You are right. But the reason is that life evolved as a long run answer because life lives within the means of the daily solar flux. Once photosynthes...
Don’t you realise that you are conflating two usages of “know”. To know what the problem is said to be, and to accept the problem as a true one, are d...
Well try this. Every time you are tempted to put the word “know” in my mouth, instead replace it with “I believe I have no reason to doubt it”. Should...
What? I propose that as a belief and thus it is open to doubt. And you yourself have only provided reasons that would confirm. If you can show it is n...
Huh? Is it not possible to doubt it is true? Is it not possible to believe it is true? That it is impossible to know it is true is what is accepted. A...
I would simplify it to the pragmatist formula of how to reply to scepticism. It is indeed a loop. Belief can ground doubt because doubt can ground bel...
But still, when are you most truly you? At birth? At death? Somewhere in between even? If every decision you make along the journey counts towards the...
I take a different route. In fact a Hegelian one. Nature is driven by an optimisation function - a thermodynamic imperative. Life and mind are then en...
I completely agree in a just world with evenly distributed material resources, then social capital becomes the determining factor. The winning nations...
I'm a pragmatist rather than an idealist so ethics becomes just another way of talking about an optimisation function. Nature isn't about right and wr...
Full on nuclear war is different issue. The question here is about the global projection of power to run a world system. And the US wouldn’t have cont...
Is this a language issue? Processed means that it is packaged food off some kind of factory production line as opposed to you buying the raw ingredien...
Seems to fall apart pretty easily. The problem is that "fate" is an ambiguous term here if we prefer to think about life in terms of causal chance vs ...
It's a practical political question for many nations when the US and China are demanding you pick a side and yet you depend on a healthy economic/secu...
Navies and bases spell empires. A big army is good for beating up a geographic neighbour. Projecting power globally is about bases and carriers. Until...
Sorry. I missed your post. But replying now, when I spoke of material cause, it was indeed to dispute the usual view that matter is a primary substanc...
You are trapping yourself into paradox by a logic which insists that identity is about a definable essence or atomic set of facts. Identity is underst...
A summary position is that - 1) The US created the post-WW2 world order - the global free trade system - as a bulwark against communism. It was left t...
It is the fuel that goes bang freely in all directions. The engine is a machine that constrains that entropic detonation so it produces rotational wor...
Maybe what I'm saying is that hylomorphism does make more sense once you do arrive at a proper understanding of contingency as the "material" half of ...
I'm not sure why you view your ontology as "modern". Fundamental physics is all about emergence these days. This for example is a lecture I had lined ...
You raise good issues. First I would say that there are two ontologies in play here. The conventional physicalist story would be that the Universe is ...
Yes, the object is all "one thing" - the substantial actuality. My (Aristotelean) point was about the causes of this "one thing". Concrete actuality i...
You could have an infinite variety of particular forms. But then they would all be varieties of ... form. We are talking about form as a general princ...
Nonsense. If you are concerned about health at the personal level, stop consuming any processed/industrial food. And if you are concerned about health...
My point is that it is processed food, not just processed meat, that is the problem. Too much soybean oil, corn syrup and refined starch. And the supe...
So a disembedding? That move from the "taken for granted" - the concrete and particular - towards an understanding in terms of the most abstract or ge...
Again, your phrasing would suggest that you want to claim there was no you before birth. Yet nothing happened to you at birth except that you moved fr...
Every point of your life contains counterfactual “could have beens”. Including all the moments before birth. And any definition of “you” has to be tie...
So in what sense is this fertilised ovum “you” rather than an undeveloped scrap of protoplasm? Why not instead accept “you” are the process of becomin...
That was the sweeping statement i was challenging. When exactly does this happen? Why birth and not inception? And what does it say there was the one ...
Yep. Something that might be comprehensible as philosophy. So not a poem. So your argument is that it IS alienating? Don't you have to show that? It c...
Not with nothingness as the input, but it can with nothingness as the output. Nothingness is what is left after possibility self-cancels. If it is pos...
It is indeed possible that our current vacuum state is a false vacuum. So everything may have hit a generalised balance and yet some fluctuation - a l...
Why don't you need to if this is a general philosophical question? Your everyday use of language is a use of language appropriate to the everyday, not...
Invariance is better understood as differences that don't make a difference. That is how you can describe reality in terms of symmetry (and symmetry b...
Ducking the issue as usual then. How can you say the stationary ball is stationary when, to quote Monty Python... The naive realist is always telling ...
A stationary ball is definitely something as it is a state of least motion as fixed by the constraints of the rather particular thing of an inertial r...
You are in a bit of a linguistic trap because this invariance is being related to a “state”. Invariance is the property. And so that seems to imply th...
OK, we look to agree there. Yep, this in turn gets tricky as the biases are both biological and cultural - hardware and software - once you dig into t...
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