Marchesk

Like Maxwell's demon or Schrödinger's cat?

If you're going to straw man it, sure. But it's just expressing a modern version of age-old concerns about skepticism, because our heads are the jars....

The p-zombie argument has little to do with ethics, but one might argue that torturing a p-zombie wouldn't be wrong since it doesn't feel pain. Howeve...

Sure, what does white police officers kneeling on a black man's neck have to do with wage slavery? Police abusing their authority happens under any ec...

God forbid people have a places to work and shop.

Do you not care about local businesses? What about when the businesses (local or chain) relocate, leaving their area more destitute?

Oh yeah, I'm not pessimistic about the human race's survival. Even if Yellowstone were to blow or there was a squid uprising. Just saying we still hav...

Also, the p-zombie thought experiment is good for pointing out the difficulty with incorporating consciousness into a material framework. But also the...

The problem with p-zombies is that they can debate consciousness in just as nuanced a manner as a philosopher like Chalmers or any of us discussing ou...

And we're not even halfway through 2020.

Also because the Christians lost their power over the state, so now they can't force everyone in society to be at least nominally Christian.

It would seem crows have neurons that can represent number of items, corresponding to evidence they can do simple counting. In the old story, it would...

The flaw in the reasoning is to suppose that because X and Y are opposites, the rest of A-Z must fall in between X and Y. But they don't. Water and fi...

You could have done otherwise in a parallel universe where random stray particle of radiation interacted with a microtuble in your brain.

Claims of unsustainability have been made since Malthus, but so far technological progress has outstripped worries about carrying capacity, energy and...

Just to give an example where it could matter, creationists could use that to dismiss evolution as merely an appearance. The underlying reality was cr...

And here is a good example (skip to 0:52 or when the treadmill is turned or 1:08 when the cat starts testing the moving surface with its paw). We see ...

I understand the reasons for thinking that, but it does undermine evolution, cosmology, geology as explanations for how the world as it appears to us ...

Problem is that if it's an incoherent notion, then science is undermined when it comes to things like evolution and our origins. How did we come to ex...

But it reminds you of the ideal soup, which you can directly perceive if you just leave the cave of your manifold impressions for the unrefracted ligh...

Do you know what the proper interpretation of Kant's view on this matter? Did he think the environment was structured in a way related to the manifold...

So Parmenides, but a soup instead of a sphere. It's weird how philosophy eventually circles back around to its roots, in modern drab. Or maybe Thales?...

I think Michael has also supported this version of realism in past discussions, but I'm not sure I understand. How are real objects dependent on our m...

I was too focused on arguing against naive realism to realize that before. Hmmm, I might be convinced by your approach.

I think jamalrob is arguing that how an object looks, tastes, feels only applies to perception. There's no such thing as what an object looks like wit...

I mistook your critique of indirect realism as a defense of direct realism, even though you briefly mentioned some correlationist stuff at the end. So...

From what I recall of similar arguments in the past, the conversation always faltered over the meaning of "direct" and "realism". It would inevitably ...

That's the basic position of direct realism. And why are direct realists at pains to defend directness? Because of epistemological concerns that indir...

It means the perception is not a faithful mirror of the object, and therefore can't be direct. If we're not aware of objects as they are, then we don'...

Let's take tool use. I know how to use some tool. But the tool doesn't solve my current problem. Upon thinking over the situation, I realize that if I...

There seems to be more going on in your cat's head than you allow yourself to believe.

A question is whether your approach to belief can explain all of your cat's behaviors. Animals need to problem solve and adapt to a changing environme...

And it's here that an unbridgeable divide opens up between those who are convinced of the hard problem and those who think it isn't a hard problem. Ei...

Well, it walks like a behaviorist and talks like one. A more hip, modern one, but when you say: My behaviorist alarm is triggered. And then you wish t...

I don't agree with behaviorism, and I think there's a lot more going on in the brain than being able to move about. That's my belief, right or wrong.

If the direct realist is committed to defending naive realism, then yes. On of my biggest difficulties with this debate over the years is the meaning ...

I think animals do more than what the current neural networks are capable of. And that that would be form concepts about the world. For animals, this ...

IMO, your argument works better if you jettison the indirect/direct distinction as mistaken by both camps, which I think you've been saying in a way.

Overall good post, but here I sense a problem. What gives your cat confidence the floor is solid so that it moves its legs confidently across it? It's...

Back when Banno would start one his famous 100 page discussion about apples or chairs on mountains. At some point in the distant past, the idealists c...

I deleted that part, as it's a bit unfair. But some people do take perceptual relativity seriously.

Maybe not dogs, but birds and insects do, since they can see colors we can't. As for dogs, there is smell and those big ears they have.

So it would seem that the direct realists are defending a correlationist view of perception, while the indirect realists think perception is like a si...

The default common sense view of almost everyone going about their daily life, and everyday language would be that naive realist position. The world i...

Which raises the question of what exactly the direct realists are defending. If it isn't a direct awareness of the object itself, but rather a relatio...

Actually it seems like Reid had a more nuanced view of color which sounds more indirect (or relative), unlike the primary qualities of shape and size....

Unless they happen to be color realists. Thomas Reid was one if I recall correctly.

Usually in context of illusions, you investigate further. If you walk five miles through the hot desert to the oasis and it isn't there, then you know...

Wouldn't that be true for both direct and indirect realists? So when most people see red, that means they have a direct awareness of the object's refl...

Our brains could have evolved to correct for that, if it had been advantageous enough. Our brains do corrections for lighting conditions, and of cours...