Wayfarer

OK, I appreciate that, and I apologise for it. I will explain myself further. As I see it, scientific or philosophical materialism is the predominant ...

Isn't that at the basis of molecular biology and mitosis etc? I'm not trained in biology, but I would have thought this was common knowledge. (There's...

That Ignore extension seems to have a bug - it concealed a couple of posts I tried to create - after having edited and posted them, they didn't appear...

Says who? Quote a source for that. See, what you always argue is basically 'materialism 101'. Then you are exasperated that it can be questioned, when...

It is not something known, but something assumed by you. You assume that it is scientifically established that matter~energy is the only true existent...

But this begs the question - it assumes what needs to be proven. At issue is the claim that organisms can be understood solely in terms of matter and ...

You are aware of ‘reductionism’, though, right? It is 'the practice of analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundame...

I take it the difference between what I was pointing to and nihilism is the implicit understanding of there actually being release from the cycle of b...

I've been reading the Google preview of that book, and have just now ordered the hard copy. It is an account of Schopenhauer's reading of the Upani?ad...

It's blatantly obvious that it is the corrupt elements in the Republican Party who are 'politicizing' the prosecution of Trump, simply by declaring th...

Agree, in that illusions are artefacts of consciousness. This obvious objection never seems to stop Daniel Dennett, though.

I wonder what they have in common? :chin:

Which is basically behaviourism. 'We can't say what is going on inside the thing, but we can report on what it does'. But I suppose in terms of the wa...

You'll want to read this to get up to speed on what apokrisis is referring to (but it's also a worthwhile study in its own right. Apokrisis is or was ...

However, such bare reductionism presents no credible account of the higher-level factors that come into play in the organic domain. You could never de...

I'm generally well-disposed to Metzinger (and Damasio and Christof Koch) - he seems a congenial spirit and quite a sound analyst, but I find coming up...

Hey Shoutbox - I'm taking a break from the Forum for a while to switch focus to a creative writing project that I've been putting off for a long time....

But Peirce also includes idealist and vaguely spiritual sentiments that you yourself are inclined to reject (the subject of Thomas Nagel's essay, Evol...

But the same can be said for all organic life-forms. Organic molecules, specifically DNA, the most primitive and basic life-forms, have attributes and...

And for that, Luther and Calvin bear the major responsibility, by rejecting scholastic philosophy in favour of fideism.

Yes, and one of the great tragedies of current Western culture is that it threw the baby of Greek sapience out with the bathwater of theological autoc...

How about phenomenology? Does that belong in the realm of 'groundless speculation and faith'? Kant and Heidegger? Indian philosophy? All depicted as '...

I’m with you on all that. Except to recall that metaphysics, in the post-Kantian sense, comprises conjecture of what must be the case for the world to...

Must admit I didn’t read that implication into it. Oh, and who?

I think it's just a much easier way of absorbing complex texts. (I've got the audio book of Being and Time, though haven't made a lot of progress with...

I am attracted by the idea that the emergence of life IS the emergence of sentience in the Universe. I found an Evan Thompson paper on that Could All ...

Yes, I agree with you, and that's what I had always said. But what made me realise the cogency was the discussion about whether AI is sentient, which ...

You forgot 'legalising child labour'. Still has to go through Senate. And still an outside chance one of the Republican hard-heads will call for a spi...

That we're not the same people means nothing to a biologist. I'll happily accept deification, thanks! You don't get academic tenure for that, and his ...

Not if your metaphysics is physical, it don't.

We are biologically identical in a way that you and an orangutan is not.

I was going to say you're providing a stellar example thereof, but I'll let it go.

There was an Australian TV feature on AI recently, which featured a very articulate guy who had a humanoid-looking doll - actually a sex doll, but not...

Yes, the jealous god dies hard. Plenty of atheist dogma on display in this thread, but then, that's what you're going to get as soon as post an OP wit...

Oh. I took that to be the meaning of the 'smallest unit', which is typically considered the atom. Parmenides was a mystic. He had more in common with ...

Given that 'soul' is a translation from the Greek 'psyche', and that 'psyche' can also be translated as 'mind', do you think that people have minds?

Here's a rather long extract by the author of What it is Like to be a Bat which makes a similar point:

We are biologically identical, to all intents and purposes. Sure, science can tell our DNA apart but from a biological perspective, we're both members...

I've often thought that if it were true that AI became sentient, could it then be accorded rights, analogous to human rights? That it would deserve re...

Something not often commented, is that nature has a different meaning for moderns. In the past, nature was not only nurturing but also destructive, an...

House passes Debt Ceiling legislation. 71 Republicans, 46 Democrats voted no. /uploads/files/y1/09snkon2ndv8pn4o.png Telling that more Dems than Repub...

Agree many think Penrose eccentric on that question but as I say, it does highlight the issue of whether consciousness really is understandable as an ...

Chalmers proposes the concept of "naturalistic dualism" as an alternative to traditional Cartesian Dualism. According to this view, consciousness is a...

That's more a matter of attention than consciousness. In performing routine actions you're deploying what adult learning models describe as 'unconscio...

They're not equivalent. Science provides a wealth of quantitative data, better adaption to circumstances, and so on, but it is not concerned with exis...

I would prefer to believe that Christ was speaking from a universalist perspective, rather than proclaiming the requirements of a sectarian religious ...

That was Democritus and Leucippus, the atomists. Parmenides was not an atomist.

Not unargued. The argument is that logical necessity can't be accounted for in terms of physical causation as a matter of principle.

Oh, ok. Promissory materialism, then.