Why on earth should anybody care about their subjective experiences? They're of interest only to them. It's like when someone at a party excitedly tel...
Reality is the novelty-provider - this is complimentary to our minds being Bayesian machines that try to incorporate and try to find the best explanat...
I don't think that's something that's likely to have a special "neurological basis." It seems like the brain just processes a whole bunch of stuff, an...
I'm in the camp that says the distinction is problematic. Mind is in one sense the unique stylistic behaviour of the brain, or the behaviour of the br...
I say "I don't know" because I have doubts that AI is actually possible. If it is possible, then we're stepping outside the normal economic/technologi...
Sexual pleasure is real, but it's obviously subordinate to reproduction (if we didn't enjoy the thing we wouldn't do it - without that instantaneous r...
To say it's the "primary purpose" is just to say that's what the sexual organs, sexual dimorphism, etc. are for. They're not suitable for playing golf...
Your list is not a list of human rights, it's a list of liberal rights, and they are negative, not positive. Positive rights entail an obligation on o...
New technology always has benefits and costs (everything necessarily has benefits and costs), but often we lose sight of that in the hype and exciteme...
As I say, I think there's a balance to be struck - "all work and no play ..." etc. Playing, relaxation, pastimes definitely have a place in the econom...
There are some peak moments in some of the story-driven games. Gaming has two aspects, the gamey aspect (competitive, learning a skill, a system, etc....
A bit of both, as most of these large, historical movements have been. There are lots of people who simply "breathe together" because they believe the...
I don't think that's true. I think there was a deliberate, concerted attempt to weaken the US, as it's the biggest potential adversary of globalist am...
Yes, that is correct. And I am entirely serious. I believe the received wisdom about Trump among the "intelligentsia" is completely wrong, as wrong as...
No this isn't really in books yet, mostly in scientific papers. The link I gave is an excellent resource on the topic in itself, with many further lin...
The best theory at the moment seems to be the predictive processing idea. The idea is that our brains approximate Bayesian machines by some quick and ...
Yeah I watched several of Trump's rallies on YT. The first one I watched in dread, out of a sense of duty, just to see what he was about (I had the sa...
Did you watch any of his rallies? Everything was there in most of them: the Wall, deregulation, getting the US out of bad trade deals, cutting taxes, ...
Who does? Everyone uses the Dark Arts. But policies do matter too, and Trump's policies were certainly a major part of what got him elected, and Adams...
Yes, the courts are and have been for quite some time now biased against fathers and males generally, as a result of Feminist academic influence and F...
One can't exactly avoid differentiating between Aristotelianism and Platonism, but the difference between Aristotelianism and Platonism is less than t...
I think in the broader context, they're closer to each other than either of them are to modern philosophy. I too cheer on the signs of revival of - le...
Just taking this point, that's part of the charm. The fact that he's not a "smooth-talking liberal" hep to the lastest popular music trends, is part o...
Yes, unfortunately that's very true. Although IQ is only one of a vast range of traits that vary among individuals and consistently among certain grou...
Defining Western Civilization as liberal, capitalist democracies, it's objectively the greatest civilization that's ever been. If you look at the aver...
Eh? It's not difficult: "We get huge audiences comparable to big musical attractions like Elton John, without the benefit of any special musical talen...
The metaphor of the wise blind men and the elephant comes to mind. :) I do think a lot of these can be collapsed together into the two seemingly oppos...
Disgust and even hate are necessary aspects of a full life, they definitely have a time and place and a useful function - although it's probably unwis...
There's definitely something to that idea. Funnily enough I've just been reading Herbert Spencer's First Principles, which has a wonderful first few c...
It's necessarily general because the meaning of life is particular to the individual, the resultant of their personal relationship with the cosmos, gi...
I think love factors into it for sure, but a) people often confuse love with hormonal lust (which fades after a while) and b) the "calculations" aren'...
Not sure that does answer my point, which is about infinite divisibility. It's the divisibility of the line that creates the numbers - IOW it's the no...
Well it works in general in that being is an energetic thing, a process, not a static quality, and the process of living through life fulfilling one's...
Human beings have certain potentialities (things they're good at, or would be under a given set of circumstances), everyone has a different set, based...
It's basically that evolution can kickstart something that has its own life and internal logic, which then spreads out into possibility spaces that ha...
Advertising makes money because it appeals to already-existing normal, average, etc., tendencies, which are driven in the first place by biology, the ...
I wouldn't expect anything rational from these debates, the tail that's wagging the dog here is simply power-grabbing by insane ideologues. As an Alin...
Again, I completely disagree. There is no sense in which the interests of an impulsive, violent person can be treated as on the same level as the inte...
No, they don't, that's absolute nonsense. A gangbanger, for example, does not have equivalent moral value to a normal human being who does no harm. Pe...
Energy implies and requires the pre-existence of space and time (energy being the capacity to do work, i.e. to alter some spatial configuration in tim...
The question has two parts, the idea of transition from nothing to being, and the idea that nothing somehow seems more like what you'd expect, and bei...
Normal is basically just average or common with regard to a particular group. For example, heterosexuality is normal because most people are in fact h...
Yeah I think it's two things overlapping. Sociality sets the stage for the development of intelligence, but perhaps with the neural mechanisms that ma...
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