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gurugeorge

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This isn't Tumblr lol But it sounds like ataraxia rather than nirvana. Nirvana is ceasing to understand yourself as a queer kind of thing that's situa...
May 21, 2018 at 11:52
I think there are a gazillion timeless moral codes - pick any perspective, any point of view, and the world automatically crystallizes as having objec...
May 21, 2018 at 02:09
Generally speaking, yes, apart from the outliers I mentioned. It does seem that most human beings are built to see their life in the perspective of so...
May 21, 2018 at 02:01
Yeah, normally in New Age circles that sort of thing is called "metaphysical." I don't see how reincarnation can be connected to metaphysics strictly ...
May 21, 2018 at 01:57
I should think it's largely one thing built on top of another, but I'm sure there are also cross-connections all over the place. (For instance, someti...
May 21, 2018 at 01:54
Eh? This sounds like you're using the word "metaphysics" in a New Age sense, rather than a philosophical sense
May 20, 2018 at 12:49
Generally speaking, people in that sort of scenario, if there are things they could be doing to pull themselves out of suffering, but they aren't doin...
May 20, 2018 at 12:47
Yes, it's very useful to distinguish those cognitive abilities we have that we share with animals (that are therefore pre-verbal) from those that requ...
May 20, 2018 at 12:37
This seems obviously wrong on the face of it. In the first place, morality doesn't dictate what peoples' aims should be, it shapes the way they try to...
May 20, 2018 at 12:18
This is quite a deep subject actually, it's one of the main topics that Aristotle and the Scholastics spent a lot of time thinking over. The short ans...
May 19, 2018 at 09:08
Pain and suffering aren't intrinsically linked to self-awareness - or at least, to the extent that they are, they're linked to self awareness at a lev...
May 19, 2018 at 08:52
They can both be right if they're using different "Frames" (i.e. looking at the situation from different perspectives, with differing central values)....
May 18, 2018 at 08:34
I think this is almost right in a few ways, but when you say "their range of illumination" I'm reminded of the old adage about looking by the lamppost...
May 18, 2018 at 08:28
If they don't bring into view something that's true, then they're merely imagining logical possibilities. I do agree with you that philosophy operates...
May 16, 2018 at 18:47
I don't think that makes a difference, because you can't just "create a life" and leave it in the dumpster. "Creating a life" in the sense of procreat...
May 15, 2018 at 23:27
No, not really, not even strictly a consequentialist. I don't think there's any hard and fast dichotomy between consequentialism and deontology. Deont...
May 15, 2018 at 16:24
Ah, I said that because you were questioning whether a p-zombie would behave as we do, but the stipulation is that it does - it behaves indistinguisha...
May 13, 2018 at 22:19
I think you're missing the point re. the p-zombie thing, it's a stipulation, a thought experiment, an "intuition pump" (a tool to draw out and clarify...
May 13, 2018 at 17:42
I'm not sure how you get the idea that I'm a moral relativist when I explained in my response, as part of its context, that and how morality is object...
May 13, 2018 at 17:35
Is any natural event or creature intrinsically right or wrong? Procreating is just something people do, something they're semi-compelled to do (most p...
May 07, 2018 at 13:00
With regard to the known, one must stick to accurate beliefs about what exists and doesn't exist; with regard to the unknown, one's own guess is as go...
May 03, 2018 at 21:59
Excellent. What's deterministic is the biological machinery that issues in thoughts and actions - for example, the fact that the sound "Ouch!" comes o...
May 03, 2018 at 11:09
Respect is given for achievement of some sort, you don't get respect just for existing. Tolerance as a principle:- It falls out of the reality that wa...
April 29, 2018 at 07:38
It's a bit of a problem, but it's relatively easily remedied - have one thing in your life where your relation to what you produce isn't like that. Wh...
April 25, 2018 at 13:09
To some extent, and in general, rules won't "take" unless they conform somewhat with native predispositions. Our genetics and biology form a tether th...
April 23, 2018 at 10:19
Well most moral arguments in philosophy use thought experiments to try to tease out our intuitions, which is to say, the feelings and thoughts we have...
April 19, 2018 at 01:54
I'm not very well versed in that aspect of Kant (I've only really delved into him from a narrow angle on his epistemology as such), but my understandi...
April 11, 2018 at 02:29
I think there's two ways to understand "phenomena are presentation" - either in an idealistic/phenomenological sense, in which there's nothing (or the...
April 10, 2018 at 18:00
I don't believe there's any good reason to think this. On the contrary, phenomena are all direct presentation. There is something like representation ...
April 10, 2018 at 14:42
Even that implies a fair amount of metaphysics, I think. Who or what are "they", what is a "commitment", what is "construction", what is a "model"? It...
April 09, 2018 at 20:21
Most modern "liberal" philosophy is oriented around non-discrimination and non-judgement as the ultimate, unquestioned values, which basically negates...
April 07, 2018 at 23:08
It depends on what you mean by philosophy. Personally I prefer the older sense, in which case any question is a philosophical question, and philosophy...
April 05, 2018 at 23:26
Yes, I figured out that was the gist of your responses :)
April 05, 2018 at 10:27
"Thinking" is just the name of that thing you're doing, and being a naming convention it's not a thing for proving. The idea of the cogito as I unders...
April 04, 2018 at 20:01
Yeah, I think I grasp what the problem is, and it's really difficult. The way I've thought of it in the past is how our categorical thinking seems to ...
April 04, 2018 at 19:39
No, not really. There are questions asked in the course of investigation into philosophical topics that might be superficial, or shallow, or have obvi...
April 04, 2018 at 19:17
I don't think the substance/accident ontology is just some notion that we unthinkingly introject because we use words in a certain way, I think it's s...
April 03, 2018 at 14:32
No it's not, it directly addresses your "what if?"s. You'd have to give me a reason to think one of your "what if?"s is true, for me to climb down fro...
April 03, 2018 at 14:13
Lots of things are possible. The question is which is most likely, and best supported by the evidence. One has to be on guard against various ways of ...
April 03, 2018 at 00:31
Yeah actually I think that does sometimes happen. It's because the topics are so abstract and difficult that it's easy to either make mistakes without...
April 02, 2018 at 18:10
The purpose of education is twofold: it is to induct a child into the ways of the world on the one hand, and into the ways of the child's people, on t...
March 31, 2018 at 11:18
I think it's all pretty wonderful, I wouldn't place man's products above or below the products of nature, because man's products are a product of natu...
March 30, 2018 at 00:19
Neither does economics. Of course relations change all the time (over longish periods). The laws of economics don't change though, they're praxeologic...
March 23, 2018 at 22:30
"Recognize" = "proving." Otherwise there's no point to the exercise, and it's indistinguishable from the confabulation of a lunatic, an LSD trip, the ...
March 20, 2018 at 14:26
You cannot possibly be serious that you think this is any way to conduct an intellectual conversation. Again, I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but fr...
March 20, 2018 at 14:17
All identity politics derived from that sorry lot is rubbish - there's some philosophical/political value here and there in the originators, the leadi...
March 20, 2018 at 14:14
How would you tell the difference between that and an actual wolf in sheep's clothing? Or don't the people in your tribe do that kind of thing? Always...
March 19, 2018 at 18:38
I'm not one who says that literally everything that's ever come from any of these schools of thought is crap. I understand very well that some things ...
March 19, 2018 at 18:32
Well yes, and that's what's often done - by those leading the movements. But I respect that you're trying to "clean house." However, I fear that you'r...
March 19, 2018 at 18:26
A priori needn't mean unverifiable/unfalsifiable. I agree that we bring definitions of possible things to the table and see if there's anything in nat...
March 19, 2018 at 18:22