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Mijin

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The point is, the measure of our understanding of a phenomenon is what predictions and/or inferences we can make about it. When it comes to your posit...
August 06, 2025 at 14:12
Your answers are basically just asserting your position again. What I am trying to get at, is why. And to also tease out the answers to questions that...
August 05, 2025 at 13:42
Indeed. In fact, even talking of "your existence" being "renewed" could be misleading here, as what we're actually positing is that every instance of ...
August 05, 2025 at 13:36
Because I am trying to get your meaning. You're alluding to bodily continuity, so I am asking follow up questions of why bodily continuity is critical...
August 04, 2025 at 23:25
Can we know that? What if the transporter functions by firing your actual atoms across space? If assembling your own atoms back into the configuration...
August 04, 2025 at 23:14
This seems to be alluding to different levels of consciousness. Sure, there are different levels of alertness largely corresponding to brainwave state...
August 04, 2025 at 23:09
But that's my question. When I ask why spatio-temporal continuity matters, I mean why is it critical to whether consciousness persists or not? If we b...
August 04, 2025 at 15:01
But why? What is it that your specific atoms contain that hold your "essence"? And how many such atoms need to be moved across for you to still be ali...
August 04, 2025 at 13:08
In my experience Why does that matter? And how, precisely, do we define it? Because of course it is vulnerable to the same sort of "imperfect copy" pr...
August 04, 2025 at 00:30
Oh ok. Yes this is just an IME thing, so no worries if you disagree. But often when there are debates on the transporter problem, and you have the peo...
August 03, 2025 at 21:30
That was the point. I was explaining that duplicates being convinced they are the original, and third-parties believing the duplicate is the original,...
August 03, 2025 at 20:57
I still don't think you're following me, sorry. I am talking 100% about the first-person perspective of the person going into the transporter. You are...
August 03, 2025 at 19:33
Well it's just a thought experiment. We also can't make Laplace's demon. A difference though is that personal identity is an issue that will eventuall...
August 03, 2025 at 19:29
Absolutely. Every time I have discussed, or seen discussions of, the transporter problem, it seems both sides assume that continuity of consciousness ...
August 03, 2025 at 19:23
It's not that it's a boring answer @ToothyMaw, and I thank you for it, but I still don't think you're quite getting my point. Today, yes, if someone h...
August 03, 2025 at 14:30
In terms of the OP, I think this is one of the few answerable questions regarding sleep and dreaming. Our brains have different brainwave states, thes...
February 27, 2025 at 11:53
It sounds a bit like true scotsman. You or I might consider something beautiful, but it's not true beauty, according to the conceptions of Kant. Well,...
January 07, 2021 at 16:40
I'm still not sure I entirely follow, as you still have not provided a concrete example. When people talk about a beautiful face, and we can point to ...
January 07, 2021 at 03:51
I would say so. My post gave multiple examples illustrating exactly what I was talking about. Asking for one example of what you mean by "sensations o...
January 06, 2021 at 07:32
I don't understand any of that. Can you give an example of the distinction(s)?
January 06, 2021 at 03:00
Speaking from a more neuroscientific point of view, there are of course aesthetic qualities to things for the vast majority of people. And not just "f...
January 05, 2021 at 15:36
Actually I was about to say the exact opposite. Factory farming is inherently cruel and we don't need examples of specific workers intentionally abusi...
January 05, 2021 at 06:52
Agree completely. It's a bit of a bugbear for me. For example, Matt Dillahunty, who I respect as much as any popular speaker on religion and philosoph...
January 04, 2021 at 10:23
Right. As I said though, sometimes that quantifier is ambiguous. For example, if I say "There's nothing to be afraid of", I am saying the set of thing...
January 04, 2021 at 09:43
We don't know that all physical things must have a cause We don't know that all transcendental things do not require a cause We don't know whether inf...
January 03, 2021 at 15:02
As I've said previously, the noun "nothing" in English is special, in that it means different things in different sentences, but almost never refers t...
December 21, 2020 at 05:14
The discussion about human tetrachromacy is irrelevant to the issue of seeing the world as it is. Whether or not women with two different cones for pe...
December 20, 2020 at 10:57
Im a member of a couple in-person philosophy groups, and they're fun from a social point of view, but the discussion tends to stay in first gear. What...
December 18, 2020 at 22:25
Well another reason is a pragmatic one: we know of no alternative. Deductive logic seems necessary to even be able to reason in the abstract and induc...
December 17, 2020 at 19:20
In reality, our planet contains many chaotic systems, therefore, in a sense, a small domino can topple a larger one but it's not an amplification or i...
December 14, 2020 at 04:00
There's no known way to start with 1 either, so the whole "nothing is still something" point, doesn't close the explanatory gap at all.
December 11, 2020 at 07:29
I think perhaps you're trolling now, as this post contains numerous errors: 1. I never said that exclaiming "ouch" would be evidence that anything was...
December 10, 2020 at 14:09
I am not a dualist, I am a neuroscientist. I want to understand pain because there are people both with painful injuries and diseases, or indeed simpl...
December 10, 2020 at 13:21
I said no such thing -- you were asking me about the mechanism by which physical neurology causes subjective experience. That's what we don't know. It...
December 10, 2020 at 02:41
:roll: This is beyond infantile at this point. I defined pain. I've answered all your questions about pain. I've told you I can elaborate on the mecha...
December 10, 2020 at 01:35
Not at all; those are different concepts. What pain is, how pain sensation works, what we mean by subjective experience and how much we (don't) know a...
December 09, 2020 at 14:44
All this started from me suggesting that your argument was a subtle shift of the burden of proof. Call me naive, but I honestly expected a simple resp...
December 09, 2020 at 14:18
And you are still failing to reply to a single thing I write. I would be quite interested to know how your "screenshot" notion of the brain would make...
December 09, 2020 at 05:03
Well I just said, I disagree with the notion that we should give up on a physical model of consciousness. There is no guarantee in this universe of so...
December 09, 2020 at 04:44
Haha, what? I didn't claim to know what pain is, why would I have a burden of proof on me? What I know about pain is that it is an unpleasant subjecti...
December 08, 2020 at 15:43
Oh brilliant, just throwing out another argument and ignoring the points being put to you, yet again. The first answer to your rhetorical question is ...
December 08, 2020 at 08:12
C is misleading at best. There is no image per se, only data which may be meaningful for a human running a program that can parse a particular file fo...
December 08, 2020 at 07:19
That's a shift of the burden of proof. I feel pain. I assume other humans also feel pain for various practical reasons, but also because if other huma...
December 08, 2020 at 05:28
Your response is just to again assert your claim: This claim is false, and I'm trying to explain to you, repeatedly, why. Consider for example that th...
December 08, 2020 at 05:17
No, you went further than that: (emphasis added) Regarding your point, I disagree. I have no expected timeline for when any particular problem will ha...
December 08, 2020 at 02:05
Have we been talking past each other all this time? No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's ess...
December 07, 2020 at 16:09
Exactly. In the case of digital cameras, data is stored in some file format that would likely be meaningless without knowing the format. There's no di...
December 07, 2020 at 09:48
@Metaphysician Undercover I'm confident at this point that there is nothing I could say, nothing any physicist could say to you, that could ever shake...
December 07, 2020 at 04:38
I don't think you need the word "actually" there. I did not suggest otherwise. Agreed, and indeed, it doesn't even need a whole culture to be like tha...
December 07, 2020 at 03:57
You have this backwards. You are the one that have asserted that neurology cannot produce consciousness. Science OTOH does not need to assert the inve...
December 07, 2020 at 03:39