T_Clark

Keeping in mind, of course, that effective, reasonably priced, and widely available contraception - a prerequisite for anti-natalism - wasn't availabl...

Well, justified true belief (JtB) is a bunch of gobbledegook cooked up by philosophers with too much time on their hands. I'm not the only one who bel...

Yes, and for those of us who remember what a broken record is, I will play my own - Your ideas are fine and you are welcome to them. I disagree with t...

Well thought through and well expressed. And correct, as far as it goes. Mattering is like meaning, it's a human concept that applies to human situati...

I wasn't talking about specific situations that apply to a relatively small number of children, and, if I understand correctly, that's not what you ar...

Of course he has the right to say that. He just doesn't have the right to inflict his judgment on the rest of us.

I have no problem with this statement of the issue, but anti-natalists, at least as represented here on the forum, take it a lot further. They draw ha...

I don't think this whole "you're an anti-natalist because you're depressed" argument is a legitimate one. Whatever the psychological basis of @"schope...

You and I, and many others, have gone back and forth on this many times. Many of us, most of us, don't see things this way. And yet you are unwilling ...

Well, you didn't answer my question, but then again, really, you did. The answer is "yes," if you were in power, you would prevent other people from h...

If you were king of the forest, would you put restrictions on when and if other people could choose to have children? If yes, what restrictions?

You are misstating my position. What I wrote was specifically in relation to your claim that an unborn child can't consent to being born. I said that ...

A bunch of really crappy fantasy and military science fiction available on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Why do the fantasies always seem to involve harems...

Philosophy was once all there was. It was science, politics, morality, psychology, religion, and all the other things where intellectual investigation...

You say you're not arguing anti-natalism, but it seems like you are. Or maybe I've misunderstood what you're trying to say. As for your point about co...

You're right, humor can be gentle. I'm trying to get to something I didn't express well. Maybe it's that humor has to be subversive. It has to undermi...

Analyzing or explaining humor doesn't work. It just sounds lame. It is lame. So, I decided to try an impressionistic approach. Humor is play. Play is ...

And I say a good job with enough pay to live a good life is good enough. As the wise woman said, the ideal is the enemy of the good. Good enough is go...

We moved into our house in 1979. When we got here, there was a small garden including a few unhealthy strawberry plants. My wife is a gardener. She co...

I have three children. Youngest 29. Oldest 37. All three went to college, although only one graduated. Two of them are now farmers and the third becam...

Arguing with @"schopenhauer1" can seem like a pointless exercise. No matter how often you tell him you kinda like your life and don't feel like things...

Looks like I made the link wrong, but it seems you are already involved in the discussion.

For a counter-argument to that, you should take a look at Schopenhuer1's thread I linked.

A good new word for my list. Thanks.

I accept and acknowledge that you feel differently about this than I, and many others, do. I agree that my ideas of what is best don't apply to you. S...

The argument you are making is the justification for anti-natalism - the belief that people should not have children. It has been discussed on this fo...

Here are some definitions of "heap" I got from the web: An untidy collection of things piled up haphazardly. A collection of things thrown one on anot...

We've all been through this argument with you before. Many of us don't share your feelings about life. I'm almost never bored. Actually, maybe never. ...

I could tell from your posts that you and I share feelings about management.

Never going to happen. Silly. Not even really necessary. What is needed is a way for every able-bodied person to have a job which is safe and which pa...

I took a look at the SEP article, in particular in relation to the distinction between epistemological vs. ontological emergence. I must admit, I don'...

Yes. I think the vagueness of the word matches the vagueness of what it describes.

In my opinion, those who think of reductionism as a yes or no thing are misguided. Anyway, now you've seen it used as a metaphysical approach. I'm not...

Yes, and the word "heap" is intentionally vague. It's a messy word for a messy pile of stuff. If we wanted to be more specific, we could tighten it up...

Harnessed humor is not humor anymore. On TV they try to harness humor using laugh tracks. As someone else said on this thread, humor is play. You can'...

You and I seem to agree. If you can't predict the behavior of complex systems from the bottom up, then a reductionist approach is misleading. Since bo...

Charles Surber and I have already taken care of it. Back in 1969, we established August 12 as Jagged Edges Day. Getting recognition has been slow-goin...

I would consider Data conscious, if he actually existed, because he acts like a conscious being when compared with the other conscious beings I know -...

I was once a big fan of Mad Magazine. In the early 1970s I graduated, if that's the right word, to Harvard Lampoon and the National Lampoon. This disc...

I've never gotten all this talk about the hard problem. Now that I've heard about the harder problem, I don't get it either. Nothing here seems partic...

Geez, I'm falling behind here. See my response immediately previous to this one. I am having a good time with this discussion. We're both being though...

Maybe we're at the heart of our disagreement. Maybe "difference of understanding" is better than "disagreement." As usual, it comes down to a matter o...

It's not fair for me to judge the experience you've had without a better understanding. But that never stops me, does it? I guess I don't see how a lu...

Really? When a baby cries for food, it's not because it is experiencing hunger? When a dog is injured, it doesn't experience pain and fear? Dogs and b...

From Wikipedia - A lucid dream is a dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some am...

There are lots of people who are "puzzled by some feature of common human behavior." Someone blind from birth might have trouble speaking coherently a...

Let's talk about consciousness in others rather than in ourselves just for the moment. We'll come back to our experience of our own consciousness late...

Simulating consciousness is consciousness. Consciousness is a behavioral feature, not a physiological or neurological one. The mind is not the brain. ...

Let me revise a bit - I think that's probably not a realistic expectation the way things are now.

If, by this, you mean that higher levels of organization can be predicted from the laws of lower levels, Anderson and I disagree.