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apokrisis

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Again, I would take the baseline position that mind, life and physics have purpose or finality in this specific deflationary sense - a sequence of dis...
May 04, 2018 at 04:56
But why wouldn't there be a direct connection between purpose and benefit? What would a benefit-less purpose even be? What would a benefit be except t...
May 04, 2018 at 02:26
Yes, it is as if that were the case. As if there was a sniffing out of all trajectories. So the metaphysical challenge would be to understand that as ...
May 04, 2018 at 02:21
That's what led me to the Kyoto School of course. I was googling for references. :grin: There is speculation about who influenced who as Anaximander w...
May 03, 2018 at 23:24
Or even less than that. It is a mere universal tendency. So yes, it is a deflationary view. But not an eliminativist one. And that is a significant di...
May 03, 2018 at 23:19
It might be instructive to consider the Kyoto School. That was a modern attempt to take a Westernised look back at the Eastern tradition to recover it...
May 03, 2018 at 22:42
You are talking about two incompatible things. I'm talking about two complementary limits. A dichotomy is logically that which is mutually exclusive a...
May 03, 2018 at 22:30
Hey, it was you who said it wasn't about stasis, except that it was. Remember that my own metaphysics is founded on vagueness, apeiron, quantum foam o...
May 03, 2018 at 10:43
Aren't you contradicting yourself now?
May 03, 2018 at 09:53
Oh well. Stillness doesn't have to be dead emptiness. It is the disengagement that resolves the karmic cycle of engagement. But you are right that the...
May 03, 2018 at 04:36
I agree that Plato was trying to put a finger on the same general idea. Any causal description of nature is going to need some kind of global downward...
May 03, 2018 at 02:22
Yep. This is indeed a case where his trichotomania may have led him astray. ;) My metaphysics is content with accident and necessity - or freedoms and...
May 03, 2018 at 02:18
But how does that Platonism work? Yes, we have the allegory of the cave. But that points to a very unrealistic kind of reality-creating mechanism. Con...
May 03, 2018 at 01:59
...is pretty unreliable. :) The way I would look at it is that purpose and form are tied together by what, in modern physics, has become enshrined as ...
May 03, 2018 at 01:14
Well, Pierre-Normand was talking about almost zero amplitudes. But that is all part of the fudging when it comes to calculating using infinities. It i...
May 02, 2018 at 01:08
This is where we - SX included - agree. Just on the physics of brains alone, quantumness doesn't come into it as there is no evidence to suggest that ...
May 02, 2018 at 00:58
Huh? Of course an epistemic instrumentalism is always a sound default position here. So I'm fine if that suits people's needs. But I personally am int...
May 02, 2018 at 00:19
So all this stopping, starting and changing. Doesn’t it seem contradictory of you to assert that the forward motion represents the instability here wh...
May 01, 2018 at 12:35
Yeah. Some say it is going back to CI. But for me, that is ontic in that it puts the observer - or at least, points of view - in the spotlight as the ...
May 01, 2018 at 12:07
But we've already discussed your odd fetish for definitions.
May 01, 2018 at 11:05
You think?
May 01, 2018 at 09:48
Are neurons evolved to exchange signals or potentials? Let’s stop mucking about.
May 01, 2018 at 07:10
Quite. I am all for decoherence as the right general idea. It ties it all back to an emergent thermodynamical evolution in time. But you can't hide th...
May 01, 2018 at 05:32
And yet infinitely often, the zero-amplitude strikes will also happen in some worldline of the observer. Which screws any claim to have done something...
May 01, 2018 at 03:52
This would be a good starting point - https://www.nature.com/news/physics-quantum-quest-1.13711 This was a paper I particularly liked - http://iopscie...
May 01, 2018 at 02:29
Is the motion constant and long-run in terms of its direction or not? Make up your mind. Either the bicycle is going forward or it ain't. Simple logic...
May 01, 2018 at 01:43
No. Well you can analyse them that way and discover nothing about what makes them tick. But if you are a neuroscientist, you might hope to decode what...
May 01, 2018 at 01:40
Here we go.... What a horrendous self-contradiction. You claim that to be moving forward steadily is unstable? Next thing you will be claiming Newton ...
May 01, 2018 at 01:18
Again, you have to be generally able to centre if you want to be able to go off-centre for particular reasons. To ride a bike, you need to be able to ...
May 01, 2018 at 00:12
Yeah sure. There are many interpretations that try to recover that lost determinism. You can go that route too. In the end, you can hide what you can'...
April 30, 2018 at 23:57
The freewill problem arose out of the discovery of Newtonian determinism and its LaPlacean implications. So quantum indeterminism definitely challenge...
April 30, 2018 at 23:23
But aren’t I saying the process is fundamentally informational, as well? And that the source of the stably persisting identity of a mindful, purposefu...
April 30, 2018 at 22:04
Yep.
April 30, 2018 at 21:45
Why so sour? You can read all about the biophysics in Peter Hoffman’s Life’s Ratchet.
April 30, 2018 at 21:41
To say life is managed instability is to explain the nature of the connection between matter and symbol, or metabolism and replication. The usual bott...
April 30, 2018 at 21:09
You must be right! Clearly once you have achieved a steady balance on your bike, you could never subsequently wobble or fall off. Genius.
April 30, 2018 at 20:30
Adult male cow manure. It refers to a stable balance. The balance is the goal that the system recovers to after perturbations or excursions.
April 30, 2018 at 12:07
But you construct your own confusions. Ever ridden a bike? Is there no homeostatic balance involved in managing its instability?
April 30, 2018 at 03:32
I love your difficulty with simple sentences.
April 30, 2018 at 01:18
LOL. It is homeostasis that is the process "excluding" instability and thus creating - dynamical - stability.
April 30, 2018 at 00:53
Life is managed instability. So homeostasis is central to that. The central problem is not about how to grow or how to fragment. It is about how to ho...
April 30, 2018 at 00:31
Evidence based policy making has been a thing for a decade.
April 29, 2018 at 06:37
Again, I never said Nature is fundamentally good. It is what it is. And we get to make it what it is - for us - to an increasing extent.
April 29, 2018 at 05:45
Sure. And the point about it being a metaphysics of immanent being is that it is founded on its dichotomies, not founded on a transcendent negating. N...
April 29, 2018 at 05:37
Respect would be the conclusion that in the long run, x is generally right. Tolerance would be the conclusion that in the long run, x is essentially n...
April 29, 2018 at 02:30
More than 50%?!? Oh, sure....
April 29, 2018 at 02:26
Yeah. And what would Nature be diametrically opposed to here. The Artificial? The Unnatural? The Supernatural? Which of these is your chosen basis for...
April 29, 2018 at 02:23
Deflection. I asked about the probability of your torturer/Stockholm syndrome applying. I asked what percentage you might actually claim as a reasonab...
April 29, 2018 at 02:12
Yes, DNA is the canonical example of formal cause or top-down constraint here. So my position - the semiotic one - is about generalising that. Thus I ...
April 29, 2018 at 02:07
Why is nature such a dirty word to antinatalists? How has it become the ulitimate source of their intellectual discomforts?
April 29, 2018 at 01:32