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Janus

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Yes, one cannot have thoughts or beliefs, period, until one has acquired the requisite level of linguistic competency. Pre-linguistic beings can proba...
May 06, 2019 at 04:07
I didn't suggest that. They are about behaviors that others would be affected by if they were aware of the behavior. I qualified the statement with ot...
May 06, 2019 at 03:20
Moral feeling and thought are concerned with behavior towards others.
May 06, 2019 at 02:54
I would disagree and say that when it comes to language users all moral feelings are informed by culture (language in the broadest sense I outlined ab...
May 06, 2019 at 02:42
I agree. I would probably prefer to say that moral feelings are informed (in the sense of 'in-formed' and hence shaped) by culture than by language in...
May 06, 2019 at 02:36
Properties are emergent, and properties are not "composed of parts".
May 06, 2019 at 02:27
In: Rebirth?  — view comment
If something is not established as impossible (an establishment which would seem to itself be impossible except in the case of logical contradictions)...
May 06, 2019 at 01:40
I'm not sure what you mean by "parse these out".
May 06, 2019 at 01:22
Yes I agree. Our moral feelings are not "raw" or merely instinctive affects, but culturally mediated, conceptually, linguistically and narrationally e...
May 06, 2019 at 01:04
I think some social animals are very cognizant (sometimes in quite subtle ways) of the difference between conflict with intent to harm and playful com...
May 06, 2019 at 00:33
Go back to sleep; you're dreaming again... :joke:
May 06, 2019 at 00:25
No worries. :smile: I would always support encouraging others to read Eisenstein.
May 06, 2019 at 00:23
Sure, not all harm is necessarily unethical, or at least entirely unethical (the benefit of the action that causes the harm might be thought to outwei...
May 06, 2019 at 00:22
All this unnecessary thrashing around is muddying the waters. Physical harm causes physical pain and suffering. Emotional harm causes emotional pain a...
May 06, 2019 at 00:09
You're making the mistake of thinking of causality as only efficient. For someone who professes to be influenced by Aristotle, this shortsightedness i...
May 06, 2019 at 00:02
Why would you think it is contradictory? That's funny....I don't find anything in what you wrote, and I haven't seen anything anywhere else, that I wo...
May 05, 2019 at 07:46
I think you are joking now!
May 05, 2019 at 07:36
:rofl: The fertility of your comedic imagination rarely fails to amaze me Master Crank!
May 05, 2019 at 01:06
It should be obvious that I am neither defending physicalism nor asking @"Dusty of Sky" to defend it. Dusty seemed to be claiming that there are compr...
May 05, 2019 at 00:20
Sure, but my point was more about the practical impediments to the advent of anything like total automation, impediments that make the very idea look ...
May 05, 2019 at 00:04
I wholeheartedly agree.
May 04, 2019 at 22:58
I can understand what you say here, but I can't see how any of it constitutes any reason to believe that we will inevitably, or are even likely to, wh...
May 03, 2019 at 05:25
I'm asking for an explanation of just how the physical property of liquidity arise from a liquids purported constituent particles. I can't see that yo...
May 03, 2019 at 05:21
You are offering definitions or descriptions, but these don't seem to amount to explanations. To be sure there are neural processes within the body th...
May 03, 2019 at 04:35
So, you are saying that the complex system we call the global economy will always be able to adapt, despite diminishing resources and their consequent...
May 03, 2019 at 04:27
But you still have not explained how a composite of microphysical entities produces the phenomenon of liquidity. I don't know if there are any compreh...
May 03, 2019 at 04:16
Are you saying that we will not need to drastically reduce consumption (a reduction of consumption that I refer to as "sacrifice:) or that we will not...
May 03, 2019 at 04:12
Why should you think that wetness, as liquidity, is "reducible to the composite state of physical entities" whereas, phenomenologically speaking, it i...
May 03, 2019 at 04:04
What about physical properties that are not themselves entities; like wetness for example?
May 03, 2019 at 03:53
Yes, Wallows, but where are the resources, both economic and energy, not to mention scientific and technological, going to come from to build all thos...
May 03, 2019 at 03:48
I don't claim that it will ever be possible to precisely correlate brain activity with complex experiential processes. But there does not seem to be a...
May 03, 2019 at 03:30
I agree with all of that. The rich could still get richer when tax rates were much higher. But, given the increasing amount percentage of debt to GDP ...
May 03, 2019 at 03:04
Again, I think it depends on the physicalist. There is a philosophical position called Eliminative Physicalism, which might be taken to be saying that...
May 03, 2019 at 02:45
If you are composed of neurons or cells or both, why would that entail that it should be necessary that they experience what you experience, if experi...
May 03, 2019 at 02:37
Right, we may be able to show that there are brain processes which correlate with cognitive events, but we can never, it seems, definitively show that...
May 03, 2019 at 02:31
Physics is physical theory, and not all of what is material or physical in the ordinary sense of those terms is describable or explicable in those fun...
May 03, 2019 at 02:25
I am no economist either. I am just trying to think about the situation in light of what is generally accepted about the increase of fragility and vol...
May 03, 2019 at 02:10
That seems well enough justified! :smile:
May 03, 2019 at 01:34
Accepting all of that, the pertinent philosophical question would seem to be: "Then why the hell do you have a cat?" Seriously, though, it depends on ...
May 03, 2019 at 01:15
I think Tim's argument is something like that in principle it is always morally wrong to break the law. But that principle is based on the idea that l...
May 03, 2019 at 00:57
I think it is rather the case that you are unjustifiably generalizing. You claim that "the bad is always there"; but why is it always bad to break the...
May 03, 2019 at 00:03
You are going to have to produce an argument to justify your idea that it is always immoral to break a law if you want anyone to take your position se...
May 02, 2019 at 23:31
As I pointed out in your other thread where you made this same mistake, GDP as it is measured. i.e. in terms of the total quantity of money and goods ...
May 02, 2019 at 23:21
I am not educated in QM or Relativity beyond a smattering of readings of science popularizers, so my question might well be naive. If there were "hidd...
May 02, 2019 at 01:40
In: Bannings  — view comment
Oh, well, there are already enough cranky old fuckers on the site anyway! Which is not to say there are a lot, but you don't need many! (Is that ageis...
May 01, 2019 at 23:52
Right, and some preconditions are more relevant than others. The Big Bang is irrelevant, or at most trivially relevant, to understanding morality beca...
May 01, 2019 at 23:38
Legislators in the service of power elites; who else?
May 01, 2019 at 21:49
I'd choose 3, because I don't think acts are immoral merely because they are illegal. I think its the other way around: serious crimes are illegal bec...
May 01, 2019 at 21:44
I was aware it is a question. You appear to be asking if I agree (presumably with you?) "that there are illegal things that are not immoral, but moral...
May 01, 2019 at 05:22
NNNNOOOO!!!!
May 01, 2019 at 02:36