Olivier5

There is also the wave-particle duality, which I think might correspond to the duality of matter and forms at sub-atomic level.

I used to think so, but I realized at some point that evil is not just the absence of good, and that there ARE evil behaviors, generally coming from c...

Of course, one can use one's mind to do crosswords or sudoku... or philosophy for that matter. But if the house burns around you and your life is in d...

Before Pop drowns you under some wall of text about 'enformation', allow me to give the short version: Like any animal, you are capable of acquiring a...

Don't know if it's been mentioned already, but the philosophical issue that bothers me the most in life is the issue of evil, i.e. why are people doin...

I'm not quite sure because he was so vague about it, but it seemed to me that bongo-fury was in the habit of denying everything mental. Just one examp...

'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, that's life Tryna make ends meet, you're a slave to money then you die I'll take you down the only road I've ever ...

So you are sending to the vast web a message in a bottle, to find soulmates somewhere, or pen friends? Any particular gender orientation in that searc...

Here you go, : Just a castaway An island lost at sea Another lonely day With no one here but me More loneliness Than any man could bear Rescue me befo...

I'll read this, thanks. My original take on him was a bit contemptuous maybe. I came to the conclusion that, flawed and piecemeal as his thinking was,...

I suppose that may also be the conclusion Wittgenstein arrives at. But note the similarity with Plato's idea that the Good transcends even the gods.

I am starting to appreciate Wittgenstein.

Ok. Then @RogueAI's argument would be that this recognizes some sort of distinction between mental event and non-mental events. (Note: I am using this...

You are making a distinction between two types of mental events: those that 'originate from' (better still: code for, represent, depict) an event outs...

Are you arguing for dualism now?

My heart is sad and lonely For you I sigh, for you dear only Why haven't you seen it I'm all for you body and soul I spend my days in longing And wond...

Ok so more fundamental than the level we've arrived at in our exploration of the infinitely small. The answer is most probably yes. Further, once we r...

More fundamental than what?

Is there one? Why should reality have a fundamental substrate?

We are just guessing about abiogenesis too. Some guys think they have the begining of a usable framework. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. My point is...

It always has been, I think. Freud and Lacan were all the craze when I was a teen.

The two ideas (of latent forms and gods) are not that different to me.

Certainly not. ATP is not carrying information, only energy.

Nope. ATP is the compound storing, transporting and availing chemical energy to other molecules, in pretty much all living cells.

The "mind-body problem" is a misnomer. Call it an enigma instead, or a mystery, or simply a question. There are many unresolved questions, like the or...

All these ideas are too fancy for me.

Having a mind and a body is not necessarily a problem. The duality of form and matter is useful, conceptually and practically. So is the particle-wave...

There are many problems in this world. Thankfully most of us can intuitively feel a difference between dreams, or even hallucinations, and reality. Th...

That is not true for me. I can feel the difference quite well.

I agree.

But dreams and reality are different.

So what would my body be made of? Ideas?

No but we can play with ideas, analyse them, communicate them. So we have ways to detect them.

We'll solve it one day. In the meantime, I'd rather have a mind-body problem than have no mind or no body.

The existence of pheromones in humans is well attested, I think.

You're describing TPF. I love it too. Right. So there's one edge which is idealism, aka only forms exist; and another edge which is materialism, aka o...

That's a powerful argument. I would argue that the vertical axis is still there and that we still climb it up and down daily, all of us, but it may be...

There's a word missing up there after 'someone's'. Assuming it is the word 'brain', 'mind' or 'head', I agree. I'm not an idealist. More of a synthesi...

Ha ha ha... See you around.

Why don't you inform me about materialism, then?

Well then, all is fine and there are no more logical contradictions that I can see.

I like Descartes as a theorician of the scientific method, but find his view of biology too mechanistic. On the issue of "animal souls" I prefer Gasse...

Okay, point well taken. Therefore ideas are empirical, and can be considered as physical. They are objects too.

Of course I can. The only question is whether you can understand the proof. Materialism, in it's most naïve form, stipulates that ideas don't really e...

Okay so you don't know how it's done. In my case, I hear my thoughts in my head.

So it makes no discernable difference from your standpoint...

How do you detect ideas?

Do you mean that ideas are empirical because we can hear them in our head?

The point is that common English defines 'physical' as 'apprehensible by the senses, measurable'.

It is our common reality: we know of the world through our senses. We can ascertain that a given physical object exists by using our senses (and instr...