We can pick on universals. Do any of the following statements contain an appeal to emotion? It's not a formal argument. We perceive individual things....
The form and validity of each step in an argument, I suppose? Don't we have a criteria for what structure a logical argument takes? It's true that oft...
I think some people are sociopaths and don't feel empathy, because that's how their brains formed. Other people might feel empathy, but they're emotio...
But only if you limit the discussion to your 'experience of'. I don't see how this is possible since many people have made rational arguments for vari...
As I understand it, universals come about by observing two aspects of the world we perceive: 1. The distinctiveness of things, thus particulars. 2. Th...
I guess, if there was a mechanism for rewinding* the universe. One could be invented for a story. Surely there must be some stories out there with thi...
On a certain view of time, the present is all that exists. Time is simply the world undergoing change. As such, it would be impossible to construct a ...
Was uncolonized Africa that much different than the rest of the world? There have been plenty of empires and conquest from many different civilization...
Well, he did want to basically use Wakunda's advanced tech to start a world war to get back at the world for colonialism and slavery. It would have be...
I'm not an idealist. Just pointing out that philosophical certainty is very rigorous. I agree that the sun will come up tomorrow, you're not a BIV, we...
It matters for the whole idealism/realism/skepticism argument. The skeptic would say that if the perfect BIV scenario is possible, then our claims to ...
It was fit for Hume, Kant and many other philosophers, starting with the ancient skeptics. I don't delve into philosophy because it's practical, I del...
Sure, but this isn't the same thing as philosophical certainty. When we want to know if we're certain the sun rises tomorrow, we're not concerned abou...
In a sense, you're right. But if an astronomer were trying to asses the probability of the sun shining tomorrow, they would take into account the poss...
The longer it takes, the better. A hard takeoff singularity is probably disastrous, as they're no way human society can adapt that quickly, and you en...
I hadn't thought of number two. Regarding #1, idealists had attempted to dismiss it with the claim that idealism includes other minds from the start. ...
We definitely have posters who have argued for subjective idealism without utilizing God, even saying that God was the flaw in Berkley's philosophy. S...
> For all these things I just mentioned, I see no better than the blind For some reason, vision is often abused in philosophy as the stand-in for all ...
Selfishness is only bad when it harms others. Since we're social animals, and survival is a social matter involving a fair amount of reciprocation, se...
Yes, and maybe there is something less than good about that. Thus the DIY movement, and all those shows about how STUFF gets made. But is it worse tha...
Indeed! Specialization (along with automation) has allowed the standard of living to go way up, for all of us unfortunate souls who get to be alienate...
Indeed. If not being alienated from production means slaving away on a farm to make ends meet, I probably would rather be alienated with all my consum...
But there are some organisms that don't age, and our reproductive cell line is immortal and doesn't age. So aging is not necessary, at least for some ...
Over the last few years, machine learning has taken off. It's not new, but the data and processing power available reached a threshold where it starte...
There is a problem with taking this approach. If red is an illusion or convenient fiction, then what makes light waves any more real? We've come to ex...
Mill would have strongly disagreed with you. In his day, the equivalent was obscenity or atheism as far as what was deemed unacceptable by society at ...
I highlighted the interesting part, because what does it mean for Kant for something to be beyond ordinary human experience, particularly in context o...
We're supposed to top out around 10 billion at mid century, so it becomes a question of whether Earth can support 10 billion for the second half of th...
Well, there is Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. Sounds like he and quite a few others took it somewhat seriously. You had Elon Musk asking physicis...
So the skeptic claims that we can't know about the external world because it's possible to doubt it? That's a really high standard for knowledge. Ther...
Maybe the evil demon created us as BIVs 5 minutes ago with false memories of a past. But the evil demon itself is a simulation, so he has to trick us ...
Listened to a Science Friday podcast recently where they had physicists on answering questions about what they're excited about. This one physicist sa...
You don't think it would be a problem for the simulation computing our coming up with those idealizations? Here's an interesting question. Could a sim...
Just pointing out that Sagan though the exact value of PI could be determined by the shape of space one exists in. It's not exactly the same, but it g...
At the end of Carl Sagan's Contact book, a human computer finds a binary representation of a circle inside PI created by aliens who shaped our univers...
We do have a mathematical value for PI which is irrational and cannot be computed (in full). A circle's definition is determined by the full value of ...
His subtle wit was so enormous that it sucked the mood of the room into a slowly forming vortex of chuckling, collapsing into outright laughter, swall...
Question for anyone: how does Berkeley distinguish between other experiences and perception? Is my dream tree not an idea? Must ideas be public/inters...
In the first argument, a is interesting: Because Berkeley ignores Hume's point, but many idealist love to use Hume's skepticism to undermine materiali...
Alright, thanks. The second argument I find interesting: Materialists would agree with the bolded part. It's interesting because subjective idealists ...
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