Janus

Depends on the branch of science. It seems the principles of valid reasoning should be central to both philosophy and science, as they should be to al...

Hypothesis and prediction seem to consist in imagining, given the empirical observations that have been made. what forces or mechanisms could have bee...

Science consists in empirical observations, hypotheses and theories. Empirical observations are either true or false, hypotheses and theories are test...

The question as to how to distinguish a human being from other animals, with its very obvious answers is not at all the same question as "what does it...

I said that the actual existence of unicorns is irrelevant because you could just as well have used 'pink invisible dog'. Anyway, it's a trivial point...

Seems irrelevant. We don't know that they don't exist somewhere; they may or may not. There's a difference between not existing and not possibly exist...

How can something be both pink and invisible?

It seems likely that hunter/ gatherers would have known what they were, or had no existentially angsty questions about it as we moderns do.. The more ...

Many people seem to be incapable of shaking the illusion that apart from some insight, some clarity and (hopefully) some joy, there is something else ...

Right, beyond our considerations we have no idea.

I'd say our considerations do (obviously) depend on us, but that which gives rise to the considerations does not.

Yep, I agree philosophy is, like the arts, a matter of taste. Why do it if there's no joy in it for you? (I don't mean you, the 'you' there is generic...

Only if you expect answers from it. I see philosophy as consisting in the discovery of questions (in it's dimension as history of ideas) and descripti...

LOL, I think that was all. Beyond that...beats me... I wish I could find a shrugging-my-shoulders emoji...

I'm hesitant to interject ( :wink: ), but it seems to me that you and Banno are talking about two different situations. If the cat is on the mat at so...

OK thanks, that's been helpful; you've altered my perspective re modal logic. :smile:

That's true; and I have to agree it is helpful to make explicit to ourselves what we are doing. Perhaps I have been looking for more in the ideas of r...

:up: :lol:

Sure we can try to imagine all those things and discover the special conditions we would need to posit to make them coherently imaginable (as opposed ...

I understand that you can stipulate that, on account of having been named, an entity can be imagined to have been different than they are in actuality...

When someone has enough interest to make a comment they claim they don't have enough interest to explain; I smell something distinctly rotten.

Just a fact! :rofl: You know nothing about me. As I thought; you can't come up with the goods. It's a little sad that you feel a need to resort to suc...

It's kind of blatantly obvious that you're resorting to ad hominem because you can't mount a decent rebuttal. If you think Chalmers invokes conscious ...

My memory tells me we probably have had a conversation, not identical, but roughly along similar lines as this one before.

As I pointed out before the idea of a programmer is no part of Chalmer's philosophy. If you wanted to posit that there could be p-zombies among us, or...

Only if someone conscious programs it to.

It's nothing but a fantasy. If it gives you pleasure to imagine you are thinking something coherent when you say that your cat could have been differe...

:up:

That whole idea is incoherent. Your cat could not be ginger in any possible world, because it would not be the same cat. All you're saying is that the...

The problem with this argument is that the idea of God is not that he could exist in some possible world, but that insofar as he could be said to exis...

Not really. I'm saying that the absurdity of the idea that the p(urported) zombies could say things about their experience, even though they have no e...

I don't find anything to disagree with in that; which is not so good for discussion.

Do we see light and dark? We see light and dark things. We don't see light itself; we see by means of light.

You would need to posit a programmer which is no part of Chalmer's ideas..

This is exactly why a physicalist like Dennett, who thinks the idea of Zombies is incoherent, says that if they were possible, then we would all be zo...

Bear in mind that I said "consciously experienced"; I already allowed that there is a sense in which we could say that reflected electromagnetic radia...

Again I don't know what you want to say here.

I don't see how what I said equates to that at all. In any case in your example what distinction are you making between content and meaning? If I'm re...

All I was saying was that wavelengths of electromagnetic energy are not consciously experienced; meaning that we don't see wavelengths, we see coloure...

\ I don't disagree with what you say there, but what I said doesn't bear on that at all, as far as I can tell.

I don't know what you mean by "thing" there. I would say experience is not a thing, although it involves things. To describe an experience you describ...

Do first person experiences count as phenomena or are they experiences of phenomena?

Ah right, I can see how it might easily be read like that! The "first course, second course, main course" bit was just added as a flippant extending p...

:up:

I think you may have missed the part in brackets (or maybe you replied before I added it since it was an edit).

Is that an actual quote from Dennett: did he actually say that? If he did say exactly that, then the obvious critique would be that a third person acc...

Yes, there does seem to be a lot of wishful thinking that serves to obfuscate in these matters. Some people just won't allow that we could be material...

Are you suggesting that we experience the effects of things prior to cognitive experience. If so, that would not be conscious experience, though. Sorr...

OK, then I am not sure what you were trying say with the post I responded to, exemplified by what I've just quoted above. You seem to be claiming that...

Yes, and I think a plausible explanation of that is we have evolved over billions of years from single-celled organisms who have had to struggle again...