You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Pfhorrest

Comments

Technically we are accelerating away from the center of the Earth, not toward it. If we coasted in an inertial frame (=freefall) we would end up orbit...
December 10, 2019 at 06:58
Yeah, I get that in much of the world since the Cold War there is this false dichotomy between state socialism and libertarian capitalism, an ideologi...
December 10, 2019 at 06:45
Most people don’t own their own homes free and clear, leaving them perpetually having to bribe those with more homes than they need to live in for the...
December 10, 2019 at 06:28
The quickest way to be rich is by already having more money than you need and lending the rest at interest to those who don’t.
December 10, 2019 at 06:09
It sounds like what you favor is what is technically considered a form of market socialism. That “owners = laborers” part (and equivalently the “econo...
December 10, 2019 at 05:56
That post was in response to someone saying that people need work to keep them busy, even if they don't need the income. I agree people need the incom...
December 10, 2019 at 05:43
In places where cost of living is low, sure, $25k/yr is enough to live comfortably, but most people don't live in places where cost of living is low, ...
December 10, 2019 at 05:41
To be clear, by "capitalism" do you just mean free markets, or do you mean the division of society into a class of owners and a class of laborers? The...
December 09, 2019 at 23:56
You could also just talk about two light clocks or any other physical systems to judge the time passage on the ship and on Earth. All processes on the...
December 09, 2019 at 23:18
That is not an uncontroversial claim, and typically it is people leaning more toward theism who are most likely to object to it. People who think ther...
December 09, 2019 at 22:09
Yeah, a possible solution to the Problem of Evil, an answer to the question of "How can the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God be...
December 09, 2019 at 22:01
This is something I find myself thinking about whenever debating the Problem of Evil. Theists fall all over themselves to make excuses for why the wor...
December 09, 2019 at 21:33
The short answer is "deontologically", but all I mean by that is "not consequentially". Not exactly, at least. I think that the ends don't justify the...
December 09, 2019 at 21:22
I think OP is suggesting a government program making that more available to everyone, and also more research into making more and better of it. And to...
December 09, 2019 at 20:58
Welcome!
December 09, 2019 at 19:39
I wasn't suggesting that that example I gave was the kind of thing Bhikkhu Bodhi meant, just that that's an example of letting shame and fear guide yo...
December 09, 2019 at 19:33
I see absolutely no reason why they would. If by "secularization of values" you mean rejecting appeal to religious traditions, all that means is an op...
December 09, 2019 at 08:20
To insist is that nobody should indulge in any pleasures so long as anyone anywhere is suffering would require that everyone refrain from all pleasure...
December 09, 2019 at 03:55
If people didn’t need to work for survival, there’s all kind of volunteer work that could be done for some sense of purpose and something to do. And I...
December 09, 2019 at 01:53
That is the question of the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, and you already know my answer to that: everything has some phenomenal experienc...
December 09, 2019 at 00:03
I think functionalism is more about implementing a protocol or format or even more generally a... well, a function. AIM on Windows and Mac are differe...
December 08, 2019 at 20:58
You did say “for example” but 60% is WAY too high. Only 25% of individuals make more than the mean individual income of about $50k/yr, while about 50%...
December 08, 2019 at 20:28
On the one interpretation, does she actually get younger, or does she just age much more slowly while he continues aging much more quickly, resulting ...
December 08, 2019 at 20:21
MR is not itself a theory of mind, it’s just a feature of functionalism. Functionalism says that mental states correspond to functional states of (par...
December 08, 2019 at 19:25
The question in the OP isn’t whether God exists, but if people would still have mystical experiences if he didn’t. Since we have examples of mystical ...
December 08, 2019 at 18:13
I think the intended application to history is something like the question of whether WWII would have still happened had Hitler died in infancy. If a ...
December 08, 2019 at 05:38
You know in the original Greek “the Word” is “logos”, which does literally mean “word” but in the context of the time meant more like “logic”, a cosmi...
December 08, 2019 at 03:02
As I see it, pleasure is identical to the alleviation of pain, broadly construed. Pleasure is the feeling of getting something you want — not just of ...
December 07, 2019 at 20:51
Then your list is not a list of all the real numbers. There is no question that there are as many rationals as there are naturals. It’s only when you ...
December 07, 2019 at 19:08
And then Cantor can read down your list and diagonally generate a real number that isn't already on it. Cantor's proof begins with a supposition that ...
December 07, 2019 at 09:48
Giving someone a greater ability to discern good from evil and a greater strength to do what they think they should do instead of doing otherwise is n...
December 07, 2019 at 09:23
If there was an all-loving (all-powerful and all-knowing) God, he wouldn't have made (or otherwise let there come to be) a hell to begin with, or peop...
December 07, 2019 at 04:04
The short answer is hedonism. The long answer requires an analogy to empiricism. When we're appealing empirical experience to judge what is real, we d...
December 07, 2019 at 03:30
The meaning of "prove" in that idiom is the older sense of "test", not the modern sense of "show to be true".
December 06, 2019 at 22:09
Coincidentally(?), the educational YouTube channel Veritasium just put out a short (12min) video describing the butterfly effect and strong attractors...
December 06, 2019 at 21:29
I think maybe you're confusing me with the people I'm arguing against? I didn't say the A and not-A thing you're quoting, that was leo, in response to...
December 05, 2019 at 22:04
To claim that something is beautiful is in essence to claim that it "feels right", where "right" might mean either "good" or "true". Comedy and traged...
December 05, 2019 at 08:06
It's also called a phase space. It's an abstract space wherein each dimension represents one variable feature of some system, and so every point in th...
December 05, 2019 at 05:59
I have read him, extensively. But it was over a decade ago and I'm just posting here for fun, not work, so don't ask me to cite pages or anything. "Ma...
December 05, 2019 at 05:45
Technically correct, but beside the point. If you have a model of the world that says it works exactly some way, observations can prove that it works ...
December 05, 2019 at 01:00
That’s the same as what I said earlier: you cannot prove anything, only disprove. The fact that you can aim a cannon using Newton’s laws doesn’t prove...
December 04, 2019 at 01:57
Correct enough. For aiming a cannon Newton's laws are correct enough but that doesn't make them correct simpliciter.
December 04, 2019 at 00:10
Interesting read. I was going to bring up mathematical chaos and strong attractors but then you already did, so I have nothing more to add now. I can ...
December 03, 2019 at 23:29
I have had similar thoughts before, and even pictured these different facets of myself as different "characters" with their own unique outfits etc to ...
December 03, 2019 at 18:54
Alright, you're obviously not here for a productive conversation but to try scoring some kind of imaginary internet points, so I'm out.
December 03, 2019 at 18:43
No, if my GPS failed to work it would disprove "it" (assuming you mean GR here). Important distinction. Whatever the absolute truth is, it has to be c...
December 03, 2019 at 18:39
Nothing can be proven (only disproven). All of science is educated guesswork (which is still much better than uneducated guesswork).
December 03, 2019 at 18:16
Where it says “on” means “to be”, or “I am”? Yeah, the Greek first-person form of “to be” is the same as its infinitive, unlike English. That doesn’t ...
December 03, 2019 at 04:27
The first sentence of Wikipedia on Ontology and the source for that both mention existence as a part of the subject matter.
December 03, 2019 at 02:05
Prescriptive claims are non-descriptive, but cognitive; that is to say, they are not trying to assert anything about the way the world is, any facts a...
December 03, 2019 at 00:27