Yeah, that's the point. Those are things we don't want to include under the definition of life. But your definition does include fire, and excludes mu...
That's basically what I said. We needed replication to create life, but it doesn't have to replicate to be alive. Yet. That's not a matter of principl...
He says it's about access to his "data" and "research". I'm not sure what that means exactly; his posts? (I'm in email contact with him BTW, if anyone...
I think this touches on an underdeveloped field of philosophy. When it comes to prescriptive matters, we have basic ethical theories about what makes ...
Wedges and ramps and wheels are not necessarily designed artifacts, they're just simple shapes than objects can easily take. Complex chemicals, not ev...
Self-replication is necessary for evolution to happen, and evolution is necessary for life to come into being in the first place, but once there exist...
Replication is not a necessary feature of life, but since you asked: organic molecules are already very complex nanomachines that interact with each o...
I think you’re thinking of much more complicated systems than are necessary to count as machines. Simple machines include things as elementary as a we...
Not as the term is used in physics, which is the sense of which I mean it here. A physical machine is a system that transforms a flow of energy from o...
Pretty much yeah. The physical is the empirical, as you say, and the empirical just is the experiential: even the etymologies of those two words are r...
I’m more saying that physicalism properly understood (as Strawson does) is instantiated within Whitehead’s system than the other way around. The physi...
:up: :clap: :100: I don’t think there’s necessarily anything nonphysical about that though. See for example Galen Strawson’s “realistic physicalist” p...
In regards to the subthread about deference to epistemic authority vs kooks and their baseless crazy speculation, may I suggest that there are paralle...
Life is self-productive machinery, where productivity is a property of mechanical work whereby it reduces the entropy of the system it is done upon. S...
As I see it descriptive (factual) and prescriptive (evaluative) opinions are just different attitudes toward the same kinds of states of affairs, wher...
A confounding factor to consider is that as people age they generally find time seems to pass more quickly since there are fewer and fewer new experie...
That’s not the Hard Problem of Consciousness at all. That’s just the fact-value distinction. The Hard Problem isn’t about evaluation, and a mathematic...
Sticks and stones can be constructed out of atoms that are constructed out of particles that are constructed out of fluctuations of quantum fields tha...
What method you use to generate answers to these questions is up to you. Part of the reason I asked this spread of questions was to see if there was a...
Only the Metaphilosophy section. Did you not read past that? The rest of the questions are about ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of languag...
The following is a formally invalid argument that hinges on affirming the consequent in a modal context: P -> Q []Q .: []P Whether those box operators...
In the lower left corner of your post you should see a ‘...’ and if you click that you should see several options including Edit. I’m not sure I under...
Affirming the consequent is when you invalidly infer from “if P then Q” that “if Q then P”. That’s not valid, but inferring “if not-Q then not-P” is v...
Same thing as what? And also, maybe the “extra steps” are an important difference? There are a lot of different views on how anarchism could be implem...
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...
Ends do not justify means in the same way that observations do not verify theories: both are a case of affirming the consequent. But observations can ...
Lif3r, you are saying that anarchy would be hard to maintain (unstable and collapse into another state), not that it is bad. Nobody disagrees with tha...
The aim of anarchism is to figure out a way to enforce moral behavior without in the process of doing so committing immoral behavior by exercising unj...
You don’t understand what anarchists propose. It’s preventing exactly what you predict in your OP. Hopefully someone else will fill you in before I ge...
I would love to be an amateur teacher for amateur students in such a subforum, were it to exist. The opportunity to share my education and help other ...
I did say you can think of them as Platonic Forms if you like, so yes “ideas” in that sense is more or less what I mean. (And also in a Berkeleyan rad...
In the parts of the physical sciences that start to verge on philosophy, I do see a lot of that. Every forum has a crank who thinks he can disprove re...
I'm not talking about it being possible for us here in this universe to actually come up with a perfect mathematical replica of the entire universe, j...
It is a metaphor yes, but you'll note right after where you ended that quote of me, I said "but there is no hardware running the program, the software...
As I said before, progress in philosophy is most often made by dissolving problems, thinking about things in ways that do not give rise to those appar...
I stumbled into this old thread, and it made me feel sad or ashamed that I never progressed past my BA in philosophy and got a PhD like I once dreamed...
Sounds to me like you're having a bout of ontophilia, or something in the direction of it at least. So yes, more or less a spiritual experience. I hop...
Think of it as though the entire universe is a computer program, but there is no hardware running the program, the software is the primary level of re...
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