Janus

I think there is a general desire in social beings to cooperate, because it is obvious that getting along with others will be more beneficial than not...

This reads to me like apologist garbage. If Descartes did as it is said, he was a psychopath, lacking any compassion or real wisdom. Perhaps he couldn...

In China an annual dog-eating festival is held and the dogs are tortured, beaten and burned alive apparently. And this was (at least in part) a Buddhi...

I find the idea that classical music or Jazz have "ended" or that philosophically interesting art is no longer possible simple-minded, presumptuous an...

The similarities in objects of the sense can be pointed to as can the observable structural similarities in perceptual organizations: the structure of...

Of course there was the influence of the psychedelic era, which also had its beginnings, along with a culture of other illicit drug use, in the late f...

Not at all; it speaks to the fact that our perceptual organizations are similar enough, and that the minutest details of external objects do not depen...

Problem is your and my "internal self" are different "objects", whereas our observations of say an apple can be confirmed down to the minutest details...

Yea, aesthetic judgement...which raises an interesting question: could novelty, a novelty inherent in the object itself, ever be considered to be a co...

The difference between "good honest observations" of subjective experience and scienitifc observation of the external world is that the latter can be ...

I probably should have used the word 'innovation' instead of 'originality'. What I was trying to highlight is the difference between finding your own ...

All it means is not imitating others for effect or seeking to appear original. If you don't do those things and work simply to improve you will find y...

Good example! :up: An authentic voice or vision will always be new, even if not formally innovative. Seeking novelty for its own sake paves the road t...

:up: I don't buy the idea that music and the arts in general are stagnating because everything has already been done, or we're not coming up with revo...

The question that comes up for me is whether "explanatory frameworks" can be true or false or merely "edifying". Even in the case of science where wha...

:up: Basically, it seems he's a very talented, smart, long-haired hippie.

:up: The only issue I see with Chalmers proposal regarding a "new kind of science"; and that the subjective nature of consciousness might be understoo...

I guess the question here for me is how meaningful is the idea that facts, which are given in anthropomorphic terms, will remain when we are gone. Whe...

I think form or shape is an inevitable category of understanding. Materiality refers to constitution, which also seems to be an inevitable concept if ...

It would be pretty wild and I agree it may not be impossible. The thing is that I was suggesting that any intelligent symbolic creature would think in...

That other animals see things differently than us doesn't seem relevant to my point that it seems reasonable to think that any symbolic-language compe...

I agree there is interplay, but I'd say that facts, beliefs and hypotheses are all dependent on presumptions and not, ultimately, the other way around...

I agree with you that mathematics is not the same as an ordinary language insofar as it is a system of strict rule-based operations and calculation. T...

Numbers are concepts, I would say, represented by numerals, just as words are concepts represented by script or sound, Number is perceived as multipli...

Nice cop-out! It starts with objects, but once you have an abstract symbolic system it, like language, no longer does.

True, our culture is characterized mostly by instrumental reason; thinking along the lines of maximization of personal advantage and the pleasure/ pai...

Yes, no strict formula, but rather the exercise of a capacity, of what Aristotle called phronesis, usually translated as "practical wisdom".

All that we can reason about in ways that seem to make sense are subjects that are amenable to binary thinking: some examples are cause and effect, mo...

If someone says they are in pain they are, if they are not lying, referring to a pain that they feel. It's true in virtue of the meaning of the words ...

Compassionate Rule: Do unto others as the best evidence indicates they would wish you to do unto them. The only caveat would be that you ought not to ...

You seem to be arguing that presumptions are not presumptuous if they are consistent with and coherent within our general set of presumptions which co...

The characterizations of evolution as a fool and nature as a moron are foolish and moronic in my view. The idea of a "blind evolution" is tendentious ...

It is also presumptuous to assert that the ideas of self-sufficiency and other- dependence are coherent outside the context of human thought and under...

We mostly do imagine there is, must be, "some arrangement" as "source", but are these ideas even coherent outside the context of human thought and und...

Subjects and objects are collective representations; artefacts of dualistic thinking. Once this is realized there is no ontological puzzle to be solve...

LOL, sorry I was using 'alive' in a figurative sense. I agree with you about heaven and hell, though.

Life is sufficient...when you are actually alive...

I think all explanations, while some are obviously better than others in various ways and for various reasons, are under-determined and inadequate to ...

I don't consider myself to be a moral realist. I think of morality as a sense, and as you note people have this sense, with its accompanying "moral fo...

That a social relationship or arrangement might be acceptable to people on account of the fact that they have 'bought the narrative" does not preclude...

I think this is very simply wrong. There are conditions under which all people will either be happy or unhappy. No one wants to be a slave, for exampl...

So what? The same could be said for running, or in fact for any aspect of our common knowledge. That all our knowledge is relative to the collective r...

You seem to be confusing empirical and absolute truth. Since thinking is only known to be practiced by (some) entities it is a plausible conclusion th...

I have seen only stipulative resolutions to the murky aspects of identity, and frankly such resolutions seem to have no significant point and to be of...

I don't disagree with any of that, but I see nothing in possible world semantics that is anything more than determining what can obviously be imagined...

Have it your way: I see no point in arguing further against dogma, so I'll leave you to it.

No it's easy to express. Logically the lectern could have been in a different room, but for all we know actually it could not have been, since to chan...

No, a valid distinction which you can't see apparently. Try looking beyond words, you might actually arrive at some new thoughts.

It is logically possible but not actually possible. What is merely logical possible tells us nothing beyond what we are capable of coherently and cons...

It is false; it is a mere logical possibility, nothing more than a matter of mere words.