Janus

I guess that's a possible explanation. But the meaning seems clear. To put it another way: 'If I am thinking I must exist' It follows that 'If I don't...

You have this wrong. The logically entailed negation of 'I think, therefore I exist' is 'I don't exist, therefore I don't think' not 'I don't think th...

I would say that all warrants for propositional beliefs (beliefs based on observation or reason) consist in "finite predicates". As I already said, I ...

Don't worry about it, have it you own way...I think you are simply wrong and I've given reasons why I think so...but I have no confidence that you wil...

We've already been over this. Parents are observable entities, god is not. It's a weak analogy.

Yes, I was aware of that Pierre. Thanks for the Searle reference; I wasn't aware of his take on perception.

You could say that knowing God is unknowable is knowing something about God. But for all we know God is merely an idea, the idea of an infinite, unkno...

I think it comes down to different ways of speaking about it. Taking vision as paradigmatic, we can say that objects are presented, made present, to u...

That people might say they know something about God does not entail that they actually know anything about God. They would need to be able to explain ...

Even to a very young pre-rational child the parents are entities the child can see doing things, so the analogy fails, since God cannot be thought but...

The child might have seen the parents fix the bike. Or has been told by the parents that they fixed the bike, this time and every other time that it n...

No do I. Totally agree. I think there are many things all of us take on faith because it seems more beautiful to do so. It makes life seem more human....

The last part is what I was disagreeing with, which I would have thought was clear. If there were a God that did things, whether or not we can explain...

That passage reads to me like reificatory 'theo-babble'. I can relate to the feelings some of the words evoke: devotion, passion, love, a sense of div...

I haven't made that argument. That said, if we cannot say how X has done Y, and there is no empirical evidence that X has done Y, what possible justif...

Everything we can say about nature is just what we can say about nature, so I don't see why physics should be any different. Physics concerns what app...

I would go further and say that all explanations based on reason are naturalistic. "God did it" is not really a cogent explanation. Even if it were ac...

Thanks, that much I could see. The part I couldn't get was how that ties in with a purportedly frequent complaint that QM is not complete. Are any the...

Can you explain why? I'm not seeing it.

We are screwed in the sense that we don't know much. We have a conception (rightly or wrongly) of brute, dead, insentient matter, and we have a concep...

Interesting, thanks. Descartes simply assumes that extended substances cannot think and that thinking substances are not extended. I think Spinoza's s...

Science is normative in the sense that there are methodologies to follow and peer reviewing of work. Really, all aspects of culture are normative. On ...

:up: I don't see it as a matter of advantage, but rather simply as affirming what seems most likely to be true. But to be sure what seems most likely ...

OK. I was speaking more generally about intelligibility of things. Heidegger's "ready to hand" or Gibson's less human-centric "affordances" for people...

You seem to be saying that things are intelligible because intelligent beings find them to be so, and that seems kind of tautologous or else one-sided...

I probably go further than you in thinking that even though it cannot be demonstrated, it is plausible to think that space, time. energy. entropy and ...

Right, we have things we know are real, by definition, like the everyday objects and entities we all deal with every day, and then we have those thing...

I think causation is understood in terms of energy exchange. I would say it is real, although it cannot be directly observed. Perhaps energy different...

What you say seems to imply that you think that seeing a particular colour and that particular colour are the same thing. I have asked you several tim...

If you refer to a dualism of aspects as opposed to a dualism of substances then I agree. You seem to count as real only that which the senses apprehen...

How do you know you are aware of the "visual gestalt of the whole painting" simultaneously? I mean you can probably fix your gaze on the edges that co...

Right, so those parts of sense which are not attended to, not conscious, are not representations, but are presumably unconscious physical, neural effe...

If most of the data is never brought to consciousness it does not seem apt to refer to it as "representation"; who is it being represented to? Since l...

The only certainties we have (barring global skepticism) are empirical and logical. To me, because it seems most plausible, because we seem to have no...

What if abstract conceptions only have effects if they are actually thought, and every actual thought is a neural (i.e. real) event?

I see no reason to believe that objects in the environment do not appear more or less the same to animals and children as they do to adult humans. it ...

Science is based on human experience, it is a particular way of investigating and learning from human experience, so I can't see how it makes sense to...

True, perceptions are of many things. I'm not sure what your point is though. I really don't know what you are talking about. You still haven't answer...

The idea of correspondence is inherent In Tarski's approach, and it is only a problem if reality is considered to be something absolute and out of the...

Do you mean 'antiestablishmentarianism' or 'antidisestablishmentarianism'? I presume the former, since the latter means being against the idea of dise...

I would not class an hallucination as a perception because nothing is being perceived.

I don't think hallucinations are problematic. I have never experienced an hallucination, visual or otherwise, that I thought was a real object or from...

It seems that 'perception' is a polysemous term and is used to refer to the whole process as in 'science of perception'. However, the part of the proc...

You say colours are obviously visual sensations, and you say that seeing colours is a (presumably visual) sensation, so you seem to be saying that col...

It's very simple—are you saying colours and seeing colours are the same thing? Taking vision as the paradigmatic example, the science of vision includ...

So colours and seeing colours are the same thing according to you?

It seems to me you are getting lost in, by complicating, the grammar. Seeing colours is a visual sensation, colours are not visual sensations.

Thanks, some interesting information that raises salient questions. In the standard ghost stories I have been most familiar with the ghost haunts the ...

You'd think, given the atrocities committed against the aborigines by the white settlers, that their ghosts, if there were such actual entities, would...

That's right, the Aboriginal people had only been here for something like sixty thousand years. Your eurocentrism is showing.