Wayfarer

I still say it’s an open question. There are alternatives to either of the two horns.

They seem to be the two horns of a dilemma, don't they? I'm familiar with the dogma, but I still say it's a reasonable question, from the perspective ...

Fair point. I guess the question I’m angling towards is that of whether evolution is directional in nature - whether it tends towards (for instance) c...

I do sometimes ponder why evolution didn't simply come to an end with blue-green algae. Heaven knows they proven their ability to survive for near a b...

I'm tackling this title. But I've already encountered many Spinozist aphorisms that seem decidely more religious than anything that you present e.g. I...

I've resisted reading De Chardin, one of my lecturers described his prose as 'turgid'. But I was interested to learn about the book by Dobzhansky, he ...

Ahem. Survival of the fittest was introduced by Herbert Spencer in an essay on the principle of natural selection - Darwin later approved and adopted ...

Is that a fact? If I boil a pot of water, is its entropy decreased?

Might await another OP on the topic. But my sympathy here is not because of the quality of the argument, but the sense of existential dread. It may no...

It's like tossing bloodied meat into the Piranha River. :cool:

There's also a fair amount of latent hostility to anything that sounds vaguely religious on this forum. (As per Thomas Nagel's comments in 'Evolutiona...

The best way to prevent proliferation of poor threads to ignore them. I tried to steer it towards a discussion of the philosophical issues, but the re...

(I restored the question, which I had deleted.)

I believe the Thin Alchemist had an identical view.

Philosophy aspires to something more than utility.

What I was trying to say in my earlier post was, don't look to evolutionary theory to try and find the meaning of existence. Evolutionary biology is n...

@"Banno" - Are you aware of Mary Midgley's criticisms of Richard Dawkins?

Notice that the theory of biological evolution is not directional - it doesn't 'evolve towards' any particular outcome, it's simply an account of how ...

The philosophical question is What creates?

I’m inclined to place reason amongst the ‘meta-cognitive faculties’. Apart from its obvious instrumental utility - counting, and so on - the advent of...

To be fair to Thomas Nagel, I only quoted one paragraph.

Thanks! Had forgotten that exchange!

That is the million-dollar question. Reason was appropriated by theologians as the 'divine spark' and equated with being an aspect of 'imago dei' - no...

Circling back to this point - that is obviously true, but I think 'reason' in day-to-day usage, in our cultural context, usually implies scientificall...

How to catch out a P-Zombie - ask them how they are.

Now there's a great thread topic, but we'd need input from some of the more experienced readers in that subject. (AFAIK, Aristotle rejects the 'realm ...

Well, kind of, but I question the accordance of this usage with the classical meaning. My understanding is that 'essence' boils down essentially to 'i...

Notice that they're all artefacts. Inorganic matter is not 'informational' in that sense. The general thrust of molecular biology is that DNA encodes ...

Shame, I found him congenial enough, never really had reason to argue with him (but then I now try and keep away from threads that are tending towards...

…that seems to the general thrust

This book I have, Kant's Theory of Normativity, Exploring the Space of Reason, Konstantin Pollok, seems to be arguing that Kant adapted Aristotle's hy...

There's a very big-picture theme behind this line of argument. I'm very interested by the evaluation of reason in Greek and medieval philosophy. There...

This occupies the field of biosemiotics, which we've all been introduced to here through the contributions of @"apokrisis", hence my quote from Marcel...

The evolutionary argument against naturalism is derived from the 'argument from reason'. It posits the existence of God as the explanation for the exi...

But the point is, the object has no specific location until measured. You can't say 'the photon caused the measurement' because this assumes that it h...

That prior to observation the particle doesn't exist in any specific place, that its possible properties are described by the wave-function, and that ...

Thanks! It is searchable if you download it and open it in Acrobat Pro. Properly bookmarked also. (I have the Penguin Classics edition in hard copy.)

Information is not the subject of physics, which is concerned with the movement of bodies. Information is however conserved, stored and transmitted th...

I added the @ tip to the Quotes how-to as it’s related.

One of the very early Church fathers was named Origen. Amongst his teachings was a much-neglected principle of interpretation of scriptural texts. He ...

Agree. I only said there is a general resemblance.

It's called 'reframing'. You should try it!

There's a reason for that, also. And the reason is, it's difficult to accomodate the basic fact of Chalmer's argument in the context of today's cultur...

Again - the point of Chalmer's essay was the audience he has in mind, namely, those who claim that the whole question is basically one for science. It...

See what you mean. I'll update the How to Quote post accordingly. //done//.

To me, the absolutely crucial thing about Kant is his recognition that 'things conform to thoughts' rather than vice versa. I still think very few peo...

have a look at the post I contributed on How to Quote, which is about exactly that topic.

The history of the issue is vexed in Australia, but overall the number of boat-borne arrivals has dropped to practically zero (and probably the amount...

Yes it's a kind of paradoxical feeling - on the one hand, having (I think) a genuine affinity for Kant, but on the other, the awareness of how great t...