Wayfarer

It might, for example, influence what observations you consider important, what experiments you decide to conduct, what you may or may not regard as v...

The fallacy of Dennett's approach is easy to describe. It is expressed in this single paragraph: All of his critics maintain that this hypothesis is n...

Apparently very hard to understand, though. :wink:

The point about the eliminativists generally, is that they're falling into exactly the trap that Schopenhauer describes: “Materialism is the philosoph...

I think the term 'folk psychology' is condescending jargon deployed by a cult movement inside academia, the so-called 'eliminativists'.

Fair enough. But remember Aristotle's dualism was of matter and form (hyle-morphe), not matter and spirit. I question this: What energy lacks, in eith...

But it also enables novel discovery - phenomena that haven’t ever been seen before. (On that note, thank you for the thought-provoking discussion, and...

If something is knowable a priori, then it's known independently of experience, so I don't see how the past comes into it. That really only applies to...

How does that follow? If I'm plotting rocket path, then I'll obviously be relying on both Newtonian and relativitistic physics. How do they 'refer to ...

Isn’t it that if x and y are isometric against some measurable values and the relationship between them is described in the equation, then the mathema...

I think the issue is that with laws, there is a sense of agency - that laws are able to compel things to happen, that they govern outcomes. So a 'law'...

Right - which is why the description 'scientific law' is treated with suspicion. It sounds anthropomorphic to some. :up: Quite right!

I read a fascinating article by a film critic years ago that explained the popularity of the genre of sci fi films like Inception, Matrix, Contact and...

Buddhism also has the two truths doctrine - the idea of the domain of conventional and absolute truth (although not unique to Buddhism, it is expresse...

But only one is realistic.

Hey I agree. The objections to the idea of laws is that the word implies a power that makes something happen, whereas in natural law, there's no such ...

Actually in the early 20th c when Buddhism was first becoming popular in the West, the idea that Karma was like Newton's laws was quite popular. It le...

9 that’s a perfectly acceptable definition but teasing out the implications requires some persistence. I think it’s also important to state that in In...

:up: Have a read of this blog post. Not so - retaliating, 'paying someone back', is not karma. On the contrary, it would be regarded as a bad karmic a...

I don't think he would endorse the idea of 'multiple minds'. Like all idealists, he says that the ground of existence is subjective in nature - that t...

But the Ptolmaic cosmology was mythological - crystalline spheres, a geo-centric universe, epicycles. Those were factually incorrect posits. And its o...

I agree that it’s a hard line to draw, and that viruses seem to straddle it, but I still say it’s a fundamental ontological distinction.

I don't understand the question.

Right. Those were the observations that Eddington made which helped validate Einstein's theory for the first time. But as I understand it the theory o...

Thanks, that is highly relevant. One of our contributors posted a link to a paper by called No God No Laws by Nancy Cartwright which is about exactly ...

Said Hume. Scientific laws exist where logical necessity meets physical causation. (Explored further on this off-site thread.)

The laws are such that living beings have evolved. They might have been otherwise, but we would never have been around to discuss it.

Surely ‘natural law’ must form some part of the answer to this question. Why water flows downhill, why bodies fall at the same rate, why nothing can m...

those activities are one of the byproducts of information technology and the internet. I mean, 50 years ago, nobody could have produced that kind of m...

:up: Simple once you see it. He does, and of course that's true. But I was leery of the 'intangible energy' idea, as if that amounts to anything more ...

But all those kinds of arguments are similar in kind to the 'multiverse' conjectures - that there might be 'other universes' where the fundamental law...

I think that the Greek philosophers began to realise, and were intoxicated by, the power of reason. We're all their heirs. It dawned on them that they...

Of course. No disputing that. compare: There is indeed a shared reality, almost in the sense of a collective consciousness - what Hegel called the zei...

So what areas of existence are devoid of meaning? Oh wait - don't bother.

No - it treats living beings as if they are not simply chemicals, which they aren't.

Switches are mechanical, but signs are semantic. I can see how signs can drive switches, but I can't see how switches can produce signs. It seems a me...

I don't read it that way. Remember Kastrup describes himself as an analytical idealist. He's therefore questioning the normally-assumed primacy of the...

A lot of the time, that seems to be where you're writing from. :lol: As an aside - I sometimes sense a faint echo of the ancient philosophical idea of...

Again - the reason that Popper devised the falsification criterion, was to differentiate scientific from non-scientific theories. So, what you're aski...

They're two different points. Karl Popper introduced the idea of falsifiability in order to distinguish empirical hypotheses from other kinds of theor...

But that's where I started! I started with asking how to define something non-physical. To which you responded: I first addressed the point about fals...

It's not 'hours of reading'. I linked to a popular recent article, What is Math? which is about, I would think, 1500-1700 words. You asked for 'eviden...

As I understand it, the principle of biosemiosis broadens the notion of 'intepretation' to include the way in which living cells inter-operate. 'Biose...

You haven't addressed it. When I brought up the idea, and linked to an article on What is Math, you said only this: At least that was a start - but it...

Yeah, I get that, but, you know, actions speak louder than words.

Some Kremlin PR hack drafting respectable-sounding diplomatic soundbytes to feed to the media, meanwhile Putin's army is destroying entire cities full...

You said nothing about mathematical platonism. You simply dismiss the idea of psychosomatic effects on the basis that thoughts are physical. The point...

My objection to the ubiquity of the use of 'information' in this context, is that 'information' does not have a simple meaning. In other words, there ...

You're not showing any sign of understanding any of the points that I've made, even in principle. Your commitment to that falsehood colors everything ...

The Russians are such cowards. They can’t actually win on the battlefield so they bomb hospitals and residential buildings and theaters full of childr...