Kenosha Kid

Also, I imagine, being a self-entitled jerk. Unless you're a rich self-entitled jerk, in which case you'll probably be fine.

I haven't replaced them with anything. I was born an atheist like everyone else. There was nothing to replace.

He said absolute time is an illusion, caused by the fact that everyday speeds are negligible compared with the speed of light. Time itself isn't an il...

Trump has pardoned the four American citizens who committed the Nisour Square massacre. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/23/trump-pardons-bl...

I don't think we can describe any drive, including the drive to procreate, as either moral or immoral. How we act, yes. Perhaps even how we think. But...

:up:

By any means demonstrate it. I'm not sure how you'd go about that. Can you conjure an image to mind of a million pencils that is, to you, distinct fro...

Well it wouldn't make sense to use that terminology. We don't have a natural drive not to steal. We have a natural drive not to do to others that whic...

That's exactly right, bar the specificity of that limit. We don't have distinct ideas of large numbers. It is only through a comparison of their symbo...

For any finite volume over any finite time interval, there is always a probability of field excitations. But even without those excitations, the field...

Because manipulating the final symbol according to a small set of rules learned in childhood is trivial and does not require comprehension of the enti...

I don't think Isaac is censoring anyone, merely pointing out that the assumptions of certain arguments are unjustifiable. It's always interesting, eve...

No, because we don't conceive of numbers in this way. We don't have a concept of 143,672ness. We can relate 143,672 to 143,671 by comparing six symbol...

I agree, but I think that is a need arising from being in a society, not a need to be social in the first place, i.e. it is circumstantial. More funda...

I disagree, science disagrees too, but what you're describing is already social. If we have a need to respect others, we are social animals.

That probably accounts for a lot, thanks. As the article says: Unexpected segue into Godwin's law at the end there, but as a fan of Dead Snow I approv...

I hope I am. Literally zero downside that I can see. The fact that we have intrinsic social capacities does not necessitate that everything we do must...

You've heard of an "open system"?

For all I know you're also sterile... it's still true that humans reproduce sexually :) Humans have a natural capacity for empathy. This capacity can ...

I assumed on first reading this sentence you were referring to the idea that we should prioritise the many over the few: the only meaning of "the grou...

You mean your typically esoteric definition? I wouldn't class that as a failure. It's important to have consensus in language. Adhere to that and you ...

Yes, it is. It is a system in an undesirable state, but it is still a system. That is extremely wide of the mark. A carbon atom is a system of fermion...

Now we're getting too silly. Of course an apparatus is a system.

The latter.

You can. Just keep saying "Not brains!"

An observation is a recording of data about a system. That system cannot be a quark, or spacetime curvature, or someone's conscious experience in isol...

I don't think this is true. Dennett defines qualia according to a survey of literature, which is reasonable: unlike a lot of the current discussions o...

A computer can be programmed to assert that it thinks. Doesn't make it so. Descartes was starting from what he knew for sure, which is that he thinks....

Does a spinning wheel know it is round? If not, where is the detection? Granted, yes, the act of doubting necessitates the mind that does the doubting...

FFS, forget it. Your bizarre responses are, as the past has taught me, beyond my skill to negotiate. The 'I think' of the cogito is an observation. It...

No, as I've pointed out with orthodox examples several times. You've been on this site for a while now. Is your impression that we're unanimous? I agr...

Ah. If you read a bit further down, I point out that there are many things we cannot observe directly (such as quarks, Higgs bosons, spacetime curvatu...

I'm not sure what you're asking. One can distinguish between a house and a mouse in physicalism, also between a living human and a corpse. Physicalism...

One kind of structure is that which encodes information. In this instance, we know that the information -- the design of the house -- is encoded physi...

Aye, although I think that is what properties are. The charge of a particle is its coupling to everything, likewise for mass, spin, etc. The position ...

That's a nice easy one. If the row of ducks was a row plus three ducks, then if I remove each duck one by one I should be left with just the row, righ...

So why are you challenging the idea that humans learn things at all? It's basically where it occurs in the brain. See my and Isaac's lengthy and somew...

I would agree with them too. I have come across people who treat scientific theory as if it had come via divine revelation, but I think most of us wou...

I didn't read past this first sentence. I have explained my reasoning as to why non-physical things are either contradictory or meaningless (the basis...

It is physical in the same way everything else is: it can be observed directly or indirectly, and its properties couple to the physical properties of ...

Sure, and applies to everything. Everything behaves in this way: it couples to physical properties and is directly or indirectly observable. And since...

:clap:

It doesn't have an apparently non-physical nature. It has an apparently physical one according to the definition of 'physical' in this context. What w...

I gave a familiar example. I did not generalise from it in the way you claim. Yes. There's no contradiction there. Empiricism doesn't necessitate phys...

Sufficiently similar, surely. The people seen through the window would be different, for instance. And the photograph is analogous to the restaurant, ...

Or maybe they're speaking about the 3% difference between human DNA and chimpanzee DNA, them being geneticists and all.

Iirc you were asking about how an unconscious mental process could feed into a conscious experience. We just ended up at how humans learn anything at ...

Oh, I can explain it. I just can't learn it for you. We have reached an impasse: I shan't embark on a lengthy post describing how human beings learn t...

There are many houses. Does this imply that my partner and I live in different houses? You speak of culture. Two people with the same culture will pro...

As I said, you can't logically doubt that we can learn things and at the same time ask questions expecting to learn my viewpoint, or expect me to disc...