apokrisis

Being and becoming must have some relationship. You can't have it both ways - that as "different categories" they are related and they are not related...

Hence the Peircean process view. Now being is emergent and so an eternal state of becoming. You only have degrees of definiteness. Matter and form now...

Again, what determines the sequence of a set of traffic lights. Is it a physical determinism or an informational one? Or do you think causally the two...

It becomes a local observer illusion. Although you could salvage a global story in that the branching at least always increases in the future directio...

Unless you want to claim nature is literally a finite state machine, then what you’re missing is that is what you appear to be claiming.

Does the fact we can make machines mean that nature is mechanical?

Hah! Quantum mechanics still presumes Newtonian backdrop time. That's the problem. The apparent reversibility of the wavefunction physics is the reaso...

It is correct to make the distinction between self-recognition and what we really mean by self-conscious. It is quite natural for big brained social a...

I like that you cash out the formal half of the story in terms of "what is and what is not". But that itself then says that becoming has to apply to t...

That was a nice summary. However notice also your triadic resolution of the dichotomistic categories... So existence was the more generic category tha...

MWI would be a trade-off. You get to save wavefunction determinism at the expense of causal localism. So every possibility gets actualised. But in a w...

Experience requires a division between what is self and what is world. To know where the world and its recalcitrant nature starts, the brain has to kn...

Thanks for your opinion.

Yep. Either that or your syllogism failed to capture the sense of Wayfarer’s position. The latter I believe.

Well obviously God has his reason for at every instant forming the idea of all the individual avians in the world in his Almighty mind and so giving s...

Being a bird is essential to being a duck, but not all ducks are birds? Sounds legit.

We already had such a moment when we went into space and looked back at the Earth. Suddenly we realised it was a tiny and delicately balanced "spacesh...

Paul Davies was Fred Hoyle's student by the way. Davies (and Lineweaver) have done the maths to convince that interstellar panspermia couldn't feasibl...

So the very mention of "aliens" opens the Pandora's Box of crackpottery, hey? My argument was that only the most tenuous "extension" let Wayfarer intr...

Here again you just expose the limitations of a nominalist metaphysics. Predicate logic is optimised for reasoning about particulars. Universal predic...

Why can't it be answered? I've been amazed instead how close we are getting to a fairly complete answer. Why something and not nothing is of course a ...

I'm confused as the OP did not mention panspermia let along tardigrades and octopuses. If that is your specific concern here - you haven't mentioned a...

The question of “why anything?” seems deeper.

You appear to be confusing mainstream research with mainstream belief. If you check, you will find there are journals of astrobiology and centres of a...

From the fact that I deliberately posted a sceptical response you ought to be able to deduce where my own sympathies lie. But it remains the case that...

I’m not convinced for a minute, so kindly don’t address me as if I am saying it is something you ought to feel convinced about. But it is published th...

Oh that. Yes, it seems crackpot. But Francis Crick for one published an argument for directed panspermia - deliberate seeding by aliens - in the 1970s...

So if there is a point where reality comes to an end, you want to say that it doesn’t in fact come to an end there? The end ain’t real? Sounds legit.

Pfft. T Clark is right. SETI is accepted science. There is a ton of constraints based papers seeking to sharpen an understanding of the probabilities....

Exactly. Nothing is more minimal than zero. So zero is the asymptotic limit on somethingness. The logic of dichotomies is apophatic. We are talking ab...

There are those like Nick Lane who make a good case that the basic metabolic options for creating life are so limited that it is much more likely that...

Which speculative claims exactly? And how is science not able to constrain the speculation involved?

What could be more minimal than zero?

Dichotomies are reciprocal limits on possibility regardless of whatever you might pretend to be discussing. They are mutually excluding. So I’m taking...

Hmm. Will you ever master this tricky notion of reciprocal limits I wonder? Rest would be minimal motion, and motion would be minimal rest. Given that...

The way you set the scenario up says we should have no problem with the basic physical environment. The air would be breathable and not poisonous if t...

You are distressed because your ontology likes to presume a world of passive and stable existence. But the evidence from nature itself is contrary. As...

Inertia is a positive quality - a resistance to change. So rest is the potential for a reaction to an action. Push a rock to get it to roll and it pus...

Creative, if you have an argument, just bring it. Don’t pretend to expertise you can’t deliver.

Err, inaction? Remember inertia? The first derivative of motion? The big deal is that "rest" isn't actually not going anywhere. It is simply a relativ...

So if discrete parts can overlap each other, then you have an interesting definition of "discrete" - one that seems to mean "continuous" as well. But ...

Thanks for explaining back to me my own argument. But why did you then tack on your wrong conclusion. So yes, a more fundamental and well formed dicho...

Can you please supply the argument and all the working out that supports your conclusion. :-} Meanwhile, just consider that there has to be some good ...

Your false impression would be that you made sense. You are just trying to say that categories are monistic. I am pointing out that categories arise v...

My position is that reason comes in grades of semiosis. So animals are reasoning creatures because the brain is organised by the kind of dichotomous p...

So one of us has defined it by grounding it as the opposite of the discrete or the divided - the standard dictionary definition, as it happens. The ot...

So this divine mind, is it the bit that is continuous? :-O But inertial motion is a degree of freedom. So a particle is defined by having six degrees ...

So are you saying that the form in God’s mind is always completely particular? Seems that this leads to more than a few problems regarding change - Ja...

It’s not hard to understand a constraints based approach to these hoary old chestnuts. But I would add that universals represent the real possibility ...

So does God imagine trees in general, or the particular kinds of trees like oak and larch, or even each particular tree, such as all the individuals i...