At its worst philosophy is a self-contained solipsist game. You define your terms, your rules - and your logic doesn't need to be flawed at all, and s...
Yes, there seems to be. We can't tell with absolute certainty, and never will. Next question? When I argue with scientists I just get so angry about t...
You know, it's actually a pretty well known position, has been for quite a while actually... And it will remain essentially meaningless, empty of any ...
1. Morality may be made of God's never communicated attitudes 2. We liberal humanists see that genocides are wrong 3. Maybe God agrees, who knows - he...
Yeah, circular. And anyway, God could start approving genocides any moment - he can do what he pleases, change systems of morality like underwear etc....
Yeah, but that's what happens when you use God as your ventriloquist puppet - it adds nothing to the argument but makes any system of morality unstabl...
I should actually re-read it - I was 19 for the first time and likely did not understand much. Now, 35 years later it surely would be rather sense-mak...
Why woud that matter - isn't this thread about God's morality? Obviously I think that genocides are never justifiable, even if the Canaanites or Ukrai...
No, I was just pointing out that genocides are fine for God in some circumstances, as are rapes and ethnic cleansings. So, that kind of God based mora...
Well, God once commanded ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide. He would have a total authority to command a machete attack to a daycare and it would be...
Idealism is "true" (or internally coherent some such thing) and most often rather irrelevant to our human experience of being in the world. Materialis...
Well, be that as it may - Jesus apparently left pitifully few instructions after himself, so they had to do the best they could. Jesus might have orig...
Of course they edited those texts - it clearly seems that Jesus' contemporary followers expected him to return to the world in their lifetimes. They h...
Well, compare Christian and Greco-Roman pagan afterlifes - heaven is a huge selling point, like marketing gold. And you didn't really need to do anyth...
Anyway, if one thinks about this obsolete dichotomy, then idealism appears the rational and logical alternative - and materialism the more emotional a...
I'm not the least bit interested in the idealism vs materialism wars. Basically in very few of the famous conflicts that arose from the 17th century p...
Well, you can define "machine" in the way that it automatically excludes anything organic - sounds rather categorical and artificial though. Anyway, a...
I think it would be pretty easy to see us as robots - bit more complicated that insects, having rather messy and contradictory code and even doing a b...
Eventually I think true AI is bound to happen, barring the collapse of our techological civilization. I doubt if I will be around to see it but I abso...
For me it would be quite enough if we couldn't tell the difference. And it's not like we would be very clear even about the existence of our own minds...
I think our only hope is to stop being ourselves and start being intelligent, thoughtful and kind. We need a fundamental transformation and while blin...
Cats are obviously the highest life form here. Of course the competition is not very stiff but still. Anyway, apropos, sometimes it appears to me that...
It would be great if we would one day have actual intelligent machine minds - this planet could do with intelligence. And the moment our species could...
I will answer more thoughtfully later. But, no, I'm not really interested how my rational views might be similar to fascism - I'm sure they at least p...
That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In th...
I don't know. I guess I will have to remain unconvinced - and I very early rebelled against the modern concept of identity, some weird, arbitrary cage...
I really don't get this point - where does it arise from? Could you maybe clarify a bit? A more intimate relationship of understanding between people....
Sure, that is a good point. But I don't know if modern academic philosophy is a very good study in humility. At times I have difficulty in understandi...
Finnegans Wake, now that is a text... I guess it is the kind of the place where you would go after the utter miracle of Ulysses - and I would still sa...
Yeah, he is very sizeable - I don't think I could be a liberal without having considered him seriously. He is a deadly earnest challenge. Impractical,...
That's a great way of putting it. I don't think we are very good at bearing the burden of "I-hood", "I-ness", but there still might at times be someth...
I have been fascinated about literary attempts at describing the reality (or as I put it, our experience of being in the world) - like the great moder...
Just? Anyway, this is a dichotomy that often comes up in discussion about the mind or the self. Either or, a very Western binary question. It could be...
Anyway, there is the famous phrase of a branch line from Kant to Auschwitz - about the connection between enlightenment and industrial genocide. I gue...
The very question itself is so full of presuppositions and premises that it should be thoroughly deconstructed and reassembled to make sense. As it st...
Strange, memory scepticism et al. I had no memory of ever opening this thread and was about to write a pretty identical post :) Anyhow, my attitude st...
Well, as a liberal who has come to admire Crazy Friedrich quite a bit, I think that he was being Nietzschean at rather an unfortunate point in history...
As an answer to the question posited in the title, it depends on our idea of language and meaning. Obviously, as a purported description of actual emp...
This imbalance has to do with our connection to the infinite, as Kierkegaard would put it. The vacuum of an infinite (God / Awe), has left us in a loo...
Sure. I think that "reality" (of which usefulness as a concept I'm far from sure) is at least slightly out of focus for us. Permanently. But, this sai...
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I don't see myself as a relativist, I strongly suspect and think that there is an independent and objective rea...
Well, I'm a Humean when it comes to the possibly universal truth of you having woken at 8am today. You might be totally mistaken. You might not even b...
Well, yes and no - we are local, but we can aspire towards the universal. It's just that we can never totally reach it. To be human means to be subjec...
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