Janus

Yes, it's an interesting irony that in order to support the view that the world is nothing more than a mental representation or brain state; a view pu...

I'm not a great lover of Kant's philosophy, although I do acknowledge its tedious brilliance. And I don't believe I can be a BIV, for the reasons I al...

I have read a little Nietzsche, more for the literary than the philosophical substance; he was a writer of some truly great poetically imaginative pro...

I'm not too sure what you are aiming at here apo. I don't see the situation as being such that there is no hope of a worldview at all, but that there ...

We can't ask them, that's the difference between written text and oral teaching. I think it would be fair to say that, according to Aristotle, each pe...

Show me a dragon that is real then. If there are no real dragons then it makes no sense to speak of simulated dragons; it's simply nonsensical.

What those thinkers thought about virtue may or may not be thought to be relevant today; and in any case it is matter of interpretation. Or perhaps yo...

If there were a lion in such a game we could say that it is simulating a real lion. If there were a dragon in such a game what exactly is it that you ...

Certainly I agree that we cannot, and should not even if we could, escape holding certain lived attitudes and dispositions when it comes to events and...

That makes no sense. To simulate is to feign reality. If you simulate love you pretend to love when you do not love. If you put a cardboard cutout she...

But the real world is conceptually articulated through and through; so why would we need to "make our way there"? On the contrary, it cannot be escape...

In order that there could be simulated brains and simulated vats; there must be real brains and real vats. That's the objection I have always had to t...

Exactly!

I don't tend to think in terms of 'delusion' but rather 'distraction', when it comes to worldviews; I think all worldviews are equally delusory, becau...

Virtue consists in having strong moral intuitions and following them. Rule-based ethics do not account for the differences between individuals. So, fo...

Speaking generally here: existential angst could come from the intuitive, but as yet more or less sub-conscious, sense that you are wasting your life ...

So, you are asking whether beliefs that are not acted upon can be immoral? Say someone believed that it was good to rape and murder infants; are you a...

The interesting point here is that the penis per se, is not throbbing for anything in particular. So I would say sexual desire is something far more c...

Are you asking whether it can be immoral to hold beliefs that immoral acts are good, such as, for example, that it is good to rape and murder infants?...

You paint the situation in interesting ways here. I guess it comes down to the felt difference between the experience of hunger and the experience of ...

I'm not sure we are disagreeing about anything significant here: I don't deny that from the point of view of our discursive understanding of bodies an...

You point to the analytic function of thought, cutting, separating, making distinctions and so on: but thought has an opposing or balancing synthetic ...

This seems fair enough to me. I think it comes down to whether you think the primary awareness of the inner milieu counts as self-awareness, as distin...

I don't think this can be right. The proprioceptive sense of the body comes on account of the actual sensations which belong to it, and are felt prior...

Yes, I agree that 'introspection' is not a good term for inner awareness because it contains the distancing notion "inspection". I know from personal ...

Whether or not you take SX to be right depends on your understanding of what it means to be self-conscious, as far as I can see. I understand TGW to b...

Thanks Hoo, some interesting takes. I read the Kojeve intro to Hegel some time ago but I still remember enjoying it, even if I don't remember much of ...

No, only the ones that don't "focus their anger, hatred and militant actions instead of indiscriminately dispersing them across whole peoples".

I think one way of thinking about "the world' is that it is a kind of collective representation. It seems to be a leap from there to say that the worl...

Did I say a rational oppressed person would do that?

Yeah, Schlegel! 8-)

I don't think I am. It's a slippery designation. I don't think material things are 'made of thought' whatever that might mean, they are by definition ...

I don't think we have any more understanding of the self than we do of freedom. What we do have is an intuitive feeling of both; that we can either ch...

You have to rely on your intuition just as you do when you tell the difference between honest and dishonest people that you have just met. There are n...

Even if we are exhaustively physical beings it doesn't follow that our wills are brain states, but merely that they are physical in some sense we may ...

I didn't mention reductive materialism, that's you putting words in my mouth again. I said "if we are exhaustively physical beings" and that makes no ...

Yes, but look at what I wrote; I said the condition was necessary, not that it was sufficient. I also said it would be necessary that our wills not be...

No, that's nonsense; we have no control over our brain states; we are not even aware of them. You are trying to pas what I have written through the le...

These are all irrelevant points, as far as I can see. We were discussing your idea that animals are merely "robots". I asked you if that means it is O...

If it be posited that we are exhaustively physical beings then it requires both that causality not be rigidly deterministic, and that our actions are ...

I don't have time to respond more comprehensively right now, but I will just say this: it is precisely (some) people on drugs, in church, crackpots, d...

Yes, the danger of generalization...the oppressed need to more precisely identify the oppressors and focus their anger, hatred and militant actions in...

First up, I thought we were speaking about animals, not about humans. In any case, you say that "at the first level it is habitual", but that can't be...

OK, then I guess I'm asking whether you think there is any biochemical system you could mess with in order to remove the capacity to have that "actual...

Are you saying that the "system of interpretance" is not underpinned by any biochemical system that you could mess with in order to disrupt it?

I have read some of a kindle sample of this book: https://www.amazon.com/G-W-Leibnizs-Monadology-Students/dp/0822954494/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1473214...

I don't think it is quite right to say that meditation is a social practice. It can be done in the company of others but I think the presence of other...

Re Steiner and what I have been saying about modes of effort to penetrate and think the unthinkable: I think Steiner would agree that there is no "raw...

I was only pointing out that free will cannot be compatible with determinism but only with indeterminism. Of course randomness (in the sense of genuin...

Free will is most (or even perhaps only) coherently thought as the ability to have done otherwise than one has done. It seems to be just on the basis ...