That pretty well recapitulates Descartes' argument. If you read through the meditation where he develops this idea - the very first thing I read in fo...
:up: I agree with you. I encountered a similar remark in another thread. Which overlooks the fact that 'being a subject' is only ever known in the fir...
Augustine in City of God said: ...anticipating Descartes by quite a few centuries. I take your point, but remember the saying in Latin is: cogito ergo...
Indeed. That is achieved by measuring something called 'voxels' which depict oxygen consumption and other parameters of brain activity. It's heavily d...
Sorry but I'm with Nagel. :-) I've just shelled out for the actual book on Google Play and I think he's right on the money (I'd only read excerpts pre...
Nobody has ever seen a brain state, furthermore, whether it is possible to establish correspondences between so-called brain states and first-person e...
From the SEP entry on the topic: Why do you think is the philosophical significance of the argument against physicalism? What is at issue, in your vie...
Another point - the objects of the physical sciences are predictable - hence the endless blather about determinism, because their behaviours and attri...
But that doesn't say anything. It's the very attribute that enables first-person awareness that is the subject at issue. So saying 'well, some objects...
But, you're talking about a person. Are persons objects? Is 'an object in the first person' even an intelligible statement? Objects are known, by defi...
:ok: Apropos of Schopenhauer etc, there's a current media article “Reality” is constructed by your brain. The first part is mainly about optical illus...
I agree with him. That's what I was referrring to. Many of the arguments in this and other threads are based on the conviction that science delivers j...
I understand the 'homunculi' argument, but I think it's misconceived. The basic point in many of these discussions is like this - let me illustrate it...
Sorry, but I took this statement to imply that science might, in fact, be all-knowing in principle. Are you not saying that? But this is more what I h...
I'm arguing from a perspective which is critical of the assumption that science is all-knowing even in principle. This is a philosophy forum, and it i...
That attempts to say a great deal in two sentences. I way I would put it is that the domain of experience always entails a subjective pole, which is n...
I don't do that. There are people on this forum who are experts in all kinds of subjects to whom I would always defer. What I did was spell out the pr...
I rather like Pierre Hadot's conception of philosophy. From the IEP entry: You've mentioned that you admired Hadot's Plotinus previously. I don't see ...
It's not a false dichotomy at all. The objective domain comprises what can be made subject to objective measurement. Objectivity is plainly important ...
N?g?rjuna denies that ??nyat? is 'ultimate truth'. That is a reification. But I've long learned that discussions of ??nyat? on internet forums is a ha...
It discloses new knowledge; it facilitates discovery - that is just what the word means, 'uncovering' something previously not seen. It provides insig...
Not true. I've given a reason why, as a matter of principle, science as now understood is not suitable for the task. The reason why science can't tack...
I think this is problematical. Humans are plainly - empirically, even - different to any other animal, in terms of their capabilities, intellectual an...
The problem is, that doesn't allow for anything other than language - no referent, nothing beyond words. So the intelligibility of the world is not de...
This is one of the insights that Barfield is known for. I think it's profoundly true, and hardly ever understood. 'The past is foreign country - they ...
I wrote what, to me, seemed a hugely significant essay in my twenties, called 'God is not God'. The point of the essay was, in short, that what we ref...
Hence why I bring up those embarrasing discussions about 'mathematical fictionalism' and 'the indispensability argument for mathematics'. The reality ...
The issue is that science cannot objectify consciousness. And this is for the simple reason that consciousness is not an object of enquiry, in any sen...
I suppose I should add that despite my meanderings in this thread, I have a clear rhetorical aim, which is basically to argue that 'what exists' and '...
Thanks for being such a good interlocuter. I have tackled the well-known Sellars paper a couple of times - the one associated with his 'myth of the gi...
Yes! Key insight. But I emphatically agree, this framework is not individual. We're each instances of it but it is basically collective, 'what everyon...
Thomas Nagel: Thoughts are Real. I say the difference is analogous to the difference between the physical symbol and its meaning. We ourselves live in...
In classical philosophy there was an hierarchy of the understanding, such that mathematical and scientific reason were said to be higher than (mere) s...
I'm trying to avoid 'arguing for theism'. What I'm trying to argue for, is the concept of degrees of reality. I'm trying to show that certain kinds of...
meh. I don't know if fairy tales are concepts at all. What I'm trying to drive towards is the august notion of reason proper. 'As classical philosophe...
But the point is, it has ramifications far beyond language. Or put another way, language is not merely self-referential. It conveys information we mig...
Maybe giving it form is part of what makes it intelligible. Substance and form = hylo~morphe. Perfectly agree. But if time permitted, which it doesn't...
It's not subject to empirical validation, it's still philosophy rather than an objective science. The reliance on first person testimony is why Willhe...
I don't think you see what I mean - I'm not talking about anything of the kind. Something much more prosaic - the recipe for a birthday cake, say but ...
No experimental evidence required: the argument is a priori, and the boundary between the 'experience of ideas' - what is that, anyway? how does one '...
But isn't that a good argument for universals? The fact that an idea can be expressed in different languages, and using different symbols, but retain ...
The logical starting place has to be the work that the name was invented for, namely, Aristotle's metaphysics. It gave rise to a coherent system of th...
Wasn't that one of Kierkegaard's main points? I haven't ever read his works, but feel as though I ought to. My take on the sense in which 'mind is fun...
Maybe! I haven't had many such experiences myself. I have had momentary epiphanies which have been life-changing, though. (Must say, I'm not taken by ...
What you're saying, is that whatever is not empirically detectable can't be considered real. Basically, and I know you will object to this, this is em...
Bingo. The point about such 'mental objects' as numbers (and universals!) is that they are real independently of what you or I might think about them,...
There are clear resemblances between the arguments about the reality of number, and the arguments about the reality of universals. The argument I refe...
the point of the metaphor was that you can see things that are in within the circle cast by your lamp. Actually when the image first came to mind it w...
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