I found it horrifyingly interesting or interestingly horrifying for a couple of seasons. Some of the situations depicted in it highlighted interesting...
I would agree that it is not truly possible to subvert the order of nature and the spiritual order; that is indeed also my view. But the thought exper...
Given any situation where people disagree as to what ought to be done, how could the purported truth of what ought to be done be known? IT might be ob...
You're misunderstanding the scenario; in it people get exactly what they want. They get the life wherein everything turns out exactly as they would wa...
OK, but we are talking about what what people would choose for their own lives, not what kind of play they would watch. I mean, people regularly watch...
Remember that in this hypothetical scenario you would not know you were a brain in vat. Your life would be indistinguishable from this life, other tha...
But that is the point; if everything is thought to be nothing more than dreams within dreams then there could be no reason not to push the button sinc...
Well, I totally agree with you; I would not push it either, and that is consistent with the fact that I am neither a utilitarian, an anti-realist nor ...
If you squint at it, the image has the kind of 'fractal' structure that Pollock's paintings do. I have often seen all kinds of faces and figures emerg...
OK, but it's not meant to give us insight into how to make decisions in this world, but rather into the ontological and ethical commitments that are e...
It's just a thought experiment to try to see what your ethical and ontological commitments are. Think of it another way; if you could push a button an...
You have to imagine that you can press the button and everyone is able to cope with paradise (despite the fact that they haven't worked to earn the ab...
You should forget about the 'external' issue of what might be imagined to be needed to support all the brains, and just focus on the 'internal' ethica...
Don't be put off by the brain; it just represents whatever infrastructure we might imagine to be necessary to support our being able to experiences "t...
If something contributes to a feeling of well-being, for example, that is distinguishable from something that contributes only to my project of buildi...
This brings to mind the phrase "God's eye view" which is said to be the 'view from nowhere'. I always found that a very silly notion; and in light of ...
Well, you're ignoring the stipulations that I always see the pixies, and that I am well aware that others don't see them, and that I don't have any ot...
The fact that I am not a drug taker, do not suffer from mental illness or have any other unusual ecperiences. I shouldn't have to spell it out; a modi...
Not at all. I'm saying that under the stipulated conditions I would have no good reason to think i was hallucinating. If you think I would have good r...
On the fact that I always see them and don't see such unusual things anywhere else. The fact that no one else ( a vanishingly tiny sample of humanity)...
If I always saw the pixies there and only there, and did not anywhere else see anything anybody else could not see, then I would probably conclude tha...
Well, it was a fair, reasonable and serious question about a hypothetically possible situation. If you don't want to answer it, that's on you, not on ...
Those are beliefs concerning empirical entities; a different matter entirely. Obviously empirical evidence wins in that context. That said, if you con...
Yes, exactly, they are the two kinds of evidence; and it is any presumption of the superiority of one or the other when it comes to our beliefs about ...
Sure, what you end up believing might be the result of an enquiry, but prior to that you have already decided to place your faith in one line of enqui...
OK, that's a fair enough answer, but we are still left with the fact that transcendence, or not, is a purely faith-based presumption either way. This ...
I restated my position because you never answered the central question; which was how are we to assess whether a belief contributes to flourishing unl...
I have asked apo what amounts to this question many times in many contexts and forms; and this is just where he always seems to fail to be able to res...
"How do we know that we know?" That's the essential question of epistemology. "How do we come to know such and such" really has this more central ques...
I have to say I have little faith in any notions of "re-programming". I see the tendency to objectification as merely a bad habit we have picked up. O...
OK, that's a fair start, What attributes, then, would you say Nietzsche thinks science has, such that it would be a "precious tool" for the job of aid...
But I think that is actually the salient point. How we think our beliefs concerning the Real work for us is precisely how we think they do or do not c...
I think the value and the beauty of the term 'spirit' lies precisely in its ambiguity and, for instance, the fact that we can speak of the spirit of a...
I think this is really the point; that Reality is spirit; which cannot be mapped, but which does the mapping and which the maps are expressions of. Th...
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