Marchesk

"The sky is blue." Obviously true, right? Well hold on there We know there's a lot more eletromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere than what we can se...

Or common sense is just plain wrong, as it has often been shown to be the case. After all, if science disagrees with the obvious fact that the sun mov...

They don't exist as objective properties. But they do exist in the same way anything subjective or mind-dependent exists. I take the question to be an...

I would tend to say the table is a collection of molecules arranged table-wise. Ordinary objects don't exist quite as we think they do (yes, I'm hedgi...

Yes. And Philosophy began (at least in part) by challenging that foundation.

But it doesn't show that naive realism is true.

It's pretty easy to show how "Donald Trump is POTUS" is true, though. If I said instead, "Alien life exists out there.", then your criticism would app...

It's asking whether the world is colored in as we perceive it to be. Let's take an example. "Is the sky blue on a clear, sunny day?" On an ordinary la...

Because it takes time to go from pond scum to up-right standing monoliths. There should be aliens running the gamut between us and the advanced ones. ...

The only thing that bothers me about consciousness is that I just can't turn it off when I want to. If I could go p-zombie mode for undesirable situat...

It might be that we're pond scum to the advanced aliens, and they ignore us for the meatier energy sources elsewhere. It could be that we can't detect...

Various hominid species spread out from Africa over the past two million years. Life has a tendency to spread where it can. At some point, life from t...

From a scientific point of view, the world isn't colored, it doesn't sound like anything, it doesn't feel like anything. That's Nagel's view from nowh...

Welcome to the hard problem. For the plot of the movie, yes. And the symbols are green. I don't think our experience of color exists as anything other...

I would say we see color for the evolutionary reason that reflectivity of that small band of the electromagnetic radiation is really useful for naviga...

c. We actually see colors, but they are properties of our visual system, not the objects or environment itself, although they are related to the refle...

Ontological questions aren't about how to use language, they're asking what is and what isn't. Is the moon made of cheese? That's not a question of ho...

Yeah, that would seem to be the likely outcome. There would be a few super-predatory civilizations with some primitive ones like ours that haven't att...

Nukes are child's play for advanced aliens in Cixin Liu's books. Humanity doesn't fully realize this for a couple centuries, though. For example, A nu...

The proof would have to be an argument that other minds are incoherent, since empirically there is no way to prove such a thing. It would be similar t...

"Some" observation "might" show it to be false? Sounds a bit weak. What if it's one study that shows a hypothesis could be wrong? Does that make it fa...

Yeah, I should have reread it and changed how it was worded. It kind of makes a difference to how people discuss the issue. There are some things the ...

Sure. But let's say for sake of argument, since I don't know what to think about all this, that black people feel like the white people want them to a...

So I thought that was naturalism, which isn't committed to materialism. You could be an idealist and a naturalist as long as ideas have no supernatura...

It's also because calling anyone a villain and saying their identity is villainous puts them on the defensive and sounds like an attack. It could be f...

Well said.

I don't agree with her obviously, but to be charitable, maybe she meant that the racial category of being white is founded on racism, and those implic...

I probably phrased it in a more provocative way that sounded like that. Anyway, I'm not sold on everything the actual diversity trainers said, but the...

Capitalism's boundless talent to take anything and use it for marketing.

I'm questioning where the line is between clear discrimination, and inferred discrimination because of all the little things. As I said, one minority ...

Agreed. But it's the deprivation of life, not the death itself for that individual, since they stop existing. The deprivation of life often effects ot...

To be more precise, the explanation was that majority populations for things like race, gender and orientation have had the power to oppress the other...

Pretty much that was laid out in the intro, and majority means any group that has power over other groups. So you could be in the majority in some cas...

I didn't say they were, did I now? I said one person in the room said it. A white employee. A lot of contentious things were said by different employe...

Unless you're a pacifist, then war is going to present a problem for always doing the right thing. So will survival situations. But let's take a simpl...

That is correct, but it was only one person, they're not upper management. And the two diversity trainers didn't say that. What they said is we all ha...

A quintessential bitter crank comment. Love it.

This is an interesting point, and there was an incident in the meeting where one minority person had to wait a bit to be able to have their say, so an...

That's an interesting observation. Whiteness remains at the center, for good or bad. It's the thing to focus on. Kind of narcissistic.

Well no, but management went into crisis mode after the meeting and had an intense meeting, followed by drinking, so I heard.

It does very much sound like that, but to be fair to that position, what is being argued is that the social construction of whiteness as a category is...

Some minorities in the meeting were expressing concern that they were going to be subjected to this discussion because white management decided that i...

It would be better to not have persecution. That won't remedy the injustices of the past, or make current injustices any better.

This was a white person, though. There were a couple other white people who took on the role of talking for all white people, which was annoying.

The person said that as a white person — that their existence was harmful to others, and this was a hard realization to deal with, but it was importan...

It was said, and I was quite irritated by it. Why do you think I made that up? There is almost no position too ridiculous sounding that someone hasn't...

Nobody knows whether probability waves are real. The wave function just tells us the likelihood of finding a value when there's a measurement. The thi...

The problem is that mental processes don't seem to be fundamental. They exist when brains develop, which only happened after animal life evolved. Panp...

Right, but metaphysics should be informed by science. It would be philosophically ignorant to espouse the five elements nowadays. Just like how discus...

Ontology and also physics.