apokrisis

I will think you will find that is BS. Triggering a gland is different from triggering a muscle. Even if "electrical discharge" is involved in neither...

So botox works because it blocks tiny amounts of electricity and not large amounts of acetylcholine discharge? Cool. I never understood that before.

You mean acetylcholine discharge? The muscle fibres know to contract because they get given a molecular message? And even if you are getting into the ...

That's a vague claim. Modern biophysics would agree that electron transport chains are vitally important as "entropic mechanism". But even more defini...

It is different in that it explicitly embraces the holism of a dichotomy. It says reality is the result of a separation towards two definite and compl...

So this is syntax and not semantics. A computer can mechanically map a set of constraints specified in one language into the same set of contraints sp...

As if syntax were semantics.

But we have good telescopes. We can see the heat death already. The Universe is only a couple of degrees off absolute voidness. The average energy den...

Why does it have to be not nihilism? My argument is that the goal of the Comos is entropification. Then life and mind arise to accelerate that goal wh...

I've already said that these are two different issues - that the Comos itself might be indeterministic or vague "at base", and that life requires mate...

Yes, any tale of efficient/material causes suffers from infinite regress. Hence the need to posit an "unmoved mover" of some kind to ground being. One...

I prefer my precise terminology. It makes it clear that adding constraints is the subtraction of possibilities. We are talking about the intersection ...

This is an important point. Another way of looking at peak experience is psychological flow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) But the ...

Yeah. Except rather than extended, they need to be differentiated. And so they can no longer be shared - being a new choice. This goes back to what se...

Get over yourself. My point was that antinatalist debates on PF pretend to speak for common human experience yet are rather unrepresentative of the va...

English seems to have been now completely deducted from the statement as it first appeared. Curious. Perhaps English wasn't the language of logic afte...

I guess only US women represent "real women" then? The USA is 4.4% of the world population, but hey, you guys and gals get to speak for humanity. And ...

Well there are two levels to the issue here. What I was highlighting was the surprising logic (for those used to expecting a biological requirement fo...

It would be interesting to hear from more woman on the question. You might expect the sense of self-actualising purpose might be greater, no? Also, th...

I take a broadly Peircean or systems view of essence. So it is real enough as the formal and final cause of being - the constraints or habits that sha...

What does he think about essences? I can't say I've paid any attention to your discussions with him.

You talk as if you can know the world without making measurements. One only has to look and one sees (ignoring the fact that seeing the world is the f...

You seem to forget what you were originally trying to argue.... Clearly you now accept this was confused as we do seek definitions that introduce new ...

Uh, yeah. Just like folk once knew the mountains and rivers and stars were alive. Yup. And even merely as an epistemological point, that is trite. So ...

With a tighter biophysical definition of life, we would measure for evidence of an entropic flux being regulated by replicating information, and not m...

The same old pragmatic one. We can measure the truth of what we claim to believe.

Again, the issue that I raised was Banno's claim we can determine such questions without a definition which captures the essence of what makes the act...

To answer the actual question about viruses, this is the official take - https://rybicki.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/so-viruses-living-or-dead/ Just defi...

But that wasn't the point. The point was that you would need a definition that could decide such a question. Banno is arguing that standard usage of l...

is a virus alive then?

Because obviously we call for a definition because we want to narrow that common usage in some useful fashion. We want to eliminate some sense of vagu...

So my argument is that essential to a semiotic definition of life is it is information which seeks out material instability. It needs chemical structu...

I think that the biophysical discoveries of the past 15 years - the new and very unexpected detail we have about the molecular machinery of cells - re...

But what molecular machinery does a virus have? It has no ribosomes or mitochondria or any of the other gear to construct an organismic economy. It do...

A biologist would define life semiotically. That is, a line is crossed when something physical, like a molecule, can function as something information...

We seem at cross purposes. I wasn't talking about the ability to imagine the sounds, sights or feelings of language as such. But sure, braille is anot...

In her case, it would have helped that she was hearing and sighted until she was two. And before she was taught a finger-spelling system by Annie Sull...

Um yeah. I think I will file that under "more fellating".

As usual, the conventional thing is to try to deal with a dichotomy by reducing it to one or the other of two options. So in labelling the mind, eithe...

I bow to your expertise. God knows why I ever had my own neuroscience column in a major journal.

Well, the Theaetetus is simply wrong in treating rationality as the memory of eternal ideas. Although it could then be regarded as essentially right i...

OK, granted there is the suggestion his Broca area was "funny" in a way that would explain a developmental delay in expressive speech, But what I mean...

He was great with language. Just slow to start speaking. And the suggestion is that he had a "well developed" inferior parietal lobe - which chimes we...

This hypnagogic imagery has the usual pedestrian neurological explanation. Falling asleep involves a gating of outside sensation at the level of the b...

So as I say, proper scepticism would be about being able to recognise when the issue under discussion is vague or undecidable. The difference then is ...

It's a good line of thought. But isn't it also the case that to be able to realise there is a gap in experience - like a lack of visual imagery - ther...

Metaphysics done right would seek out the most rational or justified beliefs. And then these would be hypotheses or axioms to put to the test. We woul...

I'd agree pretty much. Negation speaks to opposites that are reflexive or easily reversible because they are of the same scale. So spin or charge are ...

What things exactly? And what is their relevance to this discussion about modelling particles as located objects with no internal structure?

Read the wiki page. What physics means is that you can treat an elementary particle as a mathematical point as that is a model of located material bei...