Janus

So, do you take physicalism to be an ineliminable conceptual underpinning of physics or, more broadly, of science itself? What about systems and chaos...

This seems to me a misrepresentation of Dennett's faith in rationality. I take it that Dennett thinks rationality is effective in getting to the truth...

This, and the OP itself, is exactly the point I made in another thread a couple weeks ago: Applying this idea of familiarity to a famous Gettier examp...

Yeah, those explanations of what you mean by 'explanation' are clear as mud! :roll:

Oh, right! :groan: When I asked how that works I was not asking how counting works, but I see no reason to doubt that you knew that. So the existence ...

So, the existence of the numbers which have never been thought or named, that is have never been counted. is dependent on our capacity to count. How d...

Is the existence of the numbers that have never been thougt or named dependent on any human doing?

It seems to be a corollary of your position that the existence of the number 2, just as with the existence of countless numbers which have never been ...

What "rules for explanations"? Are you going to propose that they must be in physicalist terms to count as explanations? That would be very convenient...

Yes, and even apart from the Gaia hypothesis observations of characteristic human behavior would seem to support thinking that, in the face of dwindli...

Yes, and unfortunately the current conditions are looking ripe for an escalation of global conflict such as we have never before witnessed. I doubt th...

Yes, it does seem we are committed to saying that. :grin:

What do you mean by "stuff"? If to be "stuff" is to be physical, then obviously it is merely a tautologous conclusion that there is, and can be, no st...

There was a typo there: it should have read "physicalist account". My point was just that the physical form in which all accounts are given is irrelev...

Again this shows your physicalist prejudice. Of course two physical instantiations of any abstraction are not physically identical, but they are seman...

You're assuming that an ontological account is necessarily a physicality account. In any case even granting that condition for the sake of argument, i...

This is nothing more than another example of you taking your physicalist prejudices for a run. You simply assume what you are being asked to prove; th...

The fact that logical or semantic symbols can be physically instantiated does not entail that logical or semantic space can be physical. How can logic...

Sure, I can simply say that abstracts exist in logical or semantic space. What physical space actually is is really no clearer to us than what logical...

Of course it is incoherent to you, as replete with your physicalist prejudices as you are. It is not incoherent per se, in other words, but only when ...

It's obvious that, by the very definition, abstracts do not exist in physical space. So all you are doing here is rehearsing an absurd criterion for e...

As a nominalist how would you demonstrate that abstracts don't exist? To decide either way is to entertain a prejudice.

On the contrary I understand what you've written and I see clearly that the mere fact of the general form of our mental constitutions and social and c...

That is the post my post you are responding is a response to, and I already read it and there is nothing in there that addresses the question I raised...

"Masculine virtues versus feminine virtues"? Thanks for thinking of me but starting a thread on that sounds too complicated and dangerous, and I'm a s...

I think the idea is that our whole range of abilities to deal with the "equipment" of everyday life is itself a linguistically based discourse in the ...

Of course we don't experience the world in exactly the same way. My point is that, for example, we all see objects in the environment in the same loca...

When I said that those things are the domain of analytic philosophy I was not thinking "exclusive domain", nor was I thinking that analytic philosophy...

Why does it follow that because nature is our environment it is alien? In any case there is no real separation between the human and the natural envir...

I pretty much agree with what you say. But there is an idea of the supernatural which posits or presupposes a transcendent reality, something ontologi...

I think the inherent limitations of the strictly empirical scientific method when it comes to investigations of human phenomena; phenomenology, psycho...

I may have it somewhere, I'll take a look. I''l just say now, though, that I don't believe Husserl had any interest in the supernatural, and I will no...

How could you possibly know it has always been so? We are way more fearful of nature today than hunter-gatherers were; just think of what the most lik...

Yes, to us it does seem more or less alien; that's what I've been saying.

Yes, I wouldn't advise giving everything away while the present condition of the world continues to prevail. I was more talking about the steady creep...

Nor am I. A p-zombie could not act exactly like a conscious human being because it is by definition not conscious. Even if consciousness were an illus...

In light of what you say here, you are not agreeing with @"Wayfarer" that we have "fallen away" from those insights which you see as belonging to huma...

But I was claiming that significant new ideas (which are "the things I mentioned") can be found in modern philosophy, (and not merely in analytic phil...

Naturalism is focused on finding natural explanations for natural phenomena, Can you provide even one example of a supernatural explanation for any na...

He's asking what it's like to be the bat for the bat. To the degree that the bat is not aware of the "stomach, intestines, blood and faeces" then thos...

The point was not that our experiences are exactly the same, but that we perceive the same objects and that it can easily be shown that we can all agr...

Are you claiming that there are no new ideas in all of analytic philosophy; that there is nothing significant there which cannot be found in Plato and...

"Might one day" being the salient phrase here.

I wonder which "empiricist dilemmas" you have in mind.

I think this is unfair to Dennett, who by any account is a serious philosopher even if you disagree with him. Have you actually read Dennett? I know t...

Right, computers don't have neurological structures, and that's why we have little reason to seriously consider the possibility that they might experi...

I think Heidegger would probably reply that "in order to" and 'for the sake of which" are paradigmatically central elements of discourse.

:rofl: and then :vomit: I don't guano about that!

I would say the neurological structures of a bat are immeasurably more complex than any computer's program, and are probably not all that much less co...

The thing is we know that we experience. We observe our neural similarity to animals, so it is natural enough to suppose that they also experience. Th...