Janus

I don't know where to place myself in that picture.

That's very kind ND. I, for one, have always found you and your ideas to be very congenial, and by no means insignificant.

I get what you're saying, but I view it a bit differently. I don't believe Dennett is stupid enough to deny that we are subjects of experience; to say...

But isn't that why you object to materialism, why you think it is demeaning of human life; because it seems to you to rule out soteriology?

I wasn't offering an assessment of @"Wayfarer's" arguments, just highlighting that if one really seriously believed in the importance of preparing for...

Our "acts, efforts, projects and enterprises" do have points, though. Is it necessary that there should be some absolute point over and above those re...

Of course there is a very significant difference between you: @"Wayfarer", if I am not mistaken believes there is an afterlife and I think that is why...

Above not addressed by you.

An innocent may fairly be said not to deserve coming to deliberate harm, and that is a moral issue for the person who deliberately harms and for socie...

No, I'd say that here, in the context of this discussion, with you it's more about Red's Herring.

The point is that in either model, materialist or idealist. there is no problem that there should be truths unknown to us; which tells against your ap...

Since according to idealism the world is a product of Big MInd, not your mind or mine, then on that position there may indeed be truths that are not k...

Why? We are what we are and the world is what it is no matter how we might think about what constitutes us or the world in any imagined metaphysical s...

I'll leave that to you to figure out. Good luck. Yes, a truly feeble response it was!

It's ironic that you are always complaining about lack of argument in others' posts. :roll:

Right, I think that is a decent aspiration, though, at least in principle. Whether it ever could be achievable is another question. I think it would b...

:up: The nail has been hit! Accepting for the sake of argument that innocents do not deserve to come to harm, it does not follow that they deserve to ...

As I see it the GFC was caused, in great part, by corporate greed; setting up loans for people who could not afford them and probably didn't understan...

If anyone is entitled to own a home then why not everyone? It has been the property developers and investors who have made owning a home unaffordable ...

:up: What you say makes sense to me.

Yes, I agree that it's a lot to do with resentment, even desperation. When people are desperate, they are easier to dupe

I agree with both your answers, but the question seeks a deeper answer; why do they want to overthrow the Government, what motivates their participati...

OK, I didn't read the Feser piece. My point was only that thinking necessarily has meaning in a semantic sense otherwise we could not count it as thin...

Neural nets have nothing to do with what we are discussing. This is about the way we would normally speak about things. If my seeing an apple is a mod...

Let us grant that the deliberate perpetuation of the falsehood was Trump's; still the belief of others cannot be based simply on that. The interesting...

I take that to mean "No,,,argument". By your own argument the apple is a model, since the act of seeing it models it. Try and wriggle out of that one.

I have already corrected you on this; by your own argument what we see is the apple as modeled. So are we seeing a model or not? If our seeing is a mo...

Thoughts just are inherently meaningful. Thinking just is meaning-making.

I agree, but I added an important clarifying qualification.

But we already know there is a multitude of things external to our bodies; we perceive them as such. We can think of everything as being processes whi...

Right, it's a body/world collaboration, which we, in our usual dualistic manner, conceive of as an artificial separation between the two. That's a coo...

I'd say we see things as they present themselves to us. If we stipulate that there must be things in themselves, i.e. things as they are when not bein...

Perhaps occasionally they did help me get laid, but no they wouldn't satisfy the criteria you laid down there. On the other hand, they do provide a mo...

;Are you serious; you get embarrassed appearing naked in front of your cats?

And yet we may have essential definitions.

I'd say that any particular thing, or collection of particular things, does not qualify as 'everything' so it or they do not fall within the parameter...

:up: My experience has been the same; LSD, Psilocybin, Mescaline, Cannabis. MDMA; all have yielded insight. This may be of interest to those who wish ...

:lol: Nice reversal! :cool:

If it's nonsense to say we encounter statements indirectly, then it's also nonsense to say we encounter them directly. We simply encounter them. The s...

Without other minds there can be no doubt, no proof, no assertion in the first place

It seems to me that all philosophical positions are inconsistent with solipsism, since they all require language, which is born and evolved inter-subj...

Of course you don't need to ask; it is an inter-subjectively established collective representation that walking naked through the mall is shameful.

Yes, we can be certain that others have minds for the simple reason that inter-subjective agreement is the only source of being (discursively) certain...

It seems plausible to me that for consciousness to manifest an organic sentient body with a CNS is necessary. Do I believe that? No, but it seems more...

I haven't suggested they were wrong, but that they were responding in ways that showed they were not taking in what I was saying, which was advocating...

As I see it the only argument for the importance of an idealist understanding might be that it better supports "spiritual" aspirations and intuitions....

I have read that cats, (on average) due to the ratio of their surface area to their mass, reach terminal velocity after falling from about the height ...

The only idealist accounts I am familiar with invoke a higher realm of some kind; a realm of absolute goodness, beauty and truth, which is only ever p...

It seems to me that the underpinnings of ethics are easy enough to comprehend in terms of the understandable desire social animals have for social har...

Does "malignant aggression" consist in taking pleasure in inflicting suffering? The question would then be as to whether predatory animals which "toy"...