Well, this seems to me like more of the same problem. That is, starting off with subject-object dualism and a correspondence view of truth, and then c...
This is a false dilemma; as if the sky cannot be blue and facts cannot exist unless they can be intelligible isolated from the world in which they exi...
The two big finds I've found recently are "The Place of the Lion" and "Out of the Silent Planet." The first was the subject of all sorts of superlativ...
Well, the similarity might be that you seem to be saying that all your talk of brains is true in the sense of metaphysical truth. For instance, suppos...
Sure. So then what is "useful" is not "whatever we think is useful." There is some truth of the matter, even if it is hard to discover. The problem on...
The question we have been circling around is why language should be the way it is instead of any other way? Social practices seem malleable and contin...
I'm sort of puzzled by the presence of Heidegger on that list. The idea of aletheia as "revealedness" or "unconcealment" seems to straightforwardly be...
I mean, what is the counterpoint here. If we ask: "why do social practices evolve the way they do?" "Why do we find certain things useful? E.g. why is...
Ok, but where are we doing that? The claim is that language is not social practice and expectation "all the way down," and that what we expect or find...
Anyhow, Kripke's other work is of a realist bent, so I'm not totally sure where Kripkenstein fits in his development. I would think, given his other w...
Re causal closure, the position that descriptions of mental phenomena are "just describing the same thing" as physical descriptions, runs into problem...
As opposed to what, that conclusion we are inherently unable to know things? "Know" might be the wrong word here. Maybe "learn?" Not sure if this is s...
Yes, there seems to be a bit of the common move of setting up the "view from nowhere," as a strawman foil here. You see the same thing in deflationary...
Well Kripke's Crusoe is isolated from birth IIRC. The distinction is important and has led to the differentiation between your Tarzans (always isolate...
An interesting quote from Deacon. I like his work, even though I don't find myself agreeing with a good deal of it. Personally, I think there is good ...
I grew up in a city in Massachusetts, but the city was also about 400 years old and had peaked in population in the decades after WWII, undergoing to ...
But neural networks run on PCs are not concious, right? So being a neural network and processing outputs and inputs isn't enough, even if these output...
I forget the authors but one of the more famous Wittgensteinian rebuttals of Kripkenstein points out the Kripke is not even advancing a skeptical posi...
What makes some information "sensory information?" Doesn't "sensory information" imply conciousness anyhow? Likewise there is the issue of what makes ...
:up: Yes, although this would also hold true for all sorts of deterministic physical systems or chaotic functions, so long as they don't enter any sor...
Something like this seems plausible, but it doesn't seem to me to do much as an actual explanation. Why are some systems conscious? Well, it isn't jus...
This seems backwards. Of course you can predict Life, or anything similar. You could do it with a pencil and paper, just apply the rules and go step b...
I fear that your distinction might be missing the point. The workout routines of the cast of the Jersey Shore probably required a lot of effort, but i...
Question: I know that Venn diagrams presuppose the Boolean assumption that all particular propositions have existential import and universal ones lack...
Neat. I was taught vetting syllogisms with Aristotle's "Six Rules," which I always found very intuitive, but it's also sort of slow and it takes time ...
Sorry, I was really asking about the neutral monism and dual aspect theories in general; I was only thinking of Spinoza in the first question. A commo...
I think it would be fair to say that most theology prior to the Reformation and most Catholic and Orthodox theology since is pantheistic. God is prese...
On a side note, Grayling's book has a funny story vis-á-vis Wittgenstein's influence on logical positivism (which Grayling suggests is greatly overest...
Well, and the anti-metaphysical camp was hoping to censor metaphysics and enshrine logical positivism as the default hegemon. But their own project co...
This is no doubt part of it, but it seems to me that the issue goes down to the very basics of metaphysics, with two ideas. The first is the idea of t...
This isn't really "New Age." It's in First John: "? ???? ????? ?????," generally rendered as "God is love." (God is also being itself, that "in which ...
lol, but the last part doesn't make sense. The Brother's Karamazov presents both one of the most effective arguments against the acceptance of sufferi...
I think that's partly the critique, but it can go in a number of directions. Partly the critique is that people are made unfree by hedonism, they are ...
There is certainly a relation to Plato, Hegel, and Wallace, but they are also very different from Hoffman's ideas in a lot of ways (particularly his "...
:up: I've found Robert Sokolowski to be a great updater/rehabilitator of these sorts of ideas too, although he unfortunately doesn't delve into the se...
I also am not a huge fan of Kripke's Wittgenstein. For one, the skeptical challenge seems too strong here. It seems like it should just as well apply ...
:up: I agree on the type of error involved. I disagree on the track record of reductionism. How many true reductions do we have? Thermodynamics and st...
Yes, there is a dualism there. Causal closure is defined in terms of a sort of mental/physical dualism where only the physical is causally efficacious...
I suppose there is also something to be said against the push to "naturalize" epistemology when the "naturalized" attitude is presumed to be one that ...
I don't think Plantinga's argument is air tight, but neither is it merely a strawman. It's been taken seriously because, even if it is a simple argume...
Have you made it to the last chapter? He sort of turns everything he has said on his head. His point is that a common way of looking at the relationsh...
IDK, if "language of thought" or CTM are correct then they are still describing "things we do." Saying rule following is determined by "acts" or "what...
The question of whether Boltzmann Brains have ever or will ever exist seems ancillary though. Michael simply misunderstands the concept if he thinks i...
I should be the one to apologize, I just meant to add some rhetorical flourish, not impune anything. Funny enough, I've been working on a novel that i...
You seem to be operating under the impression that the "Boltzmann Brain" is "a brain and just a brain experiencing is space." It isn't. It is just "ph...
Are you under the impression that Boltzmann brains actually exist? They are a thought experiment, the inferred result of a universe with an infinite d...
Of course not. But if one wants to explain why we don't confuse them one has to move from the vague metaphor to something more concrete. That was my o...
No it doesn't. The idea that the brain can generate experiences without any access to a very specific sort of enviornment is not "supported by science...
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