Marchesk

One could flip the cave allegory so that the forms are the shadows on the wall, and our experiences are being in the sunshine. So it's the philosopher...

Mathematical?

So the real question is how viable is the theory that language provides a mechanism for disparate parts of the brain to communicate which otherwise wo...

But I think the idea here is that language allows us to form associations which wouldn't be possible otherwise. Somehow, it allows different regions i...

Depends on the pain. Is it the pain of running an ultra-marathon, or is it the pain of losing a child? Is it the pain of trying to meet a deadline for...

Sure, but for some reason, rats can't combine blue and left together to understand left of blue. Is that because they lack language, or because their ...

Yeah, but I've been asking myself that question the last couple weeks as I live my life, and it very much depends on how I feel. Sometimes I feel the ...

No it's not. And it's scientifically false. You want to know what the truth is? We all begin life as females. You might have noticed that you have nip...

Metaphysics? LOL. What he was doing is degrading half the human race due to his cultural prejudices as the privileged gender. There is nothing metaphy...

Or maybe he was bitter, caustic and anti-social which drove people away, and thus he masked that with his own inflated sense of self-worth. Geniuses a...

Certainly doesn't help one's attitude toward life.

So that means all the professional philosophers since then who disagreed were not very good at argument. I doubt that.

Maybe people engaged in philosophical discussion deliberately choose to not answer questions as a debate tactic. Or they don't like your questions and...

One small improvement would be mood alteration. There are some individuals who have a mildly manic temperament. They tend to be overachievers. It shou...

Sure, life is fundamentally impermanent, and no amount of progress will change that. While that can be unsettling and depressing, if somehow I was pro...

Well, yeah. If it's the heat death of the universe, I'm not getting too depressed about that. Of course I'm not going to be around for those billions ...

I just see that as a potential flaw in the pessimist position. It's one thing to note everything that sucks about life, it's another to convince peopl...

Anyway, I'm led back to the point that whether life is worth living is a subjective matter determined by how the individual feels about life. The prob...

Also a note on suffering. I don't dislike all forms of suffering. Some suffering is actually worth it to me. Last night I played tennis for several ho...

But there is progress, and that's undeniable. It's not evenly distributed, but the trend has been toward better nutrition, sanitation, shelter, educat...

But whether this bothers me or not depends very much on my mood. If I'm depressed, I will tend to agree with you, as I did in my PM. But now I feel di...

But is everyone bothered by that? Sometimes I like having desires, even when they aren't met. Sometimes I like the struggle. And sometimes not. It rea...

But sometimes one does experience contentment with life, and feel good doing whatever they happen to be doing. Maybe it's just a fleeting feeling, and...

That can work with things like boredom or minor annoyances. It's a little bit different when tragedy strikes. A storm that kills thousands of people i...

There is that, but I think the pessimistic position goes much deeper. It's concerned with the nature of being a conscious animal, not that material pr...

Problem is, what's the alternative? Either you have input from the general population, or a select few get to run it. Either way, it's still people - ...

The reason for this is political, not military. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are all winnable if you don't care about casualties. World War 1 ...

Yeah right. But they probably like to think they are.

Embodied cognition emphasizes the role that the kind of bodies we as humans have play in thought, perception, etc. This is in opposition to computatio...

By this you mean a BIV type scenario I take it, because it doesn't make sense that our entire life experience could be the ordinary kind of hallucinat...

Apples aren't a topic in Quantum Mechanics. You're assuming that the microphysical is all that counts, and everyday objects can be dismissed because p...

As an addendum to my post above, Simon Blackburn wrote that philosophy exists because there is a loose fit between mind and world. I found that fascin...

If there is no progress in philosophy, then why is that? Are the questions that philosophers ask unanswerable? Are they bewitched by language? Is perh...

That nobody has been able to come up with a convincing physical or non-conscious explanation for consciousness, and philosophers such as Chalmers, Nag...

There is a difference between experiencing pain, and experiencing misery. That's why I brought up the sports analogy. Some people voluntarily choose t...

If we can achieve immortality (of a sort), I'm guessing we'll be able to give birth to people who don't suffer.

The hard problem of being a rock? Is there a possible world of p-zombie rocks?

Over on the other site in the unmoderated section, you started a thread raising the question of how antinatalists can go about convincing the world to...

I think TGW's goal is to convince people to stop procreating. Now I don't think the antinatalists have a snowballs chance in hell of stopping the enti...

Would be interesting if some panpsychist wrote a first person story from the the POV of a rock.

But then why do people choose to do painful things such as running or climbing tall mountains? It seems like the suffering accompanied with such endea...

What else would make it good or bad, as far as living one's own life is concerned? Are you arguing that there is an objective criteria for judging how...

Yes, there is that. It was more of a snarky remark that antinatalism seems to be coming from comfortable people living in the developed world than peo...

It's a question of whether a person feels that the bad outweighs whatever good they get out of being alive. You seem to be arguing that people can't a...

It's not that problems aren't real, it's whether those problems make a person's life not worth living. I don't think that suffering and problems alone...

Isn't life being miserable a matter of how one feels about life? Person A feels that the various sufferings of life make it not worth living, but pers...

This feels like you're projecting your own pessimistic view of life on others. Maybe most of us find it worth living, most of the time. Or that's how ...

It's depressing because we're already born, and because it counters the natural optimism bias. What I can't be sure about is to what degree it's corre...

By prioritize, you mean funding? Or do you mean preaching that it's a moral obligation to pursue one philosophical school of thought over others?

Maybe God is concerned that you're not getting enough?