I am not questioning that physics, and the atomic theory of matter, are significant intellectual achievements. They most certainly are. I am rather ar...
It's mostly the young folks with open (and also unformed and naïve) minds who readily embrace emerging paradigms. Scientists who already have been tra...
Physicists can't agree among themselves what atoms are made out of, let alone what birds are. "...Being made out of..." is a relational predicate of r...
Yes, sure. Scientist sometimes tend to be dogmatic and philistine, especially when they are faithful to the religions of scientism and reductionism. I...
My assertion wasn't limited to quantum theory. Quite the contrary, it purports to apply to all domains of empirical discourse, scientific or not. This...
Yes, I quite agree. This is especially true when the "formal part" of the inquiry is being identified with some abstract and uninterpreted formalism, ...
It's merely a theory of gravitation. It is adequate for the very restricted purpose of understanding the phenomenon of gravitation as a manifestation ...
Of course. General relativity is a deterministic theory. It only tells you what to expect given some empirically realized initial conditions. Likewise...
General Relativity is a theory of gravitation that lawfully relates the distribution of energy and momentum in space-time with the metric of space-tim...
The existence of white wholes is close to being a logical consequence of the existence of black holes (plus some plausible symmetry assumptions). Most...
Not sure what you mean with "not so much..." It's not either one or the other; it's both. According to an IPCC AR4 figure (fourth assessment report) t...
Our exhaling CO2 through breathing is part of a carbon neutral cycle and didn't have any direct incidence on the recent increase of atmospheric CO2 co...
That would be to say that artifacts and inanimate objects (such as rocks, planets, storms and rivers) have merely nominal essences while only human be...
Thanks. There is much to agree with in you post, and maybe some to disagree with (or to clarify about my own position) but I must give to what you hav...
The identity at issue in this thread regarding the ship of Theseus is a relations between particulars. This relations is also called "numerical identi...
It could actually come even closer to replicating the physical condition the ship originally had been in than the continuously maintained ship does. Y...
The reason why someone might collect the discarded parts might be because she sees the process through which a ships is being continuously maintained ...
You seem to be arguing that, in a case where some artifact is being disassembled and later reassembled, then what determines the identity of the reass...
The main obstacle to reaching consensus on the existence of the problem (and the anthropogenic cause of global warming) is the politically motivated r...
Just picking a nit: The continuous Mauna Loa CO2 record reaches back to 1958. There are earlier spot observations when Charles Keeling was refining hi...
This is a standard of evidence that is required before a jury delivers a verdict of criminal culpability, such that the convicted individual is liable...
This is a very important point indeed. While trying to find out ways of explaining "top-down causation" to some friends of mine, this has come close t...
You've only shown there to be no infinite and denumerable totality of facts. There could still be a finite, or a non-denumerable, totality of facts. A...
Yes, I meant "consistent histories". Thanks. Michel Bitbol's paper Decoherence and the Constitution of Objectivity is relevant to this discussion, as ...
Yes, living things, for Aristotle, are the paradigms of substance in the strongest sense. They display a unity of mater and form in the sense that the...
The difference may cut even deeper if, as Aaron R mentioned in another thread, true Aristotelian substances are unities of matter and form, of dunamis...
Were the questions distinctively mathematical/logical? Was there some scientific or philosophical theme that you remember (e.g. paradoxes of physics, ...
It is a very specific sort of substance that strictly obeys Newton's first (or second) law. It's a substance that is either defined as the mereologica...
For sure. Such a robot would be aware that there are objects its world. This sort of objective empirical knowledge is dependent on the existence of a ...
I wouldn't make too much of that. This surprising gloss that Rödl has chosen to put on his project makes him no more of a materialist than Aristotle a...
Even in no-collapse intepretations, there is a process of decoherence into "coherent histories" (analogous to the "worlds" of the many world interpret...
Those must be Self-Consciousness and Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect. The latter book appeared last in t...
I never questioned the explanatory and predictive powers of the special or general theories of relativity, or the heuristic value of the "timeless" me...
Yes, of course. That was part of my point. Special relativity relativizes the concept of simultaneity to "inertial frames of references" that are used...
I agree. Your view contrasts with the view expressed by Sean Carroll (quoted) in the OP of this thread. Physicists often are happy to equate "the Univ...
No, I think you're right about that. Your being aware (i.e. having the perceptual knowledge) that there are objects in the world that exist independen...
This doesn't show that humans can't perform those operations; only that they may occasionally choose not to. Humans don't really instantiate universal...
The recent movie Sausage Party makes the case that some edible plants (and other food items) may achieve self-consciousness at the moment when they ar...
I meant to explain that there is a sense of "self-consciousness" that doesn't refer to the mere outcome of turning one's own gaze inside, as it were, ...
The book by Sebastian Rödl is quite technical and requires some philosophical background. The book by Bennett and Hacker, though, is written in very p...
Well, self-consiousness is the topic of the next chapter in Bennett and Hacker's book. This may not be a phrase that has had an ordinary use before ph...
Yes, we can use the world wrongly. But when we are simply ignorant of hidden features of the objects or phenomena that we are talking about, this need...
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