Janus

So-called "human nature" is culturally, linguistically constructed. There may have been a human nature when humans were pre-agriculturally, presymboli...

Sorry, you've lost me there. Could you explain what you mean?

I can't see any possibility of a humane (or human!) solution. I think the tendency to destroy one another (and ourselves) is inherent in the culture o...

That critique I generally agree with; as I've already said the main problem is industrial agriculture and overuse of resources, Industrial agriculture...

There are many interpretations of the so-called collapse of the wave function, for example 'Decoherence' is one that does not involve consciousness if...

Recycling so far hasn't, for the most part, proven to be possible or been considered to be economically worth doing as far as I can tell. New technolo...

No, rather it's everything and every type of thing. And to get back to the point; everything and every type of thing does not require a privileged "no...

Of course that's true if you have enough resources to create things to spend the money on. And given resource depletion those things had better be use...

No I had nothing like that in mind; I was referring to the decline in fertility, which would seem to be physiological.

The so-called observer effect or problem in QM has nothing specifically to do with the idea that the microphysical is indeterministic, other than the ...

Physical existence is the existence that can be measured and modeled: it is the subject of the natural sciences.

Yes, exactly. Popper distinguished between scientific theories and metaphysical speculation, saying that the former are falsifiable and the latter are...

It makes me wonder if this is another natural corrective to human overshoot.

I think economic growth is also the driver for population growth. Back in the John Howard days here in Australia, there was a Government TV add campai...

No, I haven't made a category error. Science is an activity, and a body of knowledge and theory derived from the activity. Neither are infallible. Per...

Yes I guess "physical existence", may be thought of as a description, or a term of designation, but physical existence is not a description. Are you f...

Fer fuck's sake! This was my very first answer to you Tim: If you've wasted time it's only on account of your apparently poor reading/ comprehension, ...

Thanks I'll have a read of it. Interesting that you say peak population will be a problem for perpetual growth. It seems to me that real growth is alr...

It's very simple Tim. All empirical sciences are both incomplete and subject to revision hence they are not infallible. I've clarified several times t...

You claimed that physical existence is dependent on a "particular now"; now you've changed the subject to "measurement of time".

I don't usually count cooking as one of the sciences, it's a craft or a technology. In any case, it is not infallible: one aspect of its fallibility c...

This is nonsense. According to Special Relativity Theory, physical (spatio-temporal) existence has no general "now", so forget about a "now" being req...

Are you being purposely obtuse? There is nothing inconsistent in what I have said. I'll explain just one more time: all science is fallible or fallibi...

He says what I already have; that the common characteristic of all scientific theories is that they are falsifiable. In fact, for him, that is the dis...

Are you claiming that looking at a lump of uranium could cause a particle to be emitted? How do you imagine that could work?

That the macro world seems deterministic to us is, according to QM, most likely because countless stochastic micro-physical processes by purely chance...

What do you mean "without a temporal perspective"? Do you mean try to imagine the world without myself being a temporal entity? Or try to imagine a wo...

You've never read Popper then?

We are undoubtedly organisms, whatever else we might be. We also think of ourselves as persons. So, if you prefer, you can change what I said by subst...

What do you mean by "science itself"? Science is science as practiced by humans. Scientific knowledge, any kind of human empirical knowledge, is falli...

OK, I'm referring to empirical science when I say that science is fallible, not mathematics. Obviously 2+2+4 cannot be wrong, since it is correct by d...

We both know what 'fallible' means, so no need for the didactic condescension. Are you claiming that all science is infallible or that some science is...

Well, I guess it doesn't make sense to say that observation or experiment are infallible, does it? Then how much less infallible would theories to exp...

How do you know that?

We have already agreed that "full understanding" is impossible, or at least that it would be impossible to know whether any understanding we have is "...

Sure, the so-called "first person perspective" gives us phenomenology, which is different than science. But what is found by each individual's phenome...

Sure we could come up with better explanations, but no matter how good any explanation is it could never prove "rigidly" or absolutely deterministic c...

Sure, but all this says is that our understandings of events, or anything, are never knowably final or infallible. So, yes, all science is fallible, b...

We cannot examine microphysical processes such as to be able to decide if they are truly uncaused or not. The consensus among the experts seems to be ...

As you should be!

Does that mean it would be fun to play with you, but not in public? :joke:

It is possible to predict (more or less) accurately on the basis of more or less accurate/ adequate theories, or even ad hoc theories which "save the ...

I think it's too much of a stretch to say that reality is constructed by the brain; more plausible to say that reality is interpreted by the organism,...

I'll pay that one! :lol:

You are asserting that determinism is the case. I am not asserting that it is not the case, but that we have no way of knowing either way.

As Hume said we don't see causes. However I think it is arguable that we do experience ourselves as causal agents, and we do feel the effects of wind,...

No, I would say that if a coherent and plausible physical theory of consciousness, which delivers predictions which can be confirmed by experiment and...

This does not seem at all compatible with the assessment in the linked article: Lyotard develops some reflections on science and technology within the...

Perhaps not so much "in the crossfire" as occupying a position beyond the two poles represented by your position and KK's; assuming, that is, that the...

OK, firstly to say that science might be all-knowing in principle would not be the same as to say that science is all-knowing in principle. Secondly t...