Perhaps, or they may be deluded. I don't discount the possibility, and yet I see little reason to believe it. Wittgenstein's statement never made much...
I have to admit it seems somewhat incoherent to me too, but the theologians would have something else to say, I imagine. As always it all depends on y...
Well, we say that we understand words and phrases to represent or refer to things, and animals don't say that, can't say that. Epiphenomenalism makes ...
That's right; the furthest we can think back towards an origin is this "hot dense prior state" which was a dimensionless point. This is really no more...
The Big Bang is understood to be the origin of this universe at least, it is also causa sui, meaning that we must take it as such since, it it were ca...
By the same criterion, the Big Bang hypothesis is not explanatory either. Both it and the God hypothesis posit creation ex nihilo, and we cannot under...
Right, is it just differences in the human brain that enables the development of language, or is it vocal chords or the opposable thumb or a combinati...
I think @"unenlightened" has already answered this very well. A complex brain can re-call, re-member and re-imagine events, which better enables learn...
eon ???n?, ???n noun An indefinitely long period of time; an age. The longest division of geologic time, containing two or more eras. The largest divi...
A tree is an interactive reality; so it's not a matter of whether it would be a chestnut if there were no humans. :lol: Banno: the last of the naive r...
We are born into a world already formed by the perceptions and judgements, evolved over eons in a community of embodied perceivers, and enacted within...
Sure, we can say all of this would be real in some way without us, but we have no idea what that could mean, since the notion real has its genesis in ...
If there were no humans those sentences would not exist, let alone be true. If there were no bodies there would be no tree, no chestnut, no flower, no...
They wouldn't be real without the perceiving body; at least not in the same way. No reality to speak of without bodies, and no speaking either. A diff...
Sure, you can still ask why, but that would be to either fail to understand, or fail to accept, what is offered as an ultimate explanation. The very i...
God is conceived as being that to which all roads lead, and at which all roads end, so unlike other.less absolute, explanations, such as aliens, or co...
I can relate to that; there is a kind of tension in Kant, since he rejects the possibility of doing metaphysics (as traditionally conceived) via pure ...
I don't disagree with that, but I was referring specifically to what we do with our colour perceptions, to what the ability to perceive colour enables...
An over-generalization, I think: we may distinguish colours simply because we like the way they look. In any case distinguishing colours and being abl...
The ability to distinguish colours is not dependent on what we do, some of what what we do is dependent on the ability to distinguish colours. The car...
You get the red one and not the green because it's not arbitrary. You seem to be saying that it's not arbitrary because you get the red one not the gr...
Because the uses of words that denote perceived qualities are not arbitrary; the perceptions are not without commonality. If they were we could agree ...
That all makes sense to me. I don't think Kant denied that there is a reality in itself (i.e. something that would be in the absence of human life). K...
So, you are going to play that game? What's a quality? It's an attribute. What's an attribute? It's a trait. What's a trait?.... Why do we (mostly) ag...
There is no "thing" redness, if by that you mean an object. But there is a quality of redness that things that qualify as red things display. The qual...
I find Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblances not very coherent or useful and even potentially somewhat misleading. Members of a human family are ...
Our experiences may be different, but if they have nothing in common then they would not qualify as experiences of reality, even though they might qua...
Is essentialism some kind of bogeyman for you? Do you see that there might be differences kinds or degrees of essentialism? Yellow is not a red or a g...
The way things seem can only be "flawed" in relation to some other way things seem; with the presumption that the latter somehow gets us closer to "th...
Of course there is something in common with experiences we could say are of red: they more closely resemble one another than they do experiences we co...
I read Kant more as saying that what we experience is a human reality. I think he was aware that the notion of 'things as they are in themselves', alt...
I wasn't referring to Kantian ideas. I intended to point out that we don't experience an external world, meaning that we don't experience anything tha...
Sure, something can change and become more like something else, but I don't see how that fact rules out stating what parts of the things have become m...
OK, that's weird; I don't know why that would be. I don't see the relevance. If there is a family resemblance then there must be some resemblance, i.e...
What could similarities consist in if not similarity of form? Similarities of form are thus essential, if not, obviously, perfect. That is there are n...
Right, if we make decisions or choices (which we obviously do) then it seems inevitable that we will feel those options to be selected freely. The not...
I tend to think that idealism and religion are generally seen as being more closely allied than religion and materialism; I'm not sure the latter are ...
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