Janus

This is where your confusion lies: some patterns have repeating structure. The word has a wide range of uses. From the Cambridge Online Dictionary: Pa...

You don't seem to be able to accept that others disagree with you without imputing lack of comprehension or bad faith on their part. You need an actua...

All sentences are patterns. Take that sentence and produce a different pattern. Sentences patterns all are. Or, Lla secnetnes era snrettap. Those are ...

You mean you can't think of anything more to say in defence of your claim that algorithms are not patterns?

"Algorithm design refers to a method or a mathematical process for problem-solving and engineering algorithms. The design of algorithms is part of man...

I didn't say that ideas don't really exist; I said that they don't have substantive existence, and that they don't exist apart from the thinking of th...

It's more of a pattern or algorithm given that, unless I am mistaken, you can program computers to generate novel prime numbers; and computers cannot ...

OK, with such different starting assumptions I guess there's not much to be discussed. :smile:

OK, got it... OK, it looks like I misread you. In that case I agree with you; it is incoherent to claim that something is real, as in substantive, and...

I don't know; I'm not religious. Comfort perhaps, or inspiration, or a sense of inter-connectedness or oneness?

OK I've only made two posts in this thread apart from the one saying that I'm not sure which post you were responding to. So, was it the first or seco...

Not sure which of my posts you're responding to, 180.

You cannot tell very nearly; since you are not near religion yourself they obviously have nothing to offer you. As Bob would have it: "Don't criticize...

Placebos do require faith. Without it they don't work.

If an animal has rights then it does not qualify as property in the ordinary sense. Does your lawnmower or your car have rights?

That depends upon who the libertarian ideal is taken to extend to. Are you claiming there are no libertarians who fight for animal rights?

False! Dogs are dependents and companions, not property.

No, I said that what I consider to be substantive is what can be an object of the five senses. I might add to that the proprioceptive sense, and sensa...

No, absolutely not...objectively speaking...

Physical objects and processes do have substantial reality, though; as they act on us in substantial ways. To my way of thinking that's all it means t...

That is mistakenly seeking an idea as though it had substance; committing Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". I don't believe such a thin...

Objects of the five senses. Ideas don't have substantive existence except in their physical instantiations. This is not to say they don't possess non-...

I don't see it that way at all. The substantive existence of things is obviously not changeless, but, taken as a whole, it is virtually, perhaps actua...

And Jaspers makes a whole philosophy out of that.

I'd say the sense of self (in the sense of identity) is dependent on memory, and may be lost due to amnesia. There also seems to be a sense of individ...

I'd say that as bread may be of quite different kinds and have somewhat different uses and roles in the cuisines of Germany and France, that these dif...

Disappear in what way and from where? In any case the alphabet is instantiated in countless texts, bur apart from that and from people thinking and sp...

OK, I read it, but I couldn't find any explanation of how concepts or universals are thought to exist beyond the instances of their being thought, spo...

So, does the concept exist apart from the instances of it being thought?

Do you think the name 'New York' exists apart from it's visual and auditory embodiments?

I thought you were arguing that the fact that there is one name of the city, just as there is one city, entails that the name is changeless. I see tho...

To be counted as warranted a truth claim requires either corroborable empirical evidence or logical necessity.

If there can be one city that is never the same from moment to moment why can a number not be the same, in the sense of not being changeless, while be...

So I know that it is necessarily true that the LNC is necessary for rational discussion because its negation leads to the negation of all possibilty o...

I know it is necessary for rational discussion because otherwise discussants could make whatever self-contradictory statements they liked, and discuss...

No, I haven't. You made a metaphysical claim; that the law of non-contradiction is certain but contingent. I asked you how you know that it is certain...

I don't understand how being can be divided into necessary and contingent.Non-being cannot be, so being must be necessary. It is only beings that can ...

You've evaded the question by changing terminology, but for the sake of the argument I'll play along; how do you know the law of non-contradiction is ...

If the law of non-contradiction is contingent, how do you know it is true right now. It might have been true five minutes ago, yet now not true; how w...

The equation of God with being seems odd, since being or existence, (per se, as opposed to individual beings or existents) seems necessary, if anythin...

I agree that the idea of a contradiction being true is impossible to parse. So, yes, a contradiction could not be a coherent (and much less a self-con...

But that argument assumes what it seeks to prove; the universality and necessity of the law of non-contradiction. Yes, that seems to follow. Any propo...

I don't see how this follows. Allowing for the sake of argument that the law of non-contradiction is only, contingently, not necessarily, true in this...

That's basically the Ontological Argument. Note, as I pointed out to @"Banno", it is not the Logical Argument (although of course the entailment of th...

You seem to be conflating logical necessity with ontological necessity. Of course it is logically possible that God does not exist; that has never bee...

Likewise.

No one is forcing you to particiapte. I don't remember saying anything about Islam or specifically about arguing against Christianity. Perhaps you can...

Sure, atheists and most everyone else probably believe that harmful ideas harm human beings. And some religious ideas are unarguably harmful, and thos...

No, you are missing something which is that professions of faith are not claims unless we are talking about fundamentalism. In the case of fundamental...

No, I'm not "projecting"; it sounds more like you are projecting your own idea of projection onto me. If people argue against the incursion of religio...