Janus

I see both as being merely openings up of new areas of study due to advances in technology, and of course new areas of study are going to involve new ...

I wasn't asking you to "go over it again" but to provide an actual argument. If you don't want to do that, that's fine... I don't care.

To posit sense data you are relying on the idea that our senses give reliable access to the organs of sense, so it seems to me that your position enta...

If it doesn't constitute access to external objects, however limited, then what do you think it does gain access to?

I used the term 'arbitrary' to indicate that I think mystical and psychedelic experiences can be rationalized in terms of any religious/ metaphysical ...

Yes. I agree, having experimented extensively with entheogens myself, and I think the 'spiritual' aspect is a 'feeling' phenomenon which does not supp...

Mystics undoubtedly experience something they attempt to evoke in their writings. It is the postulated ontological or metaphysical implications of wha...

Ethics do not depend upon a transcendent lawgiver but are based on the pragmatic need to live harmoniously with others. On the other hand, you may liv...

:100:

:up: Yep.

You presume or stipulate that our experience is in our minds rather than of our bodies. Even if I accept your stipulation that experience is "in our m...

:up: I'll repeat what I have already said: physicalism is true if there are mind-independent existents, in other words if there is no mind at large, n...

"A priori facts" as far as I can tell are generalizations derived from experience. They cannot be discovered in the first place without concrete exper...

This is hand-waving. I asked how it was discovered and confirmed that the sum of the squares on the two sides of a right-angle triangle are equal to t...

Your comment is of little use if you don't say why you don't agree.

If you are saying we don't have access to external objects except insofar as we can sense them, then I would agree.

Kant's is an epistemological, not an ontological, idealism.

I won't reply to the other passages in your post, because I think this is the nub of the issue. Our understanding of the way our sense organs work (as...

An atheist says there is no rational or empirical reason to believe in the existence of God, whereas an agnostic says there is no rational or empirica...

How do you think the Pythagorean Theorem was discovered/ confirmed if not by observation and measurement?

We infer that there are physical processes which give rise to cognitions, perceptions. We cannot be conscious of those processes in vivo, but we can o...

Your idea that something is presented "within the mind" is based on an interpretation of the objective sciences of perception and neuroscience. I agre...

This seems either nonsensical or trivially obvious. Of course the (human) lifeworld cannot be "removed" as long as human claims are made, because clai...

How could there be an internal world if there were no external world? It seems obvious that our imaginations are constrained in their ability to imagi...

Somewhat anthropocentrically you have omitted to mention the vast numbers of animals killed by automobiles—estimated to be 350.000.000 per year in the...

:lol: Fair enough...

I'm somewhat familiar with Bakker's 'blind brain theory' and his notion of metacognitive illusions. He is an eliminativist roughly along the lines of ...

If you are denying that we observe countless regularities and invariances in the world then I think you have your eyes firmly shut. If that is not wha...

It's not an axiomatic claim but an inference to what seems to me to be the best explanation. No, not simply a common belief, but a reflection on how w...

This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it...

An evocative allegory: mysterious, vaguely disturbing, unresolved and perhaps unresolvable—human life writ small. Loved it! I give it a 5.

Of course this is true, and also true of digestion, respiration, metabolism, abstraction, conceptualization, visualization and other bodily processes....

Nice! And all these questions and stories come and go round and round...we are Sisyphus...ceaseless seers and doers of poetic philosophy... So, the "C...

To say we are "inside" mind is to beg the question. We don't experience ourselves as being inside a mind, but as being inside a body which is inside t...

:up: :strong: Everything we know points to mind (as an activity) being dependent on non-mind, on material existence/ existents. There are two understa...

I read it as suggesting that reality is exhaustively characterized by manifestations of matter and the absence of matter, eschewing the idea of anythi...

We observe various activities, properties and relations of entities; so these there are indeed observable differences, and hence distinctions. between...

Do you deny that properties and activities can be observed?

What emerges are new compounds with new properties. Think about what happens when you combine sodium and chlorine, or hydrogen and oxygen, or the comp...

There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produc...

:100:

Do you recognize them as being the same person? You might assume a "causal history", even without (obviously) being able to know the details—but does ...

It seems to me that the changing of paradigms could, at least in practice, if not sociological theory, be mapped onto falsification.

It seems reasonable to think that the world as experienced and understood is an aspect or function of the "in itself' (which of course includes the 'h...

I have read some Harmon, Bryant, Brassier and Meillassoux. I think correlationism is apt when considering the world as 'human world'; we do only exper...

So it is believed by some—to others it is but the augmentation of dreaming.

I agree, deduction is not induction and induction cannot be deductively proven. Our faith in induction, we might say, is expectation based on habit, a...

This makes sense to me. Space is extension and extension implies measurability, quantity. Something similar may be said of time. Space and time are al...

I haven't claimed there is such an argument, but documentary evidence is all we have to go on when it comes to the past. And as I said if there is cro...

:up: The point about deep learning is well taken; what is often ignored is the fact that the sciences present a whole interrelated network of knowledg...