Michael

I seem to recall reading somewhere yesterday about someone who was blinded later in life and then recovered their sight and after recovery realised th...

I would say they do (unless they were once sighted and have since lost their sight). We once had a blind poster on the old forum who asked us to expla...

I don't see how that would work at all. Saying that green is the colour of grass and apples, that red is the colour of strawberries and apples, that c...

Well, a tree. Your reasoning rests on the premise that when we imagine a tree we're imagining a physical thing. But a spiritualist might reject this p...

The spiritualist who denies the physical world probably wouldn't deny colours and shapes and sounds and so on. Presumably they still accept that we ha...

And that's an opening for the spiritualist. They can argue that we do not have a clear perception (or conception) of the physical (i.e. matter and ene...

Do we imagine matter and energy (whatever they are)? Or do we image colours and shapes and sounds and textures and other sensory qualities? The extrem...

Well, as a possible reductio ad absurdum of your reasoning (unless you accept the conclusion), given that we can imagine such things as angels and sou...

How would you describe the colour red to a blind man?

I don't know how you define the spiritual (or the physical) so it's kinda hard to comment.

There's something wrong with your cat.

I don't know what you mean by spiritualism. Spiritualism in philosophy is usually considered to be the belief that there's an immaterial world that ca...

Cake or biscuit? Why Jaffa Cakes excite philosophers. BBC covering real news.

"You take them." "No, you!"

Me too. Black. I don't like tea.

We like to keep a close eye on the colonies. Can't let your play independence get you into too much trouble.

Doesn't seem to be. From the authority that is Wikipedia, "the contemporary Right in the United States is usually understood as a category including s...

Laissez-faire is an economic thing, so there's no necessary contradiction. You can want the government to interfere with "moral" issues like abortion ...

Either click the paperclip icon and select the image or just drag it into the reply box.

That's not moronic. It's right.

And yet you were so in favour of Trump over Clinton for President because you knew that it would be better? Or were you just speculating?

The proof, if there is any, would be the fact that continuous motion is illogical (and so impossible). If this were so then it must be either that dis...

I was simply responding to John's claim that motion doesn't involve an object actually going through the half-way point. My point is that if this was ...

No, it actually does pass through the half way point, and so on. If it didn't then it wouldn't be continuous motion, it would be discrete.

Sure it does, as the motion is said to be continuous. It has to pass through the half way point and before that the quarter way point and before that ...

This is the assumption that I'm showing to be false. Each movement from one point to the next is a tick. If the space between two points is infinitely...

Sorry, see my edit. I meant to say that continuous space would be infinitely divisible.

You seem to be confusing "divisibility" and "divided". Continuous space would actually be infinitely divisible. Again from here:

I don't know what you're talking about here. I'm just explaining what I meant by sequentially. You seemed to take issue with that word. It was simply ...

You seem to just be misunderstanding. What I'm trying to say there is that you can't answer the question "if we want to count every rational number be...

I don't know why you're comparing counting to ordering. The comparison is between counting and moving. And as explained here, there's no reason to sug...

Then motion is logically impossible. Which then means we have a genuine paradox in nature. Motion is logically impossible but physically actual. And s...

Less absurd than the notion of having completed an infinite succession of events or the notion of a first location to move to, which are logically abs...

This doesn't address the logical problem with an infinite succession of events having being completed, or the logical problem with the notion of there...

This doesn't matter. It still occupied the infinite number of spaces that we could have plotted as coordinates. You even admit this yourself: So in re...

Sorry, I don't know what that is.

I really don't understand your question. We just have some distance that an object is to travel and we plot a coordinate at Planck-length intervals. T...

Well, it's only that something like this must happen if motion is to be possible. Yes, and this runs into logical problems. Given that it has occupied...

I don't really understand what you're trying to get at here. The point is that if movement is discrete then one doesn't have to consider an object mov...

For example, the first coordinate would be the one at 1 Planck length. The second coordinate would be the one at 2 Planck length. And so on. But at no...

Why? What's the difference between a physical tick that is a count and a physical tick that is a movement? Counting can't simply be reduced to, say, s...

Well, I'm saying that continuous motion is impossible and so if motion is possible then it must be discrete. It could also be (although seemingly absu...

You're right. Conside two 1cm lengths with (hypothetically) 0 space in between. Is there 1cm length or 2cm length? 2cm. No space in between does not e...

This is why I said earlier "that it's the smallest measurable length is not that it's the smallest length". If space is continuous then there's a leng...

I'm addressing your claim of continuous space. You seem to think that in saying that there are spaces between my rationally-numbered coordinates you s...

I have, with my example of a machine that counts each coordinate as it passes through them in order. The sequence is the rational coordinates between ...

If I wanted to show that discrete motion is the case, sure. But I don't need to do this to show that continuous motion is impossible. And the issue he...

Motion cannot be continuous for the same reason that counting cannot be continuous. There cannot be a first coordinate to count to from a starting poi...

This doesn't contradict my claim; it confirms it. I don't need to capture every potential location. I only need for there to be an infinite number of ...

What's the difference between moving from one coordinate to the next and counting from one coordinate to the next? Saying that passing all rational co...