The functionality doesn't explain the subjectiveness of the experience; everything just has subjective experience, but what that subjective experience...
Yes, but the existence of phenomenal consciousness is a trivialism within the worldview (that I have) that of course pigs and cows and rats experience...
Socialism in its broadest sense means any system where there is not an economic class divide between those who own and those who work; where everyone ...
You seem to think "socialism" implies statism; I'm guessing you're thinking of the USSR. "Socialism" just means any system that avoids the consequence...
Then you should be down with libertarian socialism, which is anti-state (hence libertarian) but still looks for other ways to solve the problems of ca...
Here's an attempt to condense a 40 year education into one paragraph for you, then: In the early 20th century, philosophy in the English-speaking worl...
50 years ago is a bad choice of time period. Compare the difficulty in securing basic necessities like housing in 1969 vs 2019. There’s lots of cheap ...
If you admit that poverty is a problem, and you concede the conclusion of this "new" research that unregulated "free" markets result in the rich getti...
That sounds like you're just choosing to ignore the problem then, if you admit that unregulated "free" markets inevitably cause runaway inequality, bu...
As far as the same principles applying to physics, keep always in mind that human societies are just another physical system subject to the laws of th...
Not at all, it posits that ongoing inequities are a result of systemic features of the political-economic system that reward and punish the respective...
The physical world may be reducible to mental stuff inasmuch as physical means empirical means experiential or phenomenal, but minds in turn are insta...
That is an interesting point of view because it seems to derive an “is” from an “ought”: there ought not be any ruler, therefore there is no god. Do I...
Democrats don’t need someone “moderate” i.e. Republican Lite, they need someone who supports things the left half of the electorate actually want inst...
You should hold everyone to the same standards, but the formulation of those standards should include variables for variable circumstances etc. Treat ...
I'd argue for hedonism in a much more direct way from basically exactly that statement. If we start from a place where we have no idea what's "really"...
Setting aside God as a nonliteral, metaphorical, mythical character as Wayfarer describes above, and focusing instead on the logos interpretation, I w...
This seems to be a confused use of the word "believes". I believe that the sun exists, and that its existence is independent of anything anyone thinks...
A system of beliefs grounded in faith, which in turn is uncritical belief, belief not to be questioned. To believe something is to think that it is tr...
Free will theodicies depend on an incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception there is no reason God could not have determi...
Yeah, I strongly doubt you will find agreement on that of God there from theists, and I personally disagree with that definition of religion. That def...
I drew a little diagram of the broad/narrow optimism/pessimism thing for my book last night: http://geekofalltrades.org/codex/images/optimism-pessimis...
You are assuming an incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception, free will has no implications on determinism of lack there...
They can be in error, sure, which is why it's possible that someone could show you good reason not to believe it. But "you don't have good reason to b...
I like using this kind of example to illustrate the argument for critical rationalism. When it comes to why to do (or intend) something, it's pretty m...
I have had anger problems my whole life, that I've always traced back to echoes of things from my childhood. I've never had anything resembling the an...
I agree with that entirely (and just wish I could make my pointlessly anxious brain be okay with it too). There's a lot of different formulations of t...
On a related note, this is a note a wrote to myself last night, that I'll elaborate upon somewhere in the last chapter of my book later: on the surfac...
Nah you understood right, and I know it's unreasonable, but feeling existential dread in the first place is unreasonable, and just knowing that doesn'...
"Meaning" in this sense means "significance", and that's the missing picture in your view of evolution. Evolution does not proceed by a completely ran...
This is actually part of what's sometimes made the existential dread I've been suffering from this past year so horrible. Usually, when I have some ki...
I see. Reminds me of the pragmatist critique of Cartesian doubt, that it is feigned and hyperbolic beyond reason, and that we should instead start fro...
I'll just quote a paragraph from the last essay of my book: Also more recently since I wrote that, the prospect of living forever is also terrifying b...
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