I wonder why you said that Aristotelian four cause causation "flickered in the background" - on the contrary, it was perhaps at its height during the ...
Yes, indeed, true pleasure is so rare that it's hard to see how it could possibly still be seen as a good, that is, something that is good for us to o...
It's not, though, since apparently if you picked it up and brought it back to its waddle, it would just turn right back around. Also animals like peng...
Or the countless wild animals currently suffering and/or dying in some way, whether that be by disease, malnutrition, predation, infirmity, injury, et...
Sorry to hear that. I can't offer you any of those nauseating self-help three-steps to happiness pep-talks. I conceive of a threshold that people need...
It's not perfect, and it's sort of infected by the scientistic types, but the Effective Altruism movement is perhaps one of the most effective and rel...
Yes, I think I would agree with that for the most part. Very similar to my analogy to heat and friction. Pleasure is something produced through the pr...
To the pessimist, nihilism is worse than pessimism because it ignores values and is thus a bystander perpetrator of the whole disvalue game. To the ni...
Deprivationalism is an attractive theory. All experience is some form of bad, maximizing at a neutral state of mind. But I don't think it's quite accu...
This is perhaps one of the reasons why I'm tempted to eschew the term "pessimism" entirely. "Pessimism" is only "pessimistic" insofar as it is compare...
For those interested, this is a relatively short and thorough introduction to quantum mechanics: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/waves/quan...
Actually, I'd change this to say what is the point of comfortable pessimism? If nothing substantial changes based on your beliefs, what's the point? E...
The problems is that the only thing that feels is you. There is no other thing feeling suffering. If you are feeling pain, but interpret it as pleasur...
Yes, this is probably the biggest issue at play here. Re-defining what "science" is, is exactly how charlatans like Sam Harris get away with murder an...
I go back to your example of a vortex in water. You can't just scoop out a vortex. Similarly I have a hard time visualizing what a constraint is suppo...
I'm not an "expert" but I would recommend "Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed" and "Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed". The "Guides" are typically ...
Only to point out that the irreducible triadicity of relations doesn't mean relations themselves are irreducible. One can pick apart an engine without...
Yet clearly since they are not the same thing, this means they have a different nature. And their nature cannot be completely dependent upon the relat...
I would imagine a whole lot, but this doesn't answer my question: calling the most basic "something" irreducibly triadic is like saying the United Sta...
So as you say, a relation must have three parts. Are these parts themselves also triadic relations? If not, then what are they, exactly? How can we kn...
How am I supposed to understand a concept that is usually used in a reductive sense, like a relation, but is claimed to be non-reductive, irreducibly ...
This is not very coherent to me, unfortunately. By saying existence is x, someone is inherently advocating a kind of monism. I know you call the relat...
What if we want to go beyond the ontic and pursue the status of the ontic itself? Ontic investigations are inherently tied to a human-world relation. ...
If I am understanding correctly, you are saying that when I conceive of the color "red", I am not only conceiving of "red" but also a single (one) ins...
Yes, I suppose I agree with this. You have to be able to conceive of something in order to reject it. Well, I was attempting to construct a view that ...
Raphi, to be clear, you are saying that pleasure is not independently good because it really is only the experience of being in a comparatively lesser...
Exactly. Deprivationalism like this requires the holder to not only reduce pleasure to the activity of removing pain but eliminate the byproduct goodn...
You still have to refute the experience that something feels good. It's not just relief, it's positively independent good feelings. And it wouldn't be...
No, I think you're trying to reduce all human experience to the pleasure/pain dichotomy, which is crude and not the full picture. If everything were s...
No suffering is not "all there is" - evolution not only made pain to act as a motivating scheme but pleasure to counter this. If pain and striving and...
Apparently it's not as simple as you think, as there are still people who don't quite understand what you're talking about. Can you give an example as...
But, again, how does it do this? Is this "power" somehow something "else" other than simply interactions between the parts of the whole? A network of ...
But what is this kind of causality dependent on? Presumably the arrangements of parts. All the parts working together create the illusion of emergence...
Comments