Janus

Right. I'm not sure about "constructed" because it seems to carry an implication of arbitraryness. The formulation of rules seems to be motivated by a...

You don't have to answer the question if you don't want to or can't find anything to say.

Thankfully I think I do disagree with you on some points, or at least feel the need to point out that we seem to be talking about different things or ...

:up:

What difference would it make to philosophy in your view? I believe it has already happened in some enclaves.

In the land of the rigid designators where reigns the Great God Krapke there shall be no acknowledgement of the roles of description, definite or othe...

I think we mostly are in agreement, so I'll just address this: It seems to me that when it comes to simple empirical observations, the truth of statem...

I agree. With humans, as soon as the sense data reaches awareness it is always already imbued with meaning. With machines it simply never reaches awar...

I don't think rules are imposed, they describe behaviors which are entrenched and replete with their own logic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication ...

See this comment I made in this thread 25 days ago: As far as I can see this solution dissolves the supposed problem. Much ado about nothing...

For me this is no different than saying that consciousness is consciousness of the ego or self. I'm on board with the idea of generalized, diffuse pre...

I don't see the idea that there is an affective element to consciousness as distinguishing what it is like from merely sensing. I think sensing is alw...

I don't know, but I tend to think that out of all the raw sensory data that enters via the senses, only the tiny portion which is meaningful in some w...

Electronic devices don't care about anything, desire anything or want to avoid anything; animals and humans do. That seems to me to be the most salien...

I would prefer to say "what it is to be conscious" than 'what it is like to be conscious". It is definitely something to be conscious as opposed to no...

Do you really now?

The question is asked as to what a quantum field really is. Is it merely a model or is it ontologically real? And the thing with 'what it is like' is ...

Right, but for Kant duty is not paramount, reason is. It is our duty, according to him, to follow what reason dictates, which is the categorical imper...

Yeah, holy crap, it's an unholy mess. No idea, do you have an opinion on that?

It seems obvious that animals feel, hear, see, smell, taste just as we do. So what, according to you, could the "what it is like" be over and above th...

I'm not suggesting that we can know whether we are brains in vats, but merely that it might be physically impossible, even though we of course cannot ...

What if it is not merely not the case, but is also physically impossible that we could be brains in a vat? That would not be incompatible with metaphy...

If the answer is impossible to determine, even in principle, in the brain in a vat scenario, or indeed even in our own presumed scenario of a real phy...

Or else they understand that they have no choice but to do that, or else collapse or at least retrogress economically, which would be seen to be an ec...

I imagine that is so, too, but how do you know it is true?

Are you saying that we all are predominately motivated by a sense of duty or do you just mean to say that we all introject some sense of duty and that...

3. and 4. are incoherent; if we were brains in vats then there could be no evidence since everything would then be an artificial construct. What is th...

I agree. If people present their understandings of the meanings of the terms then they are presenting their own usages, That's what definitions are: d...

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I think tangents are fine if they are relevant and I think this one is. We come to understand what screwdrivers are used for by association I would sa...

I agree it is important. Logical and mathematical certainty seem to be the only full-blown certainties we have, given that they do not seem to rely on...

The point was that dogs can recognize their food bowls and know what to do with them, just as we can recognize screwdrivers, once we are familiar with...

Was your response meant to address—that is agree or disagree—with what I had said, or is it more of an aside? Same question here.

Does a dog have an internalized definition of her food bowl when she "picks it out"?

I agree with you in a sense, but I think your example is so implausible, perhaps even physically impossible, that it does not constitute a refutation ...

Simple, reserve judgement on, don't believe in, anything you cannot personally confirm, then provisionally entertain what seems most plausible to you ...

As I said, I'm not so confident as I once was regarding the implications for materialism. I'm not confident it constitutes a "slam dunk" refutation of...

I see such strictly non-deductive inferences as being abductive as consisting in imagining, based on past experience what would be thought to be the l...

I don't think we need any special formal language to discover that a neural event cannot be considered to be true or false, valid or invalid, in any w...

Can you give an example of such an inference which is not merely a matter of definition?

I'm not sure Wilfred Sellars thought they were incommensurable tout court; I think his project was at least partly concerned with attempting to find s...

Surely it must be acknowledged that there could not be two performances of a musical piece that were exactly the same, because not only the actions of...

Apparently, you understand this quite differently than I do. The way I see it the indeterminate can be referred to even though it cannot be described....

Perhaps he means that non-physical things do not exist but may be real nonetheless. :wink:

When we simply observe something we know it directly without having to hold any assertion in mind. On reflection we might say that we know or believe ...

How could it be right to say that I know something is the case if it is not the case? I think the thrust of JTB is that if we believe X is true for go...

I would find it convenient if you would be kind enough to rephrase that in English.

If what you said about the idea of supervenience were true then to say A supervenes on B would also necessarily be to say that B supervenes on A, and ...

Why call it a view if there is no view? It's no view from anywhere; so obviously we cannot imagine what it is, because that would be to turn it into a...

I'm saying that on the materialist perspective there is no view in a world lacking any percipients, whether from nowhere or of nowhere. I know, I just...