Olivier5

Back to Midgley. I really liked this part where she quotes Jane Goodall: " In the species most like our own, lasting resentment after injuries is by n...

Okay so he changed his mind at some point. A good point for him I suppose.

Eh, Mary Midgley quotes him:

Happens a lot. Ruthless competition is not the only thing that happens in evolution. Love, or if you prefer, sex plays the central role.

Of course, Darwin was a genius. But it's no adaptation to nothing, it's a flourish, an embellishment of life, an emerging phenomenon that was selected...

There's no 'settling on DNA' that I can see. The research on how all this initially started is focussing on RNA as the driving force behind the begini...

DNA doesn't even replicate itself. It's just the software, and it needs some hardware. Proteins do that, enzymes, etc. A whole machinery of them. DNA ...

I don't know. I find 'adaptation' a vaguish term for a few reasons. One is: adaptation to what? The environment is usually not static so a species has...

The bad science part is to assume that it's simple. For instance, there is probably some genetic basis for character traits, but there's no one-to-one...

Or of a pessimistic, egoist reader of Darwin, such as Ernst Haeckel, who tweaked Darwinism to "evolutionary racism". Not saying that Dawkins is racist...

Later: Why, finally, does all this matter? There are many aspects of it which I cannot go into now, and I concentrate on the moral consequences which ...

Songs are us.

" The first and slightly more respectable idea is the one which seems chiefly to attract Mr Mackie, because it fits in with traditional egoism. Mackie...

That's XTC? I had them pegged as metal. This is downright jazzy. On the same image of transcendence (and love) as a hot air balloon (sorry for the Fre...

And yet sometimes the most successful behavior from a Darwinian stand point is cooperative and altruistic.

The Kid's real problem is with indeterminacy, which seems to give him a lot of trouble, so he is looking for a determinist interpretation of QM. Call ...

I also did...

I did give one.

2 entries from me: Physicalism is incompatible with morality because if a human being is just a set of atoms like any other, why consider her life inh...

Jesus himself calls them dunces more than once in the gospels. But then, he selected his apostoles pretty much at random, so what did he expect?

l suppose the reason why complex numbers are good at calculating sinusoidal functions is that they are good at modeling rotations. An alternative curr...

Well, if complex numbers are nothing more than a mode of computation, there's no reason to worry about their use in the wave function.

If complex numbers fit the bill better than real numbers to describe a particular phenomenon, maybe it means something...

Assuming he ever was seriously seeking a deal.

Nah. Emergence is one thing, not two different things. And a lot of it looks 'strong' because then the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and ac...

Note that electric impedance is a complex variable. So there exist classic physical variables described by complex numbers.

Yes. The whole point is that many 'weak emergences' add up to a 'strong emergence'. There's just one form of emergence, continuously emerging. And yes...

Good question. The Scrabble game is only a metaphor. In the reality of how matter emerged from the Big Biggy, and how life could (must?) have emerged ...

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing ...

Does "you're another" count as a philosophical argument?

This thing has been heading to 'no deal' since day one. Too many misunderstandings.

The Scrabble metaphor can be pushed a bit further. Imagine a game with the following rules: 1. Scrabble tiles get thrown randomly on a surface or boar...

That would be dandy, except that "magic" is a very vague term, often applied to things we don't quite understand but seem nevertheless real. The magic...

From your link: What is so difficult to fathom about "the direct causal action of a system upon its components"? Why do you see that as magic, pray te...

Relax, this is philosophy. Some people see a difference, others do not. And it is a fact that you statement "strong emergence is definitionally like m...

My exact state of mind at the moment, captured by this oh-so-trivial song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T0mY7bjqsdA

And I liked it a lot.

That's magic thinking alright... :-) And anthropomorphism to boot.

That's not a source for your assertion, which was about 'strong emergence' being "definitionally like magic". Here all you got is a guy who is of the ...

You have a source for this assertion?

I never said it was magic, but it's an emerging phenomenon in the sense that it cannot happen outside of life. It has no meaning at the atomic level. ...

The way he delivers this. The flow, the tone... kills me.

hmm hmm... Her clivage is pretty deep alright. Let me refocus... St James Brown, pray for our souls. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RiuuD3CmNm0

I posted one on the purse of a woman... Women's purses are deep, aren't they? At the begining of the thread, posted Puff the Magic Dragon. I initially...

Allow me a piece of facile and utterly useless advice: what is deep to you is what is deep. It's doesn't need to be heavy and political, or protest or...

Now that's deep, and deserves context. I've gotten down to my last pair of shoes Can't even win a nickel bet Because, ah them that's got are them that...

Now you are changing the goal post. Initially you defined 'strong emergentism' as such: Atoms don't reproduce, and molecules don't reproduce. They don...

You mean this theoretically, or you think it is actually possible and done? Because the cases where it's actually doable are rare. The statistical red...

I find the existence of evil hard to explain in an atheist framework, by the way. Does anyone have a theory? I think Freud's Thanatos is perhaps the b...

What's your objection to strong emergence?