Marchesk

I'm going to guess that asking why something self-explanatory necessarily exists is a meaningless question. Finding the explanation should dissolve th...

Maybe so, but what was Witty trying to get at here? That there is a reason why the world exists, but it's beyond our ability to know?

But then Hume uses the turkey/thanksgiving metaphor to explain how our belief in the future being like the past is merely a habit of thought and not s...

Have to think about that. Take Humean causation. It's a brute fact that the sun has always "risen" each morning. But that leaves me doubting whether t...

The best attempt I've seen is trying to argue for God or the universe necessarily existing. That there is some reason why God, the universe, mind, etc...

Sure, but the problem with this is the same problem when everyone gets to interpret the sacred scrolls for themselves, and decide what God or the gods...

Would that be like the Son & Holy Spirit parts of the Christian Trinity that eternally depend on the Father or Son/Father relationship for existence? ...

Yes, that. My metaphysics is Lovecraftian. Laws of nature are monstrous beings.

Instead of responding specifically, let's take an example. One can state that constant conjunction of events is brute. It just so happens to be the ca...

That is an interesting point. But then you're putting the creationist grounds for faith on par with any philosophical considerations, just as one exam...

I get that, but if nominalism can't explain why we find it necessary to utilize universal types to make sense of particulars, then it hasn't resolved ...

Or hand waving, which Landru loved to do with experience, self and language, which is odd, since Moore did it to defend realism. I mention Landru, bec...

To briefly summarize the restated problem concerning electron charge in my last post, the similarity between distinct properties is numeric, and numbe...

That's a good way of explaining it. But that still leaves a question. How is it that separate properties have the same value? In virtue of what are th...

I suppose. So the only difference between a contingent fact and a brute one is bruteness. It's just odd that some things are contingent and others are...

I accept that the electrons each have their own charge, but that raises the question of how it is that electrons would have the exact same property.

:D

Right, so when physicists say that every single electron in the universe has the exact same charge, isn't that like saying every single person shares ...

So laws of nature would be ruled out. A lot of physics would be approximation. Every electron in the universe couldn't actually have the exact same ch...

No, there are similarities and differences among particulars in the world. That much we clearly experience. Maybe I misunderstand nominalism as failin...

No, I mean like the rules of a game. There is nothing in nature that makes chess have the rules it has. Humans arbitrarily decided how the pieces woul...

I don't understand how humans generalize details in a non-arbitrary way if nominalism is the case. There must be something about certain details that ...

I don't see how that's possible.

So take the nominalism/realism debate about universals. Reifying universals would be mistaking the universal abstractions in our language for universa...

How about, if there was not something related to x that is also true of the world, then x could not describe the world. In the case of paint, that wou...

It is quantifiable, though.

Let's say I enable conditions for you to rob a bank. I give you a weapon, a getaway vehicle, code to the safe, and the best time to commit the robbery...

For example, isn't gravity posited as the cause of planetary orbits, black holes, the rate of objects falling, etc? If our universe lacked the force o...

Some causation involves a very complex system such that we can't exactly identify what causes what, except at a high level, such as the sun warming th...

Do you doubt that the sun heats the heart? Is there anyway this is mere correlation (outside speculative metaphysics and matrix/God scenarios)?

Seems like causation is inherent to the concept of mechanism. Why does it rain? Because the heat from the sun evaporates water into the atmosphere. Th...

There have been lottery wins and millionaire athletes who have squandered their wealth and ended up poor. And then there are those who have invested a...

Maybe in theory, but what in practice will motivate enough people to be average to make this post-scarcity world work? A lot of incentive comes from b...

Just heard a short interview of Peter Singer by the BBC. The interviewer asked him whether pursuing a field that could have made him a lot more money ...

Dawkins is trying to justify our short existence as meaningful by using such a metaphor. Death isn't so bad if you consider all those unfortunate soul...

There's no way that anyone understands everything in any field of consequence. That's certainly been true in Information Technology for a long time, e...

It's no more stupid than art, sports, music, or brewing your own beer.

Voluntary extinction was never realistic for humans, either. Best the anti-natalists manage is to convince some people not to breed. Not as if that wi...

Good point regarding Camus, but I do like the idea of intelligent life in the universe evolving into a much better state, even if it makes us fodder. ...

LULZ!

I wonder if Camus ever wrote about procreation. Is giving birth a form of rebellion against life's absurdity?

I've made a similar argument in the past against anti-natalism. But anti-natalism is arguing against bringing more people into this life, not against ...

Right, particularly because the God talk very much depends on who is doing the discerning.

How in the world would we know what sort of working God is doing, though? Just because people put to writing claims about God doing this or inspiring ...

But you only step in the same shit once.

An unconscious desire would be some motivation you're not aware of that influences your behavior. The psychological explanation is that what we are co...

So the interaction is what makes statements about slabs, apples and stars true?

If we ask why water is a liquid within a certain temperature range and pressure, we know that's because of it's chemical properties. If we ask why som...

Sure, but the issue is that it seems like language can describe most of the world in scientific terms, so the question is what makes minds unique? Par...