Wayfarer

Totally agree. He seems a super-nice person as well, and his podcasts are interesting but I think he's on the wrong side of the argument with respect ...

I’m well aware of the technical distinction but they tend to blur in the popular imagination. I was also going to mention Philip Ball’s criticism of M...

There's an essay I read in The Atlantic, called The Multiverse Idea is Rotting Culture which dwells on some of the ideas in the OP.

I would have thought that the identity conditions of integers was abundantly obvious. I mean, any integer is distinct from all other integers - how do...

There's no known law of physics or anything else which demonstrates that voluntary actions are causally determined by molecular forces. It's simply a ...

It's tautologous because any statement relies on the fact that the universe exists. It goes without saying.

You know, I think this is incorrect. Things exist. All kinds of them - big list. But 'the universe' is the background against which the notion of 'exi...

Well, not according to Chalmers. What’s the big issue with dualism? Why’s it such a boo word?

Damn! Knew I should have placed that bet when there was Nothing.

Wouldn't be too sure about that. In his original Facing Up to the Hard Problem, he says: Also (David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996), p.357)

We'll see. Sure he's got a 'base', but there's also a lot of very heavy hitters that he has deeply pissed off.

Current survey on belief in conspiracy theories published 30 Dec NPR https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers-poll-finds-many-beli...

As conceived by ‘Enlightenment’ philosophy, wherein there’s an irreconcilable division between ‘science and religion’, and scientific naturalism is to...

have the book, since 1996. But I found it too focussed on biology and didn't really take to it. I've since encountered quite a few of Kaufman's articl...

//actually reading more into Davidson, mental-physical correlation is discussed, and rejected, by him, while still maintaining a materialist theory of...

It's not difficult at all. Look around you and right in front of you. All the devices and inventions you see, including, most notably, the device you'...

No, they're not 'brilliant'. They're procrustean.

I don't think they are at all. They're counter to the principle physicalist and materialist theories of mind. Armstrong's work, whose magnum opus is M...

As I said before, Trump will really come unstuck when he’s finally held to account - something that he’s avoided his whole life.

In my understanding the point of falsifiability is to distinguish empirical hypotheses; if a proposition can’t be falsified by observation or evidence...

If I might interject, Popper's original formulation was simply that an empirical hypothesis is one that can be overturned by evidence or observation. ...

Sydney’s freaking out, because our current outbreak is at 18 new cases today spread across a pretty wide area. There’s the fear that the beast is goin...

Yes, and I’m arguing that the ‘argument from reason’ is a much better argument than Chalmer’s argument from ‘what it is like to be...’. If the element...

After all this time, I still have no idea :-)

I think it’s a cogent argument, supported with quotations from the SEP article on the exact issue. Armstrong was Professor of the department where I d...

that’s what my previous post was addressing.

Why, that would be you: ‘Rational’ means ‘guided by reason’. Reason requires the capacity for abstraction. And I say that is not not a difference of d...

There’s a kind of ‘presumptive materialism’ which is typical of a certain style of philosophising. Presumptive materialism will generally not go to an...

The ‘flow of time’ requires an observer: (Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271)

It’s also the point of contention, it’s a difference that makes a universe of difference.

Purely out of habit, and the difficulty presented by the alternatives, I’d wager. I spent about 20 minutes on the article, I rather like him. I don’t ...

But, that's simple association. Nobody that deny that, I'm not denying that dogs and whales and birds are intelligent. I've had a lot of dogs, some of...

Australians are in some ways a lot more worldly-wise than Americans. It goes back to our convict ancestory and distrust of hierarchy. Mind you we're m...

Only a human can say that. If a culture thinks that we're no different to animals, then it follows. Of course no animal would be consciously evil as h...

What I mean is, we too have fringe right-wing politicians, anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers, and conspiracy theorists, but they've never been able...

As soon as you assert 'something is the case', you're doing something that no animal does. But you don't notice that you're doing it, so you can't see...

Too much TV, I think, although it seems to affect American society much more than, say, Australian.

Some passages from the SEP entry on Mind-Brain Identity Theory So - my avenue of attack is that, whilst it's perfectly fine to theorise about the neur...

noted and corrected. But, to press the point, language, speech and rationality are all connected. H. Sapiens evolved those capacities, animals did not...

Guillty as charged. Read up on the sad story of Nim Chimpsky.

Staggering evidence of a very deep disorder in America. He's presided over a health disaster, tried to destroy the democratic system, and somehow a la...

I started on the Prolegomena section on mathematical objects but haven’t made much headway with it. I was recommended Jacob Klein's Greek Mathematical...

No kidding. As I said, the whole show was to (1) keep him the centre of attention, as always, and (2) to wreak vengeance on Americans for not voting f...

another one would be whether there are correspondences between neural states and meaningful expressions (on the basis that, if brain-mind identity the...

One of my current interests is the relationship between physical and logical causation. Physical causation is the kind that is described by e.g. the l...

The problem is developing a coherent alternative to capitalism, which is not communism. I’ve been fleetingly involved in green left politics in the pa...

Says the Secular Thought Police. :razz: ‘Beasts are driven to the pasture by blows’ ~ Heraclitus. Harsh, but true.

Well, my very first post on these forums, about three forums ago, and about ten years, was on the reality of number and their relationship to phenomen...

You're welcome. (As an aside, for some reason I am very drawn to many Catholic philosophers. I don't feel at all attracted to the religion as such, al...

There's a 2009 book that I've noticed on this very topic The Master and his Emissary, Ian McGilchrist. Haven't read it, but read a long interview with...