What if I said that I feel a certain way, and someone else disagreed with me? That actually does happen on occasion. Or they disagree with what I clai...
I wasn't referring to the origins of science, only the actual discipline that exists now. I agree with your definition: "Science is the process of bui...
That's a really good point. Hadn't thought of it that way before. Not sure. You do raise an interesting question. Someone who's committed to radical s...
Science and technology are separate. Technology predates homo sapiens. Science as a discipline is relatively recent. Science is about coming up with t...
I would add creature-dependency to the relative-objective test. The dead animal smells awful. Most humans would agree. But turkey vultures probably fi...
Probably not. The one difference here is that Plato was a student of Socrates, but Paul never met Jesus in the flesh! Paul's Christianity is revelatio...
It did take over three centuries. Maybe there were, but is there any actual evidence to this? I mean, is there anything definitively showing the exist...
That's what I think. Disembodied consciousness is probably incoherent, at least for human beings, because the only consciousness we know about is an e...
How do they know for sure that Paul didn't invent Jesus? I know that's not a popular view, but some interesting points have been made along those line...
What it's like to be a Ghost: Your body is nearing death. Your consciousness become disconnected. You are now disembodied. Do you float up, or does gr...
This reminds me of the tv show, "The OA", where the main character tells a story of having been abducted by a mad scientist who repeatedly bring her a...
Fair enough, we should all be open to revising our world views as the arguments and evidence support doing so. However In this case, there is a huge c...
Assuming this is actually true, it's only part of the equation. You still need additional land for farming, mining, water, factories, business, parks/...
One consideration would be the history of being under Machine rule. According to The Animatrix, humans started the war out of jealousy and fear of mac...
Isn't that the mission of Zion in the Matrix movies? To disrupt the existing social order and free the humans? It's interesting that the third movie e...
What matters is that people are being killed for the cause. In the Matrix movie, Morpheus, Neo, etc. never really give a defense for doing it. It's ju...
Would you want someone to say that they loved and cared for you, but they didn't gain anything from it? That their concern for your well being was not...
Is this really why people rush in to save someone from a burning house? Do you think the would-be rescuer sits there and debates with themselves until...
If it was for promoting the survival of the species, why would those acts be selfish? Acting for the good of others is not defined as selfish by most ...
How about a conventional computer running a simulation of a billion chinese using pencil & paper over a century to simulate a conscious society of hum...
This thread hasn't been commented on for a while, so it doesn't matter. I don't dismiss idealism out of hand, because I've been involved in plenty of ...
Proof might not be doable in metaphysics, but I take it to be a most reasonable inference. If a plant is observed to have grown while nobody was aroun...
But what if it's a simulation of a human society and not just a brain? Would all those 1s and 0s written out on paper over a century have experiences ...
Supposedly a Jupiter-sized computer could perform one million ancestor simulations a second, so I guess all the boring detail isn't that big a deal, a...
You could reject that consciousness could be emulated (not just simulated where the Sims act as if they were conscious) and still be a physicalist abo...
Is this spontaneity a form of last Thursdayism? Also, the spontaneous brains would involve the formation of an environment I can survive in long enoug...
In the old days, this kind of thread would go 100 pages, with much talk of apples, cats on mats, and the height of Mount Everest before it was catalog...
And without some kind of universal perceiver, the idealist has no way to justify the existence of other minds. The universal perceiver plays the role ...
Ideas as in perception, not concepts. That's the sense-data theory of perception that Locke, Hume, Berkeley and others have championed. And it does br...
Au contraire. The materialist can just deny that perceptions are ideas in the mind. It's my understanding that the majority of professional philosophe...
This is what an idealist needs to do. Show how mind A can know about mind B via ideas in mind A. What is the connection between one mind having ideas ...
Is that like how software can interact with other software without an intermediary (hardware)? For a materialist, the mind is part of a living body, n...
We can't be certain, but we can strive for reasonable beliefs. I'm arguing that idealism is less reasonable than materialism when it comes to other mi...
But Inception does explicitly state that the people you encounter when entering someone else's dream are projections of the dreamer's unconscious mind...
It's like claiming that we're all dreaming. Take the movie Inception. On one interpretation, the main character is inside a dream the entire movie. If...
Because the substance of idealistic bodies is ideas in the mind of a perceiver, not a shared world of material objects. Idealists don't have a body. T...
An idealist can say it, but I've not seen it backed up. What is it that connects the ideas in my mind of your behavior to your actual behavior, which ...
A materialist can say that it's inconceivable for a human being to act like they have a mind but not have one, since mind is necessary for human behav...
I don't know. It seems like it has an epistemological problem regarding other minds. As an analogy, say both of us are BIVs. I have experiences of a w...
The problem here is that sense-data are sense-data for some perceiver, not an independent bundle that anyone can perceive. Unless you want to invoke G...
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