RussellA

Direct Realism requires backwards causation, which is impossible There is a direction to causation, in that it is not the case that first there is an ...

Direct Realism is not valid, as it requires, just from knowledge of an effect, direct knowledge of its cause, which is impossible. Direct realism argu...

Epistemological solipsism is the philosophical idea that one can only be sure about the existence of one's own mind. The existence of an external worl...

Sunlight hits the leaves of a tree, wavelengths from the blue and red spectrum are absorbed by the Chlorophyll in the leaves and green, yellow and ora...

This is the problem of negative singular existence statements, where in order to deny the existence of a given individual, one must assume the existen...

When looking at a green tree, does the Direct Realist directly perceive the colour green or directly perceive the wavelength 500nm ?

Hopefully, the following argument uses no assumptions anyone would disagree with. An argument for Solipsism Everything I perceive in the world outside...

Are you certain that you're a Pyrrhomist ?

That's a very un-Pyrrhonist thing to say, you sound very certain about it.

I take up your challenge. :smile: The argument is: 1) Only things that we're 100% certain exists exist. 2) The only thing I'm 100% certain exists is m...

The title of the thread is "Can you prove solipsism true?" Yes, an argument that refutes an absolutist metaphysical solipsism also leads to a refutati...

If solipsism is true, then everything I know, such as apples, mountains, other people, are parts that make up the whole me. If from these parts I beco...

As solipsism can be proved false, it follows that solipsism can be proved to be not true. Taking solipsism as knowledge of anything outside one's own ...

:grin:

Invaluable to me in sorting out my own ideas. I'm wavering between panprotopsychism and neutral monism. Donovan Wishon in his article Panpsychism, Pan...

In the world are elementary particles, such as electrons, and elementary forces, such as the gravitational force. My consciousness doesn't exist indep...

Not really, more that the mind is an intimate part of the world, along the lines of the article Panpsychism, Panprotopsychism, and Neutral Monism by D...

It seems to me: More or less. Something that has taken 3.7 billion years since life first evolved on Earth, in that life must be the product of its en...

No. As a mind-independent world causes changes to my mind, my mind causes changes to a mind-independent world, a case of Enactivism. In Enactivism, co...

My world consists of what I know, and everything I know exists in my mind. What I know are feelings such as pleasure and pain, concepts such as govern...

We cannot know the whole if we only know a part. We may know a rock, but as there is no information within the rock that it is part of a mountain, we ...

:up:

Perhaps, but as Raymond Chandler said “A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

Gödel died from a fear of poisoning, and malnutrition killed him. Most geniuses are killed by old age.

Sounds like Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Solipsism, consciousness and the problem of cause and effect I am conscious of the colour red, taste something sweet, feel something smooth, hear a sl...

Perhaps the bigger puzzle is how do we decide whether a puzzle, such as the puzzle of consciousness, is an impossible puzzle or not.

It must do, in the same way that there are impossible problems and impossible objects. Wikipedia even has a list of impossible puzzles. War between pe...

The world appears logically consistent, which allows us, for example, to use Newton's second law F = m * a to predict future events. But does being ab...

As with Windows Free Cell game 11,982, some puzzles are insoluble. Why should we think that all puzzles are soluble.

The alien, the human and the donkey Life first started to evolve on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, and there is no reason to think it has stopped....

If understanding is knowledge about a subject, our understanding and knowledge can only go so far, until reaching an inevitable barrier beyond which t...

What does it mean to solve the puzzle of consciousness. In what sense can we ever understand consciousness. In what sense do we understand anything. H...

If these puzzles are ultimately insoluble by humans, then why not also add "World Peace" to the list.

Another puzzle, perhaps overriding all of these, is why it is believed that humans will ever be capable of solving these puzzles. What reason is given...

Because this thread was initiated asking the question whether Descartes was an "evil genius", which can only be about what he meant or thought.

Are you saying that, even though Descartes didn't, in fact, torture dogs, the myth that Descartes did torture dogs has a value as a symbol that sends ...

From the magazine "Philosophy Now", within the article by Samuel Kaldas titled Descartes versus Cudworth On The Moral Worth of Animals is written: "De...

The Philosophical Quarterly Vol 42 No 167 April 1992 "Descartes on Animals" Peter Harrison - www.jstor.org/stable/2220217 Peter Harrison remarks that ...

The sentence from the Britannica: "He argued that, because animals have no souls, they do not think or feel; thus, vivisection, which Descartes practi...

It seems a pity that the father of modern philosophy is being discredited for something he probably never did. In the article Descartes on Animals in ...

True, in that talking to dogs is preferable to torturing plants. Descartes reasoned that as animals didn't speak or philosophise, they lacked souls an...

Or, as an article in The Guardian newspaper proposes, perhaps we should talk to our plants rather than, as the vegans propose, eat them. "As we edge i...

If it is right to judge the morality of a philosopher writing 400 years ago by today's standards, then we should expect the morality of philosophers w...

Science is about knowing what is true in the world. Philosophy is about doubting what is known to be true in the world.

If you believe that someone is acting immorally, yet they believe that they aren't, in the absence of an ultimate arbiter of morality, why should your...

I agree with @Richard B. Kripke also wrote: “Heat is the motion of molecules.” Wikipedia - Heat A thermodynamic system does not contain heat. www.brit...

If "this lectern" is a type, and as types are usually thought to be universals, who is correct, the Realist, the Nominalist or the Conceptualist ? The...

It depends of which properties are essential for an object to be the same object. It it is judged that location is an essential property of an object,...

The question is to what extent is scientific language literal or metaphorical. To what extent is Kripke's language literal or metaphorical. I believe ...