Wayfarer

The robot butler 'knows' how to do a lot of things, but it can't improvise, or adapt, or do anything outside being a robot butler. I agree it's meanin...

standards, dear fellow. If we don't make a stand, who will?

It's a linguistic innovation, though. An artificial flower might appear real but in fact it is not.

Actually I will qualify my initial response - propositions are true or false in respect of the facts. If something which had been thought a fact is fo...

it is Orwellian. Today's installment is: Trump is insisting that 'voter fraud' is the reason that he lost the popular vote to Clinton, despite there b...

A man - not a man - throws a stone - not a stone - at a bird - not a bird - on a tree - not a tree ~ Riddle told by Plato. Interpretation: A eunuch th...

The comments that I made, were not about democracy at all, but about Trump's well-documented and abundantly obvious disregard for facts. I mentioned t...

Sure thing. But whether mathematics is a social construction, or refers to something independent of thought, is another kind of question altogether, n...

Actually, while I'm critical of the OP, I think there's an element of truth in your remark, in that I think the *absence* of anything spiritual does o...

I second that. L Ron was more successful, though. But I hadn't noticed the resemblances before, thanks for pointing those out.

How can you leave that aside? If knowledge is not genuine, then it's not knowledge. Well, I think that is a classical case of what Karl Popper describ...

True! I have a collection of such objections which I have come across on forums over the years. Basically, it comes down to the fact that if a stateme...

I composed it myself X-) Heaven forbid. Hard enough to deal with 'alternative facts' in the current climate.

I think the 'third tower collapse conspiracy' has been thoroughly and irrefutably debunked.

'Speaking truthfully' is to be in accord with the facts. But not every kind of truth-statement can be validated with respect to so-called 'objective m...

'Facts' are neither true nor false - statements or propositions are true or false.

I think becoming disillusioned with Ayn Rand is probably a healthy thing. I haven't taken the time to study her, but her reputation is terrible on phi...

https://algonquincollegesocialmedia.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/keep-calm-and-don-t-feed-the-troll-22.png

You really do come across as a Putin troll, you do know that, don't you?

Plato wanted a benevolent dictatorship, run by philosopher-kings of supreme virtue who had no self-interest and altruistic motivation. If that matches...

From an OP in today's NY Times: Amazing the number of people who can't or won't recognise a demagogue when they're looking at one.

Right, well I suppose you have to speak to people on their level. X-)

They do? Which doctors?

But if you probe the zombie - why do you feel good about it? What do you like about it? What kinds of things do you like? - how long would it take to ...

But here you're up against the distinction between sound and meaning. A zombie could produce many kinds of apparently-vocal noises, it could recite th...

But speech ISN'T physical behaviour. It conveys meaning and intention, neither of which are physical. So again, ask a zombie a question, and how can i...

It's relevant, because the whole notion of 'p zombie' is a thing that looks like a human but has no inner life - therefore doesn't feel . If you say t...

Interestingly the Wikipedia entry on the topic begins 'A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical b...

Thanks. Well, I kind of get it, but I still say that if it has no inner life, it is not, then 'a being', but at best a simulacrum.

That is tendentious starting-point, and also, probably, begs the question, i.e. assumes the very point that is at issue. None whatever. Find some othe...

Hi Cabbage Farmer! Hope your garden is growing bountifully. But, the example you gave was 'bread that was molecularly identical to bread' except that ...

Science would know nothing about laws without the ability to reason, and 'the ability to reason' is neither a product of, nor is expicable with refere...

I think one of the very most pernicious memes in US culture is this idea that 'Government is evil' - that it's an intrusive Big Brother, who is teamin...

Kant, 'who rescues the a priori origin of the pure concepts of the understanding and the validity of the general laws of nature as laws of the underst...

I am challenging the notion that it is possible in principle, as per the kinds of arguments given in Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, which I won't try and re...

So you can imagine something that is at once identical and yet completely different? That seems both incoherent AND inconceivable to me, on the ground...

I don't want to disagree! Hi, Cabbage Farmer. Some remarks on the distinction between concepts and imagination by Ed Feser: http://edwardfeser.blogspo...

I think of Escher's drawings as visual paradoxes - representations of something which seems real but which obviously can't be, as they are drawn from ...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Escher's_Relativity.jpg

Professor Carroll, I think. I think what he is referring to is the fact that the equations of physics are independent of time, in other words, time is...

Sure. Well stated. You ought to consider some formal study of the subject as you obviously think deeply about it.

Humans are 'beings'. To fulfil the definition of 'being' is to have an 'inner life'. The whole discussion is simply an abundant illustration of the in...

'Turning the other cheek' is 'slave mentality' for Nietsche.

(Y)

That doesn't strike me as a difficult question in the least. Imagine asking a person to describe something - say, a photograph with lots of objects in...

There are many things in which there is an undeniable constancy of reference. If you ask me for recipe for chocolate cake, and I give it to you, and y...

It's beyond laughter at this point. The Joker has the Button.

Simply not the case, though. I recall an interview with the director of the massive Brain Research project that Obama initiated - he acknowledged in t...

But this is precisely what is at issue. In other words, that begs the question. It is precisely the difference between a corpse and a human being: the...

A rock formation is not something that can be 'broken'; whatever shape it is in, can be explained purely in terms of geology. A rock formation could n...