Arkady

I think you are confusing "reason" with "reasoning." In any event, not all thought is reasoning. If I ask you to form a mental picture of a hammer, an...

My objection to your objection was not that one must employ the mind to raise such objections. My point was that phil of mind equally "employs our cog...

"Employing our cognitive faculties in order to study our cognitive faculties" could equally well apply to phil of mind as to cog sci. In any event, yo...

Sorry for the delay in my response: I've been out of town. Perhaps I am just obtuse, but I still don't see the circularity here. I understand that the...

No: the article you linked to describes a problem with replication in certain types of studies (including those using fMRI), as well as false positive...

Then your view is at odds with the evidence. I linked to an article study demonstrating just the opposite of what you say. The study found that brain ...

I put "judgement" in scare quotes because, insofar as this form of technological mind-reading relies on judgments at all, it is a type of judgment whi...

Well, then it is a "judgment" which can be accomplished via machine-learning algorithms. I suggest that you check out the article I linked to in my di...

Nothing in "encode" was meant to imply a causal relationship. The research demonstrates a primitive form of technological-based mind-reading, which is...

For instance, this: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-predicts-what-youre-thinking/. There are other such examples.

The perceptual process and the resulting understanding would themselves be physical processes: pressure waves in the air, photons, or tactile stimuli,...

The portion of your post which I underlined is incorrect: if mental states supervene on physical states, then the physical state which corresponds to ...

The neutron is not a fundamental particle. It is composed of quarks.

I don't see how. Per physicalism, believing that a particular treatment is causally efficacious (which is all that the placebo effect is) has a corres...

Very roughly speaking, supervenience is a type of relation between states or properties such that A supervenes on B just in case A states are an emerg...

Firstly, let me say that I accidentally "flagged" (and then quickly unflagged) your post in trying to respond, so if armed men kick down the door to y...

Then you may claim that appropriating, say, mineral resources somehow "disrespects" the Earth or whatever, but it doesn't follow that it constitutes t...

Then appropriating it for personal use isn't theft, as theft is the unlawful appropriation of someone else's property. If it's not "owned by anyone/an...

It was actually in reference to substance dualism, and pretty much anything that that thesis might entail about consciousness. It might also rule out ...

I would find a couple of things to quibble with here. First, if "concrete" (as opposed to "abstract") is here taken to mean something like "causally e...

:up: Very good post. Re: your point about ethical philosophers working backwards from the desired conclusion to the ethical thesis which supports it, ...

Don't get snippy with me if you can't follow an argument with 2 premises to its logical conclusion.

Then the commons stole it, if we accept the premise that "property is theft."

So it was the property of the commons prior to being stolen? If not, then it's not theft (as no unlawful seizure of property has occurred). If so, the...

Got it.

"Theft" implies taking someone else's property. If property is theft, then who is being stolen from?

A foundationalist would probably disagree with this...it would also rule out all forms of a priori knowledge, it seems to me, as I generally associate...

Sorry, but it's the religious people who claim to have all of the answers. Please stop projecting.

Um, no. The "culture wars" (at least as generally defined in the U.S. - perhaps it's different in Australia) usually refers to the political struggle ...

Perhaps I will. However, in the meantime, you might address my questions, above, regarding how belief in "objective reality" (vs. the alternatives) wo...

Hmm...the thesis of moral realism is more a matter for (meta-)ethics, rather than metaphysics, it seems to me. I take it you are here using "objective...

What would be an example of a "useful" metaphysical answer or thesis?

I admit that I've not read every page in this discussion, so forgive me if this point has been addressed. I've heard scientists such as Lawrence Kraus...

Not sure why it's funny. We may be talking at cross purposes here. I believe I've ably explained why "all men are mortal" is not tautologous. Anyone r...

Suit yourself. However, I don't know that it's "pedantic" to point out that "definitional" and "definitive" are distinct, as "all men are mortal" is d...

Statements can also be tautological by virtue of their semantic structure, however, e.g. all cats are cats. P1 from your argument (underlining mine): ...

"Definitive" is not the same as "definitional." I agree that it's pretty definitive that man is mortal (again, at least at present), but I disagree th...

Sorry, but that first sentence isn't even grammatical. I know that no one is claiming that there exist any immortal men: my point was simply to contes...

Practical impossibilities aside, this says nothing about the logical impossibility of an immortal man, only that it would be inductively difficult to ...

But is this true by definition? The mortality of men could be an accidental regularity. Some men alive today may well be rendered immortal by means of...

It is? How? There are by definition no immortal men? One might also quibble that deductive arguments tell us anything substantive about the world, vs....

But there is something different about them: they are much less likely to occur than non-ordered ones. Any particular unordered sequence is no more li...

I know I'm very late to this party, but... Premise (1) seems rather tautological, wouldn't you say? Given that humans are intelligent, all of their co...

So nice for Schumacher that he has "progressed" to a higher plane of development, which the poor, recalcitrant scientific materialists are powerless t...

This seems more a trope of sexual assault theology than anything grounded in evidence. Many rapes (e.g. those which occur during wartime) seem nothing...

None of these contain arguments. Do you not understand the difference? All you have done is quoted other sources, stated your view, and so forth. But,...

What I "pointed out" is a logical consequence of your own view. If you are unpersuaded by what I am saying, then that is simply a failure of rationali...

This would seem an argument by assertion. As we've gone over many times at this point, some disciplines (e.g. natural theology - for which you yoursel...

Yes, there is a gap in scientific knowledge concerning the origin of DNA (you may be aware that some models - referred to as the "RNA world" - posit R...

Ok. Once again: you said that Dawkins et al claim that life is an "accident," when in fact he has said exactly the opposite. You have said the evoluti...