Marchesk

Then what was all this about? Looks to me like you're saying our ancestors were mostly peaceful until the white people with their Christianity went co...

I do, and I'm aware that tribes had warriors and conflicts as well, although I'm sure it all depends on the tribe, time and region. I've also heard th...

I guess things were peaceful enough under Egyptian, Roman, Aztek, Chinese, Assyrian, Persian and Mongul rule. It's true, slavery was based on being co...

Except for machines, which only have access to words, but do a fairly good job of translating these days.

There's lots of possibilities in between we all take drastic action right now or the human race is doomed in a few decades. Maybe civilization manages...

That sounds antirealist!

As opposed to jelly fish or neutron stars? Humans aren't special in that. Anything in the universe exists because things are a certain way and not som...

Yeah, but the realist argument is that the world goes on existing without humanity in it. As opposed to the world merely being a kind of appearance to...

https://iep.utm.edu/dummett/#H3 In the general, I take realist to mean the domain in question exists independent of humanity. Man is not the measure f...

According to Michael Dummett, realism about any topic is a commitment to bivalence logic, where the truth value of any statement in that domain transc...

Your points for morality being all three options make a lot of sense, but the question about the objective part is if it's not independent of humans, ...

But then the question here is why not antinatalism, or why don't we all embrace a suicide pact so as to end the suffering? If not either of those, the...

True, so perpetual motion machines and FTL acceleration drives could become possible in the future if there's no reason for the constant conjunction t...

Yes, but there are some difficulties for Humean causation. For one, it can't differentiate between a state of affairs which is said to be impossible, ...

This sounds like Hume's reason has gone awry. The way out is just to admit there must be some causal factor at play in the world, even if we can't obs...

So what you're saying is that we have no reason to think we'll have a habit of expecting things in the future. If there is no reason for constant conj...

I disagree, since theories need to also be predictive. That and every scientist talks in terms of explanation and cause when they're not waxing philos...

No wonder Kant was worried about science after Hume. If we take Hume seriously, there is no reason for anything that happens. Therefore, there are no ...

However in the case of expecting causation and the world to go on being predictable in the future, the habit is always there. So it's not like usually...

What comes in from the environment is noise. The nervous system turns this into information in terms of perception and cognition. Perceptions and cogn...

Are information processors, generators and experiencers also myths?

So why are you still involved in the odd word game? You enjoy sophistry and 100 page threads arguing over the status of red cups and apples?

But then we wouldn't be here. Some alien reengineered biosphere would have been the result. No dinosaurs either :( Maybe that's a resolution to the Fe...

If you're talking about the existing biosphere, that would mean reengineering almost everything including microbes. I'd be really worried about that g...

David, do you view transhumanism as a more likely outcome than the dystopian possibilities given the kinds of technologies involved? Potential dangers...

I don't know what reality fundamentally is, but the question is whether reality includes some sort of abstraction, which would mean nominalism is wron...

It's hard to see how aliens would come up with a different arithmetic for discrete entities and it have the same usefulness. I don't know, but they se...

Both. Were there not 10 chickens before humans were around to count them? The example I always heard was 2 dinosaurs were in a pond, and then a third ...

Those are just different units for the same value. Yes, math is done in abstraction all the time. It's not like there are prime chickens.

Thanks for the book reference. Without having read it, what does the author replace numbers with? If it's something else that's abstract (some kind of...

If that's true, then it should be possible to do physics without numbers. In the world somehow? I don't know, but the symbol 19 is arbitrary. There ar...

Granted, but the historical figure probably expected God to send angels to fight off Rome and restore the kingdom of Israel. He most likely didn't exp...

Obviously I'm not talking about the symbol. It's the number it references, not whatever we use to denote it. 19 is just a symbol. It represents a quan...

The realist argument is that those numbers and symbols are about something which exists independent of us. For us to do the math. Does that mean prime...

The skeptic is responding to Moore’s metaphysical realism. Waving a hand around doesn’t prove anything beyond the experience of having a hand. Moore t...

They typically describe the history of some important experiments and physicists leading to the development of QM along with the various interpretatio...

And prime numbers would have never been discovered without math.

So then give us the English account of QM without any math.

The strongest case for realism is that we can't do science without some kind of abstract entities, whether they're mathematical or other kind of opera...

Sure, so we can dismiss Descartes as being unreasonable when he set out to doubt everything. But the ancient skeptics did provide reasons for their do...

We're not forced to, we're just very strongly encouraged to be part of communities. But if someone really wants to self-isolate, they can do so. https...

Everyone agrees that we have experiences of seeing color, hearing sound, feeling pain and what not. But people are going to hotly disagree on the sema...

How do you suppose behaviors are produced in response to environmental circumstances? The brain must be doing something with the manifold of raw sensa...

So there aren't unpleasant sensations until we create words for them? That makes no evolutionary sense.

Semantics. What difference does it make if we lump all the sensations which hurt into one general category? The matter at hand is the subjective natur...

Pain doesn't come from language, it's biological. We wouldn't have language for sensations or feelings if we didn't already have them. That's why ther...

It would be more like if one person was arguing for universals and the other against by citing physics in support of everything being particular. Whic...

That would always depend on the particular question and poster. Are you looking for some sort of universal ethic here? There is none.

Sure, but it's not telling you what the CPU hardware is actually doing. And binary is an abstraction of electricity being moved around through logic g...

Private conversation.