Wayfarer

I see philosophy as primarily concerned with the problems of meaning - and that in an existential, rather than a semantic, sense. Philosophy attempts ...

I turned 70 this year, and again I’m thinking what an amazing time it is to be alive. Even despite the perils and obvious doomsday scenarios. I think ...

No need to! Not so much enthusiasm as curiosity. It's cutting edge. All of those reports have only just begun to circulate, but as I said, I have reas...

That’s what the youtube video is claiming. I’m not saying you have to believe it. Incidentally the channel, Cold Fusion TV, produces generally pretty ...

Nope. Brainwaves. I know, hard to believe, but there it is.

It is of interest, and I think Rovelli's persona is appealing. But I'm dubious about his philosophical stance. The question as to the subjective eleme...

You don't understand it, then. The rendered images were not from text prompts, they were from brain scans. There was no other input than a subject wit...

:up: Is there a word for ‘sleepwalking into a nightmare?’ ‘Cause that’s what a lot of people seem to be doing.

There’s going to be a godawful s***fight at the Republican Convention if he is. They almost derailed him first time around.

He’s talking about Donald Hoffman…. does he get to Kastrup? I’m a bit dubious about Hoffman’s use of the term ‘reality’. I think his book should be ca...

Ah yes so I did… :yikes:

You think? Read this. The wave function describes potentialities, according to Heisenberg. The wave function is not ‘in’ space time - that’s why the r...

My understanding is that he’s passed some major deadline for nominations. That’s the last I heard.

Watch again. There is a sequence about exactly that at around 12:14 with about 3-4 examples (cat, train, surfer, etc.) I think the argument can be mad...

I'm very saddened by the reports of shelters, hospitals and schools (such as they are) being blown up in Gaza with mass casualties. I've always been s...

Have you signed up and actually used ChatGPT yet? It must be a year since it came out….quick google….Nov 30th 2022…and I’ve been bouncing ideas of it ...

I don't know if it's true of those traditions, but what has been handed down. The sapiential and practical sides of the disciplines have been ignored ...

There's about a couple of dozen plausible movie plots right there, sci-fi, espionage and end-of-world scenarios, writers will be able to take their pi...

That discounts philosophical or noetic intuition probably on the grounds that it is too near to religious revelation. But that is why postmodern philo...

On a more serious note, I think the video does a fairly balanced job of conveying concerns about what exploitations of this kind of technology could d...

Thank you for the response, helps me to understand your viewpoint a little better.

I read not long ago that there is more computing power in a singing christmas card than existed in the world in 1946.

:up: Important point. I hadn't picked up the specificity on first listening.

I suppose ‘demonizing’ is a fair criticism of that passage, but that is not the main point. If you’d like a ref to the article which it was taken from...

In reality, something of momentous importance was rejected. And it's a matter in intellectual history that Ockham has a lot to do with this, as his pr...

Here is where I think post-modernism falls into the trap of relativism. What is bias? If I agree with the post-modern analysis that there is no *ultim...

Same goes for number. Science of course relies on mathematics, but the question of the nature of number is a metaphysical, not a scientific, one.

There's an interesting entry in Wikipedia, on the biological term (a neologism), teleonomy. It was coined in 1958 by a biologist to describe the 'appa...

Based on the quality of his entries here, the answer is most likely 'yes'. :wink:

The Colorado 14th Amendment judgement has come down - Colorado judge rules Trump can be on ballot but says he ‘engaged’ in insurrection. Why the scare...

I liked that book at the time I read it. I still reckon Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy’s a good standby. It has many flaws as have b...

I think I get it. You’re saying there must be an objective reality over and above whatever models or representations the mind creates, right?

My father was an esteemed professor of medicine and one of the generation of doctors that introduced birth control to civilisation. He read the Club o...

So what do you make of the essay behind this discussion, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, by David Chalmers?

Agree, but it’s hardly a ‘nuance’. It is a glaringly obvious fact. There was a feature by a journalist a couple of years ago about the process of acqu...

The latest mass-shooting episode has just been reported - Multiple Victims in New Hampshire Psychiatric Hospital.

You’ve moved quite a long way from The reason I reacted against the OP in the way I did, was because I took this as an expression of the kind of scien...

So does a Swede have Swedish brain states?

Q: How to define stupidity. A: I have a spanner. Will that help?

Recall that the original concept of the atom was ‘indivisible’. As such it represented ‘the absolute’ in material form; Democritus said ‘there are onl...

Glad to be of help, and as I forgot to previously say, welcome to Philosophyforum. It's not a matter of like or dislike. There's a distinction in play...

The myth of the 'good guy with a gun' has no stats to back it up. For every legitimate discharge of a weapon in defense or the upholding of the law, t...

Extremely distressing story in today's Washington Post with graphic photographs of what AR-15 weapons do when fired in schools and churches (link prov...

I did notice the Chinese put huge emphasis on 'not interfering with America's internal affairs'. The unspoken quid pro quo is, of course, 'so you won'...

Of course Xi Jin Ping is a dictator, although it was not particularly diplomatic of Biden to say so. He could have answered, 'the PRC doesn't elect it...

There's an entire massive website, The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle, which is devoted to this idea. It's a constant reference point for me, I gu...

And validated in peer-reviewed science journals! I've often reflected, when Dawkins waves his hands around and says 'but where is the evidence??' that...

That's the idea. It's a refinement of Hilary Putnam's 'multiple realizability'. So, do you think in the absence of any mind that basic logical princip...

But what is 'holding'? Is it 'representing'? If so, that's semiotic - which is not itself physical as it relies on interpretation. If you say that 'a ...

Taken out of context, it might appear to be, but the article provides further detail. The associated report was the work of 'an exhaustive distillatio...