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gurugeorge

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Again, no, I think this is the confusion, there's no relation other than the vague one I mentioned. Awareness isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't awar...
August 13, 2018 at 08:40
Not if it was instinctive (by that I just mean the idea being "in the air" and people following it like a fashion - I remember it happening some time ...
August 13, 2018 at 08:23
In: The joke  — view comment
They certainly have lol :)
August 13, 2018 at 08:20
Actually that seems like quite a controversial statement. Do you have a source for it or is it just your sense of things?
August 13, 2018 at 08:19
Superfluous to what?
August 13, 2018 at 02:13
This is wonky in two ways. In the first place, economic value is subjective, marginal utility. In the second place, in representing ratios of exchange...
August 12, 2018 at 23:02
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I don't see how you can get away from talk about cause/effect and determinism, especially if agency talk can be broken down into deterministic talk. O...
August 12, 2018 at 22:47
No, no, that's the confusion I think you're making: awareness is awareness, knowledge is a different thing, only very loosely connected with awareness...
August 12, 2018 at 22:44
Not achieved by "most?" I'm not sure if people have such a concrete idea of their ideal partner as all that, and anyway, isn't it sort of a good thing...
August 12, 2018 at 22:42
Oh ok, thanks for the sermon. But I haven't seen anyone else reporting on any universal particularism either. I suppose there are some people who clai...
August 12, 2018 at 22:35
Well I haven't seen any manifestations of particularism in the universe, so I go with "indifferent." ;)
August 12, 2018 at 18:39
Again, why is equal distribution so important? And so worth cursing reality for the lack of it? I mean, would you be happier if we were all identical ...
August 12, 2018 at 18:37
Eh, I think that's needlessly complicated. Knowledge is an objective body of symbolic structures (paper, ink, bits, words, etc.) that get their meanin...
August 12, 2018 at 16:09
I don't know whether it's disingenuous, it was probably an instinctive move by "Atheists" to shift the goalposts to make winning formal arguments agai...
August 12, 2018 at 15:53
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Yes, I understand, that's the allowance I was making for directedness and teleology. There must indeed be some kind of rudimentary, "blind" computatio...
August 12, 2018 at 15:49
In: Morality  — view comment
Yes, well that would be the irony of it: all our grand moral structures, which actually exist and actually are objective, ultimately exist because the...
August 12, 2018 at 15:45
What's wrong with uneven distribution?
August 12, 2018 at 15:40
In: Morality  — view comment
True, but that's a pragmatic reason, not a philosophical reason :)
August 12, 2018 at 15:39
In: Morality  — view comment
It's the same for a godfull and godless universe. Basically, unless you want to be good in the first place, nothing's going to argue you into it. Some...
August 11, 2018 at 21:38
"Atheism" used to have the stronger sense of positive belief that God doesn't exist, and that's usually how religious people understsand it, as a posi...
August 11, 2018 at 21:34
In: Morality  — view comment
The standard argument for how morality exists in a godless universe, is that it's a function of evolution. Communities define themselves by rules (gen...
August 11, 2018 at 21:26
See, the problem is, most people don't find that problematic, because most people are built to cope with it just fine - in which case you might consid...
August 11, 2018 at 21:17
In: The joke  — view comment
Yeah, I think your position is too Panpsychist for my tastes :) As I said, I'm willing to admit that there's a kind of directedness and teleology bake...
August 11, 2018 at 21:07
As others have said, you're kind of mixing up several senses of "objective" here. It's helpful to look at all the dictionary definitions of a term, an...
August 11, 2018 at 08:42
Have you read Clement Rosset? You might like his take on the essential metaphysical "cruelty" of the universe, and how the two responses to that are b...
August 11, 2018 at 08:36
The only connective tissue we know is causality. If a thing has an effect on something else, then they're together in the same universe, that's your m...
August 11, 2018 at 08:31
What Pirsig means by Quality is what the classical philosophers meant by "The Good/True/Beautiful." That's probably a good way to triangulate with the...
August 11, 2018 at 08:24
It's more common in Eastern philosophies to take account of the sort of thing you're talking about, and talk about it openly but it's not completely u...
August 11, 2018 at 08:19
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I dunno, I think the "I" is more of a complex thing than you can get at that level, although I'd agree there is directedness and teleology even at tha...
August 11, 2018 at 08:06
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In all 4 scenarios, the boundary of the "I" is the total physical animal; its own awareness of itself, its internal modeling of itself, is secondary, ...
August 10, 2018 at 21:15
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I think the apparent paradoxes disappear if one stops believing in the "ghost in the machine" and all its variants. The "I" that's choosing is the ent...
August 09, 2018 at 20:17
Well the gist of it is that the political process has been captured by an unholy alliance of Left-wing ideologues, sundry so-called "experts", NGOs, b...
August 08, 2018 at 20:21
They're not "absolutely different"- obviously they're related, just as the idea of Brexit is related to Brexit as a process.
August 05, 2018 at 23:32
This is a distortion of reality and it sounds like it's based on prejudice against Leave voters. The vote was for independence of the EU and control o...
August 05, 2018 at 23:31
Oh yeah, well of course the Tories didn't expect the Brexit result, and a substantial proportion of them are pro-EU for obvious snout-in-trough reason...
August 05, 2018 at 18:20
This particular point is hilarious. The basic point of democracy is to avoid civil war by ensuring that the biggest opinion coalition affects the acti...
August 05, 2018 at 17:45
Well, it's always carrot AND stick isn't it? :)
August 05, 2018 at 17:28
No that's just obfuscatory media propaganda. It was always pretty clear in the Brexit materials, in debates, interviews and written stuff, and it's st...
August 05, 2018 at 17:27
No, from general reading and reading of history (I'm 58, educated in a different age); but the following article is probably the best thing you can ea...
August 05, 2018 at 17:19
The US already had its Fascist period at the appropriate time, with the early 20th century Progressives. The New Deal was essentially a mildly Fascist...
August 05, 2018 at 05:33
The problem is simply that predation, free-riding, exploitation, etc., are always options, and to guard against that you need rules, and ultimately th...
August 05, 2018 at 05:04
It's already happening, the clash between "globalism" and nationalism is that revolution. The "globalists" (university-indoctrinated lunatics in acade...
August 05, 2018 at 04:46
I wouldn't quite put it that far, I think usually the relationship starts off fairly symbiotic - for example the French feudal system coalesced in the...
August 04, 2018 at 20:50
The tail that's wagging the dog of those things is the vampirism of the elites that I've mentioned (being paid more and more bloated incomes to strang...
August 04, 2018 at 18:22
I generally follow Taine on the French Revolution, and the parallel seems clear from that.
August 04, 2018 at 18:07
No, although of course I may be mistaken, I do think I understand your position. I've read Hegel, etc., too. I'm just disagreeing with it and trying t...
August 04, 2018 at 18:03
To understand what's going on, I think you have to go back a bit further, to the causes of the French Revolution. Essentially we have the (university-...
August 04, 2018 at 14:49
Sure there's no knowing without a subject knowing - but this doesn't mean that:- Subjective experiences are "tokens of types of experiences such as kn...
August 03, 2018 at 22:49
Yeah I get that, and as someone who's been rediscovering classical philosophy myself recently, I'm sympathetic to it - more than I used to be (I would...
August 03, 2018 at 02:38
I would disagree strongly with that. As I see it, knowing and willing are objective relations; their intentional objects are not subjective, but objec...
August 03, 2018 at 02:30