I think it owes to the field being necessarily more closely tied to politics than other fields. I also think a huge black mark against economics comes...
Berkeley doesn't think external objects exist when no one is perceiving them (naive realism). See the Principles: His responds to the objection that h...
The objects we experience appear to exist outside of us and independently of us. Idealism, at least in its subjectivist versions, says this common nai...
I was thinking of this thread drawing fractions for my son. You can draw a half many different ways. A circle with a vertical line bisecting it and on...
I read the OP. It just seems like a very similar argument could be made where materialism comes out on top under a quite similar yardstick. The other ...
This is a bit of a strange way to try to justify idealism. I don't know of a single ancient creation mythos that appears to represent any sort of idea...
This is a good post overall, but the bit about Hegel needs an addendum. For Hegel, the real is the rational. He's all about trying to walk his readers...
To be fair, no one asks a biologist to predict the next mammal that will evolve, or a neuroscientist to guess what they're thinking of using neuroimag...
I think any attempt to predict the particulars of a recession is a fool's errand. I'm talking more about how "what has been the case," is erroneously ...
Maybe. I recall and experiment a few years back where entire photosynthetic bacteria were said to be entangled with one another. This shouldn't be sho...
The Great Courses' Mind-Body Philosophy is great. They got Patrick Grim to do it. His "Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions," which has work from Ch...
It becomes a non-trivial question when it is difficult to determine identity. This article has a good example from the world of physics: https://nauti...
I think it's worth looking at other types of interactions between different types for guidance. How are the following different? 1. Interactions betwe...
Eh, what does that get you? A dated three bedroom with termite issues the last owner got for $135,000 in 1990. We need a new "big" amount of money at ...
I immediately thought of Cartwright with the OP here. To expand on the above and the very good point made here: , the "laws of physics," are not the a...
Yes, that's a fair point. Hoffman's "Conscious Realism" could be aptly labeled "Conscious Idealism." It's saying that the things we want to talk about...
I feel like this is similar to the objection raised earlier. Saying something cannot or is highly unlikely to be right does not require you to know wh...
He sometimes gets dangerously close to the line of undermining his own argument at times, at least by my reckoning. However, overall I think he has a ...
Yup, that's the main way I thought of it. I also thought of it in terms of the macroscopic variables in the past consistent with those in the present,...
They're both discrete ideas, or at least discrete enough ideas that we can give shorthand names to them. I can use the words "dog," "color," "hollow,"...
So, the corollary here would be "I believe in physicalism, but I don't know if physical reality exists?" This seems different to me because it is a po...
Sure, but this seems like the opposite of your atheist argument. If the existence of God / the physical nature of reality don't have any practical imp...
And what is the evidence that that supports the position of ontological physicalism in the first place? Does anything make it the default? What would ...
I don't think these are analogous. One about God is saying "there is no evidence for X, so even though X can't be excluded by necessity, it does not m...
So: "Everything in the world is Brahman and is caused by Brahman." "Only things that are experienced actually exist. If no one is around to see the Mo...
I don't think that's the same thing. Physicalism is an ontology, it's an explicit claim about the nature of reality. Epistemological/methodological co...
Rarely. But it can work well enough for cross disciplinary analysis of scientific findings. You can still see how different models fit together and wh...
Exactly. And physicalism could indeed be a state of affairs even if solid "evidence" for it cannot exist due to the fact that all such evidence comes ...
Because it's not possible for there to be a truthmaker or because it's not possible verify the existence of said truthmaker? It seems to me like there...
Throughout his book he refers to his belief that there is "something" out there. That to me bespeaks realism. I'm not sure if his opinions have since ...
Hoffman is a realist. As a scientist, he's not going to get hung up on metaphysical challenges to the existence of the external world. His goal is to ...
I haven't looked in his models in any depth, but I can see how it works if you have the condition that an organism looking for resources so that it ca...
For another example of an "immaterial" ontology there is the claim that reality is fundamentally mathematical. Talk of "physical" structures is then e...
I don't see how that works. You still have a world full of concepts, symmetries, cause and effect, etc. Why this plethora of entities and endless vari...
You are confusing idealism with anti-realism. They are not the same thing. There is an entire subset of idealism called "objective idealism," that acc...
It seems indeterminate. One way a professor recommended us to think of relativity is with distance as an X axis and time as a Y axis. You can move "fa...
I think a large amount of disagreement on the aforementioned topic comes from the misunderstanding that saying "reality may be radically unlike percep...
The physicists who developed the interpretations of QM certainly didn't see their work as philosophy of science. There is a vast number of discoveries...
It doesn't? I won't pretend to be an expert on these things, but I've read enough histories of physics and recent books by physicists to know that pro...
Hoffman's impetus for his book was the idea that our perceptions of "how the world is' are what may be holding us back in science. If we assume the wo...
Yeah, bit of a red herring on my part. I mentioned the Phenomenology only because it's a good work arguing against radical skepticism. I see the two t...
Ironically, this is relevant given empiricism tells us that knowing a quantum object's velocity makes its position unknowable and vice versa. Another ...
I'll have to check it out. Seems like similar conclusions to Hoffman's as far as the noumenal world is concerned, at least in that the reality of the ...
I read Hoffman's book recently. It's pretty good. I was a little disappointed that it didn't go into any of the research on the way information about ...
You don't need to jettison the standard model to have different cosmologies. You need the Big Bang to understand the directionality of time and explai...
The Supreme Court could allow states to re-implement abortion bans because it was a court decision that originally made it illegal to have bans of abo...
But this would only apply to a small subset of unknown truths, those that follow the form "no one knows that X" where X is a true proposition. And whi...
Interesting. Enformy seems like it would be an emergent factor from: The laws of physics being what they are and allowing for complexity to emerge. Th...
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