Janus

Is the argument over what is most fundamental: changelessness and identity, or change and diifference? Eternity or temporality? Parmenides vs Heraclit...

Your "of course" seems to indicate that you acknowledge you have been talking nonsense. Yes, speaking formally we could have chosen otherwise regardle...

I have no idea what you are talking about, unfortunately. If my decision was free, then I could have chosen otherwise. If my decision was not free (i....

You know, like lifeless, as in "it was a lifeless performance".

If you had chosen the other option it would have been your free choice; no contradiction. You could have freely chosen to smoke a cigarette or you cou...

At least one of his organs is sub-par.

Maybe, but then it depends on what is meant by "dead". Literally or metaphorically dead.

You're just repeating the same assertion, but you're not backing it up with any argument.

You haven't explained why that must be so. At a particular moment I chose to smoke a cigarette, at that moment I could have chosen not to smoke it; th...

Of course you cannot do both; that's trivially true and irrelevant. Your claim was that you could not have done other than what you did.

Why? In the moment you have a choice between two things you want.Say you want to smoke a cigarette and you want to refrain from smoking a cigarette. W...

No, you could have decided you wanted something else more.

Would that make it somewhat better or somewhat worse?

:up:

:cool:

This is quite possibly true. But I imagine ancient tribes were not in the habit of being involved in complex, logic-based metaphysical arguments. I se...

Yes, although I probably should have been clearer and written: "the notion that it could be established that one position is the correct one and the o...

OK, great, give a brief but concise summary of my argument and then show how you have addressed it.

Your first response is again inapt because I haven't denied the meaningfulness of metaphysical statements. How many times are you going to need this p...

Firstly it was I who first introduced the idea of "undecidability" into this thread, unless I am mistaken on account of not having read through the th...

I don't think it does; because the question as to whether the truth of metaphysical conjectures of statements is undecidable is itself decidable on bo...

There is a considerable difference between acknowledging that something is logically possible, that it might be physically possible, considering it to...

I never said I was unbiased when it comes to favoring some metaphysical pictures over others; in fact if you read carefully you'd see that I have been...

Yes, but the issue is decidability not meaningfulness. I for one, already said the LPs went too far in saying that metaphysical statements are meaning...

Maybe, but it's not relevant to what is being argued by those to whom it is directed.

So, if no one else on here agrees with your "one true self-evident metaphysical system" (which is not a metaphysical system at all in any conventional...

I can't see how your metaphysics could be both free of speculation, and "debatable". If it were totally unreliant on speculation, then it would self-e...

What's the point of discussing it if you make up your own meaning for the term 'metaphysics"?

Empirical beliefs cannot be premises for metaphysical arguments.

It's the state you're in when they put you in a mental institution. :wink: :joke: No, seriously, I would say it is a more or less complex experiential...

The only things we generally agree on "from our experience" are empirical matters.

I don't think @"Pseudonym" has been arguing that the content being argued over in metaphysical debates is meaningless, but that the idea that one or o...

LOL, I haven't strayed from my take on what constitutes "the argument", if my take is different to yours, then so be it; perhaps we will find no commo...

Yeah,I already covered the fact that metaphysical theories are not strictly theories at all, except you conveniently ignored what I have reproduced ab...

You have an argument to support that claim? I don't know. I have no idea what you are trying to say in your post after the sentence quoted above. If i...

While I agree that this must be true of empirical theories; I don't think it is necessarily true of metaphysical theories. That would be like saying t...

I agree with you that metaphysical debates could be decidable in the sense that like-minded people within a certain language game could come to agree ...

What you are referring to here is consistency and coherency, not explanatory power. Consistency and coherency can be assessed 'internally'. Explanator...

If by "brute-fact" you mean "unsupported axiom" that would apply to all metaphysics. The aim of any metaphysical theory is to postulate the fundamenta...

You might be disappointed if you expect a "precise theoretical description" from Whitehead. For Whitehead what is most fundamental is feeling, the vag...

In the empirical arena the explanatory power of a hypothesis or theory is gauged according to the success of its predictions of observable phenomena. ...

There is no such metaphysics, since any consistent metaphysics is merely a valid elaboration of premises which cannot be demonstrated from within the ...

I think you are too dismissive of Whitehead and mischaracterize him as a 'panpsychist' as I've already explained. Also his "theism' is not really thei...

I don't think apokrisis would deny what I said, but he might deny the interpretation of "self-regulative internalness" as 'psyche', though, because th...

How could an entity without some minimal subjective experience ("internalness") have any degrees of freedom? If an entity could respond in different w...

Mechanical response is conceived as being exhaustively causally determined. In an interpretative response there must be some agential freedom; you cou...

Isn't that the kind of definition which makes sense of the difference between human and computer responses?

Well an interpretation would be a response which is not merely mechanical, wouldn't it? A response in which there is some degree of creative freedom, ...

Well, he will no doubt correct me if I am misinterpreting him, but I think he is just emphasizing the sign relation as interpretative rather than as e...

As you know, I was arguing with @"apo" over this point earlier too. But I have come to think that what he is saying is that the sign relation just is ...