How to read a jellyfish's mind by Lori Dajose , California Institute of Technology The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connec...
Which is one of the reasons the Christians screwed them in the end. The pagan Roman's lack of empathy for the weak was their weakness. But it does not...
Similarly obvious is the fact that every living creature ultimately dies. Nobody actually avoids death. Hence reproduction is the only way to 'stay ar...
An organism is not typically trying to "sustain life", period. Rather it is typically trying to sustain life long enough to be able to reproduce. In o...
You keep avoiding the point I am making. Why focus only on fear, at the exclusion of all other emotions? Are you a fearful person? Do you often feel a...
No, it does not make sense. But to define desire as avoidance of fear is equally ridiculous. There ARE several different emotions. They do exist, and ...
Would you have any evidence for that, or it is just the way it looks like on your end? Why attribute to fear (or anger, in other posts) a sort of priv...
Perhaps you should try to address what I am saying, and not something else altogether... Or just try to understand what I say; that'd be a start. If i...
Not even me! What I am driving at is that a philosophy should not just be about what is the case, which is rather the domain of science, but also and ...
Why, the reference is evidently to Tolkien, made humorously by paleontologists, who are all geeks, and all geeks love Tolkien. This said as a geek mys...
More generally, you may be interested in any of the versions of the "wheel of emotions" out there, to broaden your emotional palette. The concept is f...
It's not a natural response to fear. It is the polar opposite, conceptually. Think of it in terms of tropisms, a term from botany which means "involun...
Ok, in general terms then, my first reaction is that you have to include positive tropisms, not just negative ones, among the motivating forces for ex...
As I keep telling my staff: when you feel angry, ask yourself why. Assuming that you are not mentally imbalanced, paranoid or disturbed, your anger ma...
By this reasoning, it's a-okay to kill people... Hence your monism cannot support a healthy human society but may be useful philosophy for serial kill...
I guess you're right: it's all about concepts. Hobbits do not exist in our present reality, if by "Hobbit" you mean: Note that this definition (from O...
Sure, but what status does life has in a monist system? If seen as good, why? If it's all just one stuff, why care about life? What's so special about...
To simplify even further: things are always presumed to exist. Existence cannot be proven. When people say things like "X exist", they usually mean "I...
Clearly she is a big fan of reproduction, but in all species, not just in one species at the expense of other ones... The key conceptual difference be...
I found the following text useful enough, and relevant to this thread. Translated from the original by Google and meself. The "eccentricity" of Rome a...
Oh wow! Banno is giving some thought to his posts. Miracles happen... So it turns out that existence is (or can be, amongst other things) a logical pr...
Yes, I pointed out that if conscious thoughts had no impact on anything else (i.e. were epiphenomena) then nobody would know of their existence. But i...
So the reason there can be some form of intelligence in the universe, is that there's a lot of stupidity in it too, and they tend to balance each othe...
Sad but true. Or triality, or n-ality. There are dimensions, such as time and space, that seem to exist objectively and look radically unlike other st...
The challenge could be put this way: "If there's no ghost of the universe, how come there's a ghost of us, human beings?" By ghost I mean something li...
Apart from some panpsychism à la Spinoza, materialist explanations for the mind-body problem are usually self-contradictory. They saw the branch on wh...
In my mind, a kind of stuff can be said to be fundamentally different from another IFF it is impossible to produce one from the other and/or vice vers...
Fair enough: this one and unique substance of the monists could well harbor in itself, as part of its very own necessary (intrinsic) qualities, the ca...
I fail to see that big conceptual difference between materialism and idealism. It's all just one type of chocolate, to paraphrase @"Khaled". This is p...
Technically, you cannot get a circle or a square just with lines. You also need a 2D space as the context for those lines, i.e. a plane in which to in...
Monism says there can be only one kind of fundamental stuff. Not two or three or an infinity of different kinds of stuff but just one. Khaled's point ...
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