I think an oft missed distinction here is between the idea that "every thing around us is physical" and the broader claim that "all facts can be expla...
We live in a world beset by truly global collective action problems: climate change, ocean acidification, the power of transnational megacorps, global...
lol, what? They hit two Panamanian ships and would have hit a Nigerian flagged, Japanese owned ship has the munitions not been intercepted. "Extremely...
FYI, proportionally is generally assessed at a fairly granular level. E.g., if a force is firing inaccurate and ineffective artillery from the playgro...
My favorite source on time is Arthur's "The Reality of Time Flow: Local Becoming in Modern Physics." It's fair to its sources and even funny at times,...
We're committed finitists here. Heresies are not allowed. In all seriousness, IDK. I see a thread in the queue by a new user named an-salad? I assume ...
Once they had control, yes. However, on their rise to power the Nazis were very active in the sort of street fighting that characterized political lif...
Absolutely. The leader is divinely appointed and the electorate either acedes to the will of God and is rewarded or is punished for rejecting God's wi...
I agree that the label has many problems. There are certainly some troubling similarities between the "Trumpist movement," and fascist movements, but ...
I have considered if the whole "getting something from nothing," issue with strong emergence isn't just a more particular form of the old Parmenidean ...
Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it ...
If the problem with explaining apparently emergent phenomena is just that you need a "lot more computational capabilities," then what you have is mere...
I liked Tegmark's book, but I don't think his speculation actually resolves the Fine Tuning Problem the way he thinks it does. It seems like there wou...
To be fair, weak emergence doesn't have the "magic" problem. Weak emergence doesn't preclude reduction, and can be explained in terms of "data compres...
Just to be clear, my argument here is not that there aren't plenty of good candidates for emergence or many powerful arguments for why something like ...
The problem is not in finding examples of phenomena that might exhibit emergence. There are plenty of those. It's in framing what emergence is in a wa...
Well, I slogged my way through a decent amount of: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_792452-T2/images/I/51mlCVx4pML.jpg ..and it actually red...
I don't get how it couldn't be, since "what is the ultimate nature of reality," seems to be a question both physics and philosophy try to answer. The ...
Yeah, they're synergistic for sure. I had this idea of turning deduction / induction into a Hegelian negation type deal, and trying to see if there wa...
Just to be clear, I agree with you 100%, and Hume obviously had a pragmatic sense about this too. I'm just saying that if you accept his argument abou...
What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?" I think you're right. The d...
I'm not sure I understand this. How is science supposed to work if we can't count on past observations to tell us anything about the future? We've bee...
It's not that everything is reducible to some amorphous and expansive idea of "the physical" but rather that everything is reducible to physics. I see...
I'm sympathetic to the idea of something like "physicalism without reductionism," but as is discussed earlier in this thread, I'm not sure such a thin...
We don't need to suppose that "science," as a whole, uses cause. One cannot get through a science degree without having heard the mantra of "correlati...
I liked Nagel's book, but it occured to me that the problem goes back even further, to Plato and the Pythagoreans. Way back with the Republic, we get ...
I see what you're saying. If the universe is actually eternal, that solves the problem. But cosmologists often frame the problem as getting support fo...
Which is achieved through Absolute Knowing. But to figure out how this is achieved, students of Kabbalah and the Gnostic Ogdoad will need to first wat...
I have no doubt that if you search biology journals the term "eyes" would appear far less frequently than the terms "cells" or "genes." But would this...
This is initially how I was conceptualizing the problem as well, but I think it runs into problems. "Time" doesn't exist outside of our 4D spacetime m...
Thanks. I'm not sure I really understand the question, maybe because I'm not super familiar with Heidegger. In general, I think pronouncements about t...
I agree. "Realist" international relations theory doesn't seem to actually explain history very well, and so relies on all sorts of ad hoc additions l...
Yes, that's the premise I was accepting starting out. Things can begin to exist for no reason at all, no Principle of Sufficient Reason in effect. I'm...
Hitchcock does not agree with you. He says Russell's premise re "cause being irrelevant because it is absent from the advanced sciences," (e.g., physi...
Uh, even the Neo-Russelians admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/1...
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I read a lot of popular physics and physics articles and cause is mentioned frequently. There is, for instance, al...
Smallism is a neat term for the idea that "facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts." Wholes are defined by their parts, ra...
If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace mor...
I think the terms do overlap for philosophy of mind. It's in ontology when I see more room between them. In ontology, physicalism is normally packaged...
Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism in that case though. I can't think of any reason w...
I think you're right, but this has at times been identified as a flaw in superveniance that needs to be corrected. What many physicalists would like t...
This is the ontology he lays out in "The Idea of the World," which is a collection of essays from different times, so it might very well be he has cha...
It's worth pointing out that Kim himself says his arguments seem to shut the door on a non-reductive physicalism grounded in substance metaphysics. He...
No. I'm actually quite a fan of speculative history. What I am saying is that the method is easy to do poorly, and in some respects Nietzsche does it ...
There are different flavors of idealism, but in general they have the same starting point as physicalism. The external world and other minds exist. Th...
I believe I said I did not think Nietzsche had a compelling, coherent theory of romantic/familial/Platonic love, not that he never used words rendered...
Or perhaps the West is engaged in neo-colonialism by trying to foist their "sexual revolution" on to other cultures, undermining gender identities peo...
Sorry, I think I was misreading you. I was thinking counting being something we "do" was somehow supposed to resolve what I see as the crux Wayfarer's...
This is exactly what idealists claim, in favor of their own position. No one has ever observed the noumena, it's impossible. Every empirical observati...
Seems like this could just as well be an argument against reductionism/smallism, rather than an argument against physicalism per se. I'm not sure if t...
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