Wayfarer

thanks, I find The Atlantic's coverage pretty incisive.

Bodies always perish in the end.

Long gone. I revived this thread because it was relevant to the point I was making elsewhere. Prior to that the last post was 4 years ago. "Materialis...

My case stands.

Secular humanism is unavoidably conditioned by underlying prejudices, such as the idea that life is a consequence of blind physical laws. I've read a ...

I've often heard Dawkins make comments to the effect that Darwinism is an awful social philosophy. What I haven't heard is any plausible suggestions f...

What made it interesting to me was the (I thought) simple observation: that numbers (and the like) are unlike phenomenal objects, in that they're not ...

Hard Problem thread] It's a question I'm very interested in. One point I've often raised is that numbers (and logical laws and so on) are not dependen...

I've moved my reply to a thread on mathematical Platonism as it is a different question to 'the hard problem of consciousness'.

I think I'm starting to get the point (although he lives up to his surname :-)

My dear other hails from there. She has a number of bearded uncles resident there although none resembling Socrates. Anyway I think I am starting to s...

You could change the symbol to anything you want, but what the symbol represents would have to be constant. That's what is interesting!

:100: But you'd hardly cast them as representative of our culture at large.

I'm trying to understand the point that Kit Fine is making. As you posted the article, I thought you might cast a little light there. I haven't read t...

The point about the understanding of reason in contemporary culture is that it tends to be strictly constrained by empiricism, meaning in effect that ...

i.e. 'true in all possible worlds'.

Here is the passage that @"Caldwell" referred to: My response is: so what? What is the point?

Do you mean, that hedonism is the only basis you see for an ethical philosophy? That there are no ends beyond pleasure? Based on what you've said, I t...

Doesn't this just say that definitions are meaningful because they state what the object in question is? And that knowing what things are is the basis...

My belief is that what has been passed down as 'immortality' or 'eternal life' does not actually mean perpetual embodied existence or living forever i...

The Greatest Nuclear Threat we face is a Russian Victory, The Atlantic. Argues that Putin's success would entail uncontrollable nuclear proliferation,...

Someone should say something about the distinction between 'being', 'existence' and 'reality'. They're casually regarded as synonymous, but they're ac...

Just found this fabulous remake of the Santana classic Oye Como Vas. Full screen and volume up! (And that site that is behind these 'global remakes', ...

I think Murphy's Law originated in the US military and was a rule of thumb for minimising the amount of complexity required in a military operation or...

I've been reading the IEP entry on Kit Fine. In it, there's a summary of the discussion in the paper. Note this paragraph, which I've already mentione...

Hey, it was The Sixties. :party: Hard to explain to the youngsters, nowadays.

My involvement with philosophy was originally motivated by the belief in, and search for, the enlightenment I was certain was real. As a youth, these ...

From which: So, why shouldn't the response to this be simply 'so much the worse for "set theory"?'

However we're not a cup when we see a cup, nor a mountain when we see a mountain. A footnote on Aristotlean-Thomist epistemology. My interpretation - ...

It is said that 'intelligence is the ability to make distinctions'. So it can be assumed that it is a distinction that Republicans will not make.

I have encountered the Frankfurt School only later in life. It is pessimistic - I do wonder how many potentially productive lives were derailed by One...

Thanks, I'm enjoying the forum again, and trying not to get involved in too many arguments.

I read some months ago that Russia was having to re-purpose chips from domestic appliances such as dishwashers to use in their missiles due to their i...

Great! You win access to bonus article.

*

Thankyou for my inclusion in such exalted company :up:

:cool:

I read about it in Simon Conway-Morris' book, Life's Solution. Scientific materialism arises precisely in the attempt to apply scientific method to th...

But you can't step outside that. There's not 'the world how it is' and 'how it appears to us' because what we know is a function of how it appears to ...

No - the argument is about objectivity, not about particular objective differences. You and I, being members of the same culture, period of history, a...

If you can't understand when an argument is refuted discussion is pointless.

Plainly - I'm able to read the encyclopedia description of Godel's proof, but I'm not equipped to understand the math. It just occured to me, however,...

On the contrary, it might have huge impact. If you’re Buddhist, then it affects your conduct and your view of life, and if you’re not, then you might ...

That's only because you've stipulated the first set of characters, so it's no longer random. Besides, what Robert Lanza said is that these experiments...

The problem with your view is how much it ascribes to chance. Ultimately, you say, stuff just happens, but that is actually not an argument or an expl...

Nevertheless as this is a philosophy forum it is appropriate from time to time to at least consider philosophy.

The bottom line of Robert Lanza's Biocentrism can be interpreted to say that the universe comes into being through the conscious experience of agents....

I would. :-)

The point about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics is that evolution apparently defies the second law by greatly increasing the degree of or...

Does anyone see a resemblance between Aristotle's 'unproven first principles' and Godel's incompleteness theorem? 'The theorem states that in any reas...