Marchesk

That makes sense. So going back to your previous posts on Moore's demonstration that he has hands as proof of a physical world, ordinary language supp...

This leaves out the part where we also feel the pain and learn to associate our sensation with how other people are talking and behaving. Our ability ...

According to whom? Prediction is only one part of science. Understanding the way things are is another.

But that isn't true. We have the ability to infer what we can't sense by how it interacts with what we can perceive. We can also figure out which prop...

What does truth have to do with utility or perspective? I understand truth to be the way things are, regardless of whether it appears that way to us, ...

I'm not entirely happy with my response. It's true that pure snow looks white to humans. But is it true that snow is white in the same way that snow i...

Would having an experience of "thinking, therefore I am" count? Or feeling existential dread?

We can and do go deeper with science, which is a combination of reason, observation and testing. We can't see subatomic particles or radio waves. But ...

Simply misleading could be simply deadly if one sees a mirage in the desert, mistaking it for an oasis. Anyway, my point is that there is a difference...

My point was that we have a distinction between appearance and reality because sometimes they differer. Which means that just looking to see that the ...

True, but we could also apply this to various illusions. The stick is bent in water is false even though the light being refracted by the water makes ...

But you could still have the symptoms of ADHD. You would just be called something else like "scatter brained" or a free spirt, or lacking in the chara...

I don't agree with the always part, but your overall point does raise a problem I still have with deflationary notions of truth. We can all agree that...

If so, then this would be a case where Wittgenstein was right about philosophers abusing language.

Which means we can't know whether it's true. But it's also possible there is no truth to be had in this matter, depending on what one thinks about sta...

Right, but that's different from whether there are things we cannot know, because of some limitation to our ability to know. We don't know whether the...

Because statements about things like the color of snow or the location of cats is about things which aren't statements. And if those things are what t...

There are things no human knows. If I ask you what the number of hairs were on Julius Caesar's head before he died, is that a word game? Would we ever...

Depends on whether truth can be something which is unknowable to us.

But this seems odd. You have a statement and then you have a state of affairs. The statement is true if the state of affairs is what the statement say...

Well, it's how you determine whether a statement is true or not. Or, it's what makes a statement true. The snow is white. Okay, so something makes tha...

And octopuses have nine brains - a central one with and one for each arm.

Because the criteria would be different for each one? There is no one standard of justification that applies to all statements.

Even if this is so, we might still want to ask whether a particular philosopher got it right. For example, Was Meillassoux correct that post-Kantian p...

How fast 13.7 billion years flies by?

So it slows down after your dead? I'm not sure about that. Seems like the first 13.7 billion years flew by. But maybe not existing is different than b...

After Finitude and Meillassoux comes immediately to mind.

Consider this dream anecdote from Oliver Sacks regarding one patient: Now I don't know what it's like to experience the world in such a sensory state,...

That was funny! An obvious rejoinder to the beetle-in-the-box is that we talk about our dreams, whose content is inherently private, since nobody else...

That's a really interesting thought. Maybe so. There was a Star Trek Voyager episode where they came across advanced aliens who were descendants from ...

Dennett thinks that subjectivity in terms of the Cartesian Theater or the Hard Problem are an illusion. A trick of language or the brain. There's noth...

In Dennett's case, the mental is redefined to be something objective, such as the functional role it plays. He's never said we don't have minds or exp...

Maybe not if the tape was rewound, or another planet. I think the meaning of the dinosaurs going extinct where the big ones occupying all the niches t...

Truly a great example of convergent evolution. This has taken a silly scifi turn, but it is an ongoing debate in biology (not the Kardashian part, I s...

Or have acid for blood.

Also that our ancestors came out of the trees. I don't know that the Velociraptor line would have gone to the trees for long enough to develop the kin...

Kangaroos seem like they would do just fine. But there are other examples from outside Australia. Elephants were mentioned in the book. There's only b...

Also, this debate has implications for the potential success of SETI. If biological determinism is the case, then it's more likely SETI will detect an...

Those options weren't always unrealistic. Do you mean in contemporary society? That we're not just going to take the guilty from the court room to the...

They sure do disappear. The only way around that is to redefine good to mean something else than what it means for humans. But then, that means God is...

I'm guessing hanging and the guillotine were a lot cheaper, not that I'm advocating that, although I'm not sure giving someone a lethal injection is t...

It doesn't have to be. But it does guarantee that person never re-offends. This is a problem. The standard should be really high for receiving the dea...

Maybe, but I'm not convinced by the moral argument against capital punishment in this case. If you murder a bunch of people in cold blood, why should ...

I'm suggesting it would be preferable to kill someone like that than to let them go because of good behavior, given their propensity toward killing, a...

But compassion for whom? The perpetrator or the victims? There does seem to be a mostly universal desire to punish offenders who break the rules. Stud...

But that's not true, because there is a concept of the victims having justice. That's part of the reason for sentencing perpetrators. It's not just to...

There is a movement based on the feeling that social justice is being forced down people's throats in an unnatural way that is something more than mak...

There was a Columbian serial killer who after being released from a psychiatric hospital disappeared and his whereabouts remain unknown. He was convic...

In some cases the Justice System screws up and convicts the wrong person.

I think death row should be reserved for the worst of the worst where the evidence is overwhelming and they're not criminally insane, which means they...