Marchesk

You do have 007, who's kind of like Batman in that although he has no actual superpowers, he does super heroic things backed by all the technical gadg...

The infinite set of empty sets?

Sets all the way down.

Exactly. There is no such thing as an entirely empty universe with nothing in it. Agreed. Also all the people that don't exist, or are dead, or will b...

Absence of anything. I'm not aware of anything in reality that matches that.

No. Just pointing out that the space isn't nothing. It's just not building material.

Not even God? Pretty much. So is popping into.

That sounds like a really weird way to phrase building a house. But okay, you're creating space for rooms. It's only nothing in the context of it not ...

Well, the atomists thought the void had to exist for a variety of reasons. But modern physics makes space out to be something and not just a void. It'...

If we're trying to show why something cannot come from nothing, then a good starting place would be to decide whether nothing has any ontological exis...

The absolute vacuum .... I can't tell you how much that language bothers me. Perhaps the actual math/physics makes sense, but what he's saying sounds ...

Meaning to us, but that doesn't mean the absence of something exists as far as nature is concerned.

But in order to play Chess, you have to follow the rules. Otherwise, you're playing a different game.

Other than things exist occupying specific times and places?

So chunky stuff all the way down? I go back and forth on the reality of mathematics.

Lucretius made the argument that something can't come from nothing or else anything could pop into existence at any time. We don't observe that, there...

That does raise the question of what matter is. Tegmark has a point about physical properties being mathematical.

So was it a quark soup?

But then what about cosmology? Was matter there at the beginning? As for not understanding, we have math to help with that. Why should we expect to un...

He did have access to the writings of the atomists, right? I think their reasoning was superior, but lost out for other reasons.

What about fields and energy? What makes matter more primary?

That's one view. But matter might supervene on fields that also make up space and time. Consider the earliest point in the universe right at the Big B...

Is your argument in the OP that ontology is confused because we need to be looking at language games instead to see what is going on when we categoriz...

A Monolith. Haven't you seen the prelude to 2001: A Space Odyssey? But seriously, csalisbury has a point. Why build a philosophical theory of language...

I voted for realism and rocks in your poll. My thinking would be that everyday objects exist more or less as we experience them (with the addition of ...

So what does that entail? My problem with ordinary language philosophy is that it seems to stick it's head in the sand regarding the difficult metaphy...

I should have specified that the ontological makeup that results in the reality of the human experience (everyday objects, time, space and what not) a...

I don't know that reality is properly material, or even completely physical. It's something with those sorts of properties and relations, but it's not...

I'm sure it's a range, as with all things in philosophy where opinions differ. Personally, I don't think subjective idealism is very tenable. It's har...

Banno has posted survey results of professional philosophers before where a large majority agreed with realism. However, I don't know if that was prim...

Can you die in your dream?

My thinking is that we interpret the AI as playing itself in chess because we've set it up to train itself in a way that leads to self-improved chess ...

Oh, well that's a good question! I guess the answer would be yes, because computing a game is the same result. However, I'm open to questioning whethe...

The constructivist answer would be no, only the games that have been played exist.

The arrow of time is provided by thermodynamics and the initial state of the Big Bang, which is observation-independent, suggesting some kind of mind-...

A problem for this interpretation is that the necessary cosmology, astrophysics, geology and evolution would have to be dependent on future observatio...

Plus the focus on this life that Stoicism and Epicureanism offer, which is more grounded and reasonable than focusing on sin and the afterlife.

But we don't have to, if we don't agree with Nietzsche's perspective, particularly on science.

Superstrings, branes, parallel universes, wormholes, singularities, gravitons, pilot waves and any other postulated physical entity that lacks empiric...

Lying in the real world isn't exhausted by the above. We lie to protect other people's feelings, to provide boundaries for ourselves, to protect ourse...

Is anyone going to actually in real life tell a murderer where their friend is in order to uphold some principle of truth telling? The answer is no. A...

That's a sort of Wittgensteinian or pragmatic position to take, but it's not realism, since realism is concerned with things as they are, not as they ...

If we can't perceive things as they really are, then direct realism is impossible, since realism is concerned with things as they are, not as they app...

The selfish gene evolving the meme machine producing the intuition pump, including multiple drafts, but no theater.

Do you have an example of a rogue metaphor?

Do you think it's possible for metaphors to be misleading?

That language makes me squirm a bit. Grasping is a metaphor. It makes it sound like the mind is an animal reaching out to concepts.

Those scenarios were just meant to illustrate what an indirect realist means by being aware of a mental image instead of the physical object itself. A...

I didn't say perception wasn't veridical. I said it's not direct when we're conscious of a perception.

It's the experience of dreams that's relevant, because it demonstrates that it's possible to have a perceptual-like experience where the content is cl...