Marchesk

Sure, but they're not fundamental. And it's not clear whether our ordinary conceptions of objects is coherent when factoring in their physical constit...

Because science tells us of many things we don't experience that result in the world we do experience. Radio waves and atoms are good examples. Why wo...

But that assumes our representations are not based on something related existing outside and independent of the knowing subject. After-all, why do we ...

Another interesting property of fields is that they coexist in the same location (or all locations), unlike ordinary objects. Materialism was wrong. O...

That's plausible except there are some fields we can map or interact with. A magnet in the presence of iron filings will show the magnetic field lines...

The view from nowhere exists because science has to abstract from human perceptual relativity to get at the way things are, and not just as they appea...

Goatcha. I voted climate change, because global poverty is on the way down, but serious enough changes to the climate could easily reverse that trend.

You didn't include AI in the list. Some people believe it is the one big existential problem just over the horizon we need to figure out, because it's...

Okay, then what problem do you have with my modern update of the great chain of being, from the very small to the universe? Is there a problem with ho...

What is that you want from an ontological discussion? I think science helps informs us on what exists and what that stuff is made up of, at least down...

Science is successful in telling us all that stuff. But there's still plenty left unexplained like consciousness, causality, the right interpretation ...

It's not misleading since science is very successful in telling us what that stuff is. Granted, it's a bit murky once you get to fundamental physics, ...

Fields, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organs, brain activity, people, societies, cultures, ecologies, environments, planets, s...

The thing is quite a few members on here are ordinary language philosophy fans, and not great fans of metaphysics, so discussing the usage of words is...

I also thought being referred to living things, hence the great chain of being of theology from God on down to microbes, but not chairs or rocks. Unle...

https://youtu.be/q7v5NtV8v6I?t=212 Starting at about 3:38 in the video above, Phillip Ball, an editor at the Journal of Nature, is discussing popular ...

We have our own experience of the world as individuals and human beings, and then we have scientific explanations of the world which are divorced from...

Also lawyers, because somebody needs to decide whether the philosophers are legally responsible for their inaction. And the one person who just doesn'...

Ah, makes sense. I thought you were just pulling his leg.

On a semantic externalism view of meaning, a BIV cannot mean that it's envatted, because it can only refer to the sensations provided by the vat progr...

So, the world-stuff creates patterns that we sometimes find useful and turn into mathematics and physics.

Shades of Heraclitus?

Right, so is math about useful patterns, or about making up arbitrary games, like Chess and Go are made-up games with well defined rules that allow fo...

So let's try this out. I as ruler of the nearby city demand you pay a tax. I have my soldiers take three oxen out of your six. You complain that this ...

Let's say the rules of arithmetic are arbitrarily made up, like Banno's math game. The golden ratio is one result of arithmetic. The surprising thing ...

There is a the one-electron universe hypothesis where all the electrons and positrons are just one entity traveling back and forth through time, thus ...

Like the morning and evening star, water and H2O, temperature and molecular motion, Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, the empty set and 0, or the charge ...

But there is clear progress, at least in terms of science and technology.

Probably so. I was more focused on whether we could understand the concepts if either the aliens sent us something difficult, or they thought a lot di...

Mentioning that he starved himself to death because of a food paranoia tends to grab the attention.

Sure, it might be message. But let's say the signal is in a pattern of prime numbers like with the book and movie Contact, so we would know for sure i...

I believe it's possible to know that a radio source is non-natural without being able to decode the message. Or at least that's what I've heard from S...

Or it's like, Western science is inherently imperialistic and sexist, so we should reject it's truth claims in favor of culturally appropriate ones.

Richard Rorty might be an example. Certainly relativism has been around since ancient philosophy. I believe the Sophists made arguments that truth was...

That makes sense.

No, we have to be able to say that is an action we should not take against others. Thoughts are private to the individual and nobody else's business. ...

If we were to detect an alien signal, but were unable to decode it despite our best efforts, wouldn't that imply incommensurability? Or just really st...

The physiology wouldn't change, but brain processes that integrate that sensory information into perceptions might, if they're mediated by language. T...

Its philosophical bunk all the way down. Right, I take it by that he means there's nothing meaningful to philosophy that can't be addressed by either ...

Hey, I've watched A Beautiful Mind. Being crazy doesn't mean you can't also be an accomplished genius. And I was only referring to the part about star...

i don't expect answers, but I do expect big questions.

Yeah, I don't know. An interesting question that comes to mind is to ask whether it's true that philosophy is bunk, and how we would know that to be c...

Uhhhhh .... sure.

Banno stated in this thread he's convinced philosophy is bunk, so the goal would be to deflate/dissolve philosophical discourse.

That sure would make deflation easier.

Right. Take "The snow is white", for example. So we can all agree it's true in one sense when looking at a patch of white snow. But then turn it into ...

If we took the statement "The sun is setting" from some ancient cosmology made at the right time of day, would it still be true when translated to mod...

Okay, but what if the terms of that schema are wrong (flawed, misleading, contradictory, etc)? Are they still referring to a translatable true stateme...

So if we were to translate 115 into their language, would we have to teach them the missing numeric concept first?

The distinction between appearance and reality is important to the notion of truth. So while it's true that the sun appears to set in the sky, and it'...