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Count Timothy von Icarus

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The proposition that information is as fundemental as matter and energy is not uncommon in physics. There is also the proposition that information is ...
January 01, 2024 at 21:02
I would start with physicalism re philosophy of mind. In the body doesn't in some way "produce" the mind, then why does ingesting certain chemicals so...
January 01, 2024 at 20:57
That's a very good point. I didn't mean to portray it as necessarily universal. I wouldn't want to even actually call anyone a "Last Man," as the term...
January 01, 2024 at 20:28
Yes, they are two different outcomes. But the need for the Overman seems to be born out of the condition the Last Man to me. Fukuyama's only point is ...
January 01, 2024 at 20:07
My favorite is Julius Evola titling his book "Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul." I find esoterica quite interesting, ...
January 01, 2024 at 14:59
Peterson is talking about both. He, and the movement as a whole, is very hostile to critical theory and critiques of objectivity, even as they also em...
January 01, 2024 at 14:42
:100: , that ship sailed a long time ago. And the point has been mooted by how ineffective the Russian Air Force has been. Most of their activity is l...
January 01, 2024 at 14:29
Well, IMO, while the modern nu/alt-right certainly shares a lot with/ in some way grows out of more venerable right wing traditions, it is itself some...
January 01, 2024 at 13:02
This is certainly true. I feel like philosophers themselves can be more or less culpable in how their work ends up perceived. For example, we end up w...
December 31, 2023 at 18:42
I think Rorty actually uses something close to the example in the OP. "Cats are animals." But suppose we discover tomorrow that "all cats are actually...
December 31, 2023 at 18:04
We seem to be going in a circle. We've already acknowledged that the world would be a different, better place if everyone acted morally, or that there...
December 31, 2023 at 17:26
This would seem to apply to almost anything. E.g., it's not my wife cheating on me that makes me unhappy, but my belief that she has been unfaithful. ...
December 31, 2023 at 15:30
They have been actually, people just pay less attention, but it still goes on. The Armenian diaspora is one of the most effective diaspora groups in t...
December 31, 2023 at 14:10
Isn't it begging to question to assume the correct moral beliefs are distributed such that being correct about them is a 50/50 proposition? The same s...
December 31, 2023 at 13:43
This is true only if you assume that people's beliefs about morality have nothing to do moral facts. But if people have the moral beliefs they do beca...
December 31, 2023 at 01:16
Well, the non-natural moral facts would be involved in the consequences of your actions to the extent that your family won't come to see you because t...
December 30, 2023 at 23:41
Well, God can't actualize A instead of B AND actualize B but not A. Aquinas is clear that God cannot perform contradictions. God's freedom is that God...
December 30, 2023 at 23:32
That's a question that would seem to deal with causality, which would tend to require a naturalistic answer. The difference for someone like Moore wou...
December 30, 2023 at 22:46
Of course. My main concern is to uncover the true nature of reality, to fathom the real, the absolute. Inside the machine I will be free from the hust...
December 30, 2023 at 21:01
There might not be any immediately discernible difference. This can be true in the case of the car battery as well. You might actually have a live bat...
December 30, 2023 at 19:58
This objection seems applicable to almost all actions. If my car won't start and I attach jumper cables to it, it's my belief that the battery is dead...
December 30, 2023 at 18:32
:up: Sorry, I wasn't very clear there. Those questions were more rhetorical questions that came to mind given the topic covered in the OP vis-á-vis wh...
December 30, 2023 at 15:08
I didn't write that passage. It's by one of my least favorite philosophers, the wonderful Bertrand Russell. It's really a case study in the pitfalls o...
December 30, 2023 at 14:23
How so? In what way is Nietzsche's "historical analysis" more actual historical analysis than Hegel or Vico's? I would say Marx actually has a leg up ...
December 30, 2023 at 13:20
Umberto Eco is pretty good on this apparent contradiction in political narratives. His "Eternal Fascism," is a good example. You see this quite a bit ...
December 30, 2023 at 12:39
I think sums it up rightly here. It just doesn't make sense to think of God as in any way contingent in Thomism, which the "possible worlds" style of ...
December 29, 2023 at 18:26
I suppose it depends on how you define "ego" and "conscience." It would seem to me that saying, "people are not free because their actions are dependa...
December 29, 2023 at 18:09
The way I understand it, divine simplicity is tied to God's total lack of contingency. For Aquinas, God's essence includes existence itself, making Go...
December 26, 2023 at 16:45
This certainly seems to be the case in Harris. It doesn't fix the problems re epistemology and scientism though. Plus, it seemed historically short si...
December 24, 2023 at 14:22
Right. And if humans generate meaning and value, and humans are part of the universe, then in an important way the universe generates meaning and valu...
December 24, 2023 at 14:07
Nice article. Seems pretty much to be the common argument for panentheism you see in Plato, the Patristics, etc. However, they generally say things li...
December 24, 2023 at 13:46
Very well written piece. I think your conclusion probably works, provided you accept a lot of the assumptions it rests on. However, I find the premise...
December 23, 2023 at 19:09
Catholic theology is quite broad, but in general the idea isn't that we can do meaningful things for God, at least not in the way we would do things f...
December 23, 2023 at 15:48
Probably nearly infinitely wealthy, since ideally we'd live in some sort of Star Trek, post-scarcity society where we can just replicate things, beam ...
December 23, 2023 at 15:24
I'm currently reading the book below. It advances a fairly plausible, though highly modified variation on Saint Aquinas' "intention in the media," to ...
December 23, 2023 at 13:22
Just got another way of looking at it, we could consider Maimonides argument for the via negativa re: statements about the Divine Nature. Following Ar...
December 23, 2023 at 03:26
One way I've heard Meister Eckhart paraphrased on this is that God "boils over" in love and creates. In this way, creation is necessary, although it's...
December 22, 2023 at 19:54
Some languages certainly seem more suited to rhyme. The Inferno sounds far better in the original for example. English is not a particularly great lan...
December 21, 2023 at 18:41
Lots of people spoke out against the Iraq WMD claims and the claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If this was a short term liability, it ...
December 10, 2023 at 14:35
"Scott Ritter is an unreliable source who often makes things up," doesn't entail "the opposite of what he says is true in all cases." It means he's an...
December 10, 2023 at 12:13
I would not look to Scott Ritter for information about anything. He's not even a Tucker Carlson-tier propagandist but a full on state mouth piece. He'...
December 09, 2023 at 22:54
Sure, but so is "if mind creates nature..." If mind (and rationality) is completely sui generis, then I'm not sure why solipsism and radical skepticis...
December 09, 2023 at 12:12
German land forces are indeed very anemic. Their ground forces are below 63,000 and their reserves are not large. In general, if you're going to rely ...
December 08, 2023 at 15:08
Doesn't this sort of beg the question by assuming that rationality can only exist as part of mind? If mind emerges from nature, and nature has no orde...
December 08, 2023 at 13:37
In: Free Will  — view comment
This really depends on how you conceive of free will. I personally find compatibalist arguments for free will that are grounded in process metaphysics...
December 08, 2023 at 12:13
Hamas has participated in one fair election. It was held almost twenty years ago now. In that election they won a slim plurality of the vote, not even...
December 07, 2023 at 18:09
Right, interpretations of Kant have broken into differing camps. However, the more popular one seems to be the dualist camp, the camp that draws a har...
December 07, 2023 at 16:51
There is Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, which attempts to include a number of other factors in explaining evolution. It focuses on genes less than t...
December 07, 2023 at 12:56
There are varying interpretations on Plato, but my take would be that desire of the good is in everyone. However, this desire is often corrupted or ov...
December 07, 2023 at 12:38
I will just note that all the cases of overcoming you mention are about (extremely rare) individuals overcoming barriers to self-actualization. This d...
November 30, 2023 at 12:24