:up: I'm also not sure why it would be important to define individuals "without any reference to their relations to minds," in the first place. For on...
Well, to make things worse, I've seen many physicists and philosophers of physics call into question the idea of even particles as discrete objects, i...
BTW, a similar delineation problem occurs when trying to define computation in physical systems. You can map all sorts of computations onto all sorts ...
Depends on what you mean by "from physics?" Obviously, people do recognize things like pumpkins and even cultures that developed largely in isolation ...
Yes, exactly. That's s the way it is for things. You could know the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep and this, taken by itself,...
I also think this gets at why AI images full of unrecognizable images are generally taken as "creepy" or "disgusting." /uploads/resized/files/lg/2i0sw...
Right, there is not a perfect physical definition, but there is certainly physical evidence for such definitions. Conventions could be different. They...
Ha, that's a funny clip. Aren't they two sides of the same coin? We have evidence to tell us that a plant is different from an animal (universal ). We...
Noson Yanofsky's book on this subject sounds quite interesting, it's been on my reading list. Still, from what I understand of his thesis, I don't thi...
Certainly. Like I said, multiplicity is given in experience, and this doesn't seem to be arbitrary. Yet you're not going to get canonical dividing lin...
I'm sympathetic to your objection. Information is inherently relational, and so of course, for bits to be the building block of even the simplest "toy...
I took it that the "formal question" is about where any methodology must begin re metaphysics. Are we to begin our investigation with being or the min...
Probably the bit (or qbit), right? 1 or 0, nothing more complex. Presumably, you can say everything about any of the other candidates (except perhaps ...
No, I think this holds up even from a purely information theoretic view. Floridi addresses this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Information in a ch...
Rocks also might be the wrong sort of thing to look at for a paradigmatic example of discrete objects. Rocks don't have much of a definite form. A roc...
Well, supposing that the world can be adequately described with mathematics, there would be a big difference between the mathematical entities consist...
Well, my take here would be that people are physical entities, and cultures are just groups of people, their (physical) artefacts, etc. So their delin...
Well, we do have machines that do this sort of thing, e.g., autonomous spotter drones that can distinguish tanks and IFVs from other objects. Less exc...
I think this is an area where information theory gives us a very good set of tools for understanding this sort of thing. You can think of a descriptio...
It's more the latter though, right? A human being "raised by wolves" without language would still experience objects, no? Even the sheep recognizes th...
I would add that these problems become particularly acute, I would say insoluble, if one starts from the position that what we know/experience are "me...
Well, suppose you were helping someone fix their plumbing and they asked you to "please bring over that set of pipes." But then you only see one pipe ...
In the poker example, you can think of it purely in terms of frequency. Dice might be even easier though. Suppose we want to know the chances of getti...
I'll go with one of my favorite theories on the relationship between the two, which sees beauty as an irreducible synthesis of goodness and truth. For...
Placeholder for Section 2 on the targets of reason and accounting for them, as well as how the Transcedentals of Unum (Unity) introduced the problem o...
Creaturely Being and Essence-In-And-Beyond Existence Edit: to be clear, "creatures" as those things requiring creation lack self-subsistence. For exam...
If the letter is legitimate, why do you think Plato refrains from saying anything like: "I maintain that these things are unknowable, and I myself do ...
But eidos isn't invoked as an expedient for justifying a political system. Quite the opposite, Socrates only looks at justice within the context of a ...
The question of how life "does not grow old," in perfection is an interesting one. Consider the vision towards the climax of Dante's Divine Comedy: /u...
Yes, a great deal of effort is expended on trying to develop the idea and avoid the problems of collapsing into the silent unity of Parmenides or the ...
Eric Perl's short little gem "Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition," makes a similar argument, but applies it more b...
It's not clear which answer is right, and yet it is clear that this answer is wrong: /uploads/resized/files/62/2hmru19h17esorb7.png ...so it does seem...
It was a norm that philosophers should be exceptional people who "lived out their ideals" up to the modern period. Many seemed to do this quite well, ...
Anyhow, here is an interesting contrast of the two that brings up Wittgenstein's interest in Schopenhauer as well. It mostly focuses on the Tractatus ...
The sciences too. The whole hot debate in evolutionary theory today, the focus on genes to the exclusion of all else, seems to be somewhat a case wher...
I think this would be radically underselling it. Consider the image of the soul—the charioteer of reason training the two horses (the appetites and pa...
I guess it depends on what you mean by "zeteic skeptic." Plato seems to allow a priority to dialogue—as opposed to speeches—even as he suggests there ...
Hans Urs von Balthasar's "Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Saint Maximus the Confessor." Aside from being a rare deep dive into IMO one of th...
Yup, me too. Conciousness comes in because supposedly it can be reduced to physics. Well, from my view, what people think about the world shapes cultu...
Unfortunately, I don't really recall. I want to say it's mostly Book II, maybe a bit in Book I. I recall the part about rebutting the potency argument...
Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but in computation there are multiple systems that are computationally universal/Turing complete (e.g. Turin...
I'll have to check that out. It seems to me that the track record for reduction is quite weak, and that the empirical support for it is not particular...
:up: good examples. I guess if I had to sum up I'd say the issue is that describing organisms traits seems to require speaking to an additional sort o...
It's also occured to me that the thought you have previously imbibed and accepted will make it difficult (although by no means impossible) to see othe...
Yup, he addresses those precise issues. They are why the answer is a qualified "yes." I think his reasoning is fairly straightforward, so it's probabl...
Can't help you there. I found this article on sublation interesting but I can't fully understand it: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Aufhebung#the_mathe...
I'm trying, lol, maybe I missed the point. Well, you can see the direction I was thinking in anyhow. I don't see it that way. For an example of my thi...
I know this is an old thread, but if you only got around to the Metaphysics, this is really discussed most in detail in Book X of the Ethics. It isn't...
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