long-winded clarifications that fall on willfu...

I just want to say to David that (anyone’s quarrels with transhumanist means aside) I’m very pleased to see a professional like him touting the right ...

So you're saying that you think genetics is not just an inevitable consequence of molecules doing what molecules do, when the right molecules come tog...

Great reading comprehension there. :smirk: (Hint: X as Y isn’t Y as X). I don't at all deny human reason, only that it depends at all on some kind of ...

ooh sick burn bro

Also you can right-click the "___ minutes/days/etc ago" bit after the post you want to link to and "Copy Link" or whatever your browser says for that ...

Okay, I figured that's probably the more sensible thing you meant, but also, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the kind of "emergence" that I've ...

The way you've phrased that makes no sense in the most straightforward way I'd interpret it, so I can only assume you must mean something other than w...

Nope, glad to be talking about things other than just emergence! Yes. It's not clear to me what "make determinations of its own kind, by its own right...

There is space yes, but we don’t see small things (where even a galaxy is “small” for these purposes) expand because on small scales the forces holdin...

And the way that it works is something that we made up. We decided to make languages where words mean more than the sum of meanings of their phonemes ...

He didn't say specifically between galaxies. New space is being added everywhere. That's what it is for the fabric of spaced to get stretched: a lengt...

That is, ironically, a very anti-emergentist line of argument; it's basically the line of argument that underlies my panpsychist position on phenomena...

It's possible that the senses of the terms I'm using aren't the only once, but in those senses as I learned them, your second example would still be w...

That's like saying "but if magic can happen in stories, it can happen outside of them too". We can make up anything we want for things that exist only...

In a sense, yes. Everything in space would observe itself as seeming to be at rest and at the center of the expanding universe; so yes, we do too, but...

Yep. For instance, if space is expanding at a steady rate (say doubling in size every unit of time), the two objects will get farther and farther away...

Nothing can move through space faster than light, but new space being created does not count as things moving through space. During the inflationary e...

Weakly, yes, but that’s not in question. If we make up something with rules where it happens, sure. The question is whether the universe follows such ...

This is more or less my conclusion as well. Something or another is the completely correct answer, but we can never be sure that any particular option...

I’m not at all denying structure. If you simulate or model a house, it is enough that you simulate or model the bricks etc that it is made of — arrang...

It's a question of whether the new behavior is an aggregate of the behavior of the constituents (weak emergence) or not (strong emergence). E.g. if yo...

The solution is to reject the implicit premise: justificationism.

Specifically strong emergence does, and as I've repeated at least three times now, including right in the OP, that is the specific kind of emergence I...

I've been doing a long series of threads about it here for over a year now, following the list of topics from my aforementioned book (which is really ...

I agree completely, and it's no mere coincidence that my political philosophy is modeled on my philosophy of academics, and in both I treat governance...

Sure, but that's not relevant to the point at hand. One cannot meaningfully give the temperature of a single particle, only an ensemble of particles, ...

And I repeat: reproduction is a product of things atoms can do.

All of which can in principle be broken down to complex arrangements of behaviors of atoms, without requiring that anything happen besides what those ...

I didn’t mean that I aim for philosophy itself to come up with answers about specifically what to do, but rather to provide a better general means of ...

:up: Very clear explanation of details that are actually new to me. :smile:

For the same reason that we collect a variety of goods and organize them on shelves in the same building called a "store": it's much nicer to go to on...

Doesn't seem like threadcrap to me, seems like a perfectly natural segue from the OP through @"Athena"'s question to our discussion: what's the point ...

There are fields of philosophy that do already address political and economic questions, like political philosophy. Many of the questions of political...

I merely saw your own message here: ...and was surprised that you would give such inaccurate glosses of those two terms. I was going to offer a correc...

This is correct, and I’m very surprised to see @"180 Proof" get it so wrong.

:up: :100:

It sounds like you are separating the human agent from nature, i.e. assuming a non-physicalist philosophy of mind. But even if that were the case, the...

So we can tell who is best to helm the ship by looking for someone who professes to have no idea how to helm the ship? What if they were telling the t...

NB, FYI, that the term "hard determinism" refers specifically to the combination of determinism with incompatibilism. It doesn't just mean "full deter...

I agree with all that. What I meant was that it would be great to actually have a leader who is wise, to be able to rely on a truly wise person for di...

Oh I see, you’re confusing is and ought, and trying to ask if the things I prioritize are actually important as though that was a description question...

Thanks a bunch! This is perhaps the most positive response I've ever received to any OP here -- it's exactly what I always want, "I like what you're t...

That would be a sensible interpretation of just his quoted bit out of context, but given the full context it's clearly not what's meant: So I have thi...