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Count Timothy von Icarus

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At this rate, the party is coming to represent nothing more or less than personal loyalty and subservience to the infallible personage of Donald Trump...
July 12, 2021 at 17:39
For me, it's that the cave is in fact sealed, a tomb. Kant showed us that we cannot interact with our physical world. Everything is mediated by the st...
July 04, 2021 at 11:58
I believe I may have found a problem with one of your premises though. "Actual infinities don't exist," doesn't seem to follow from their being contro...
July 02, 2021 at 00:46
I wouldn't get your hopes up. If there was solid information linking Trump to crimes it probably would have leaked by now. His CFO might go to jail. I...
June 30, 2021 at 19:10
I don't know if I agree with that. The argument is that you can tell that your mind is a real one. You know that for sure, and that certitude us a rea...
June 28, 2021 at 02:47
That's one way to spin it... That's a program for community outreach policing, C3, etc. Exactly what advocates have asked for. And given both the: A. ...
June 28, 2021 at 02:27
That's certainly one way to look at it. I think Whitehead is instructive here: https://www.religion-online.org/article/whitehead-and-newton-on-space-a...
June 26, 2021 at 23:26
One of the problems with global warming is that the costs aren't distributed evenly. North America, Europe, and East Asia gain the most from using car...
June 25, 2021 at 20:08
Thanks! I wanted to give Strauss credit but I was traveling and didn't have the book on me. He credits him in the text. I haven't had a time to finish...
June 25, 2021 at 12:19
I think you're getting at a weakness there with the anti-natalism, but not via the direct route to "why?" The issue is when. How do you scope your mor...
June 24, 2021 at 12:14
Ha, gotcha. That idea was a joke though.
June 23, 2021 at 22:43
June 23, 2021 at 19:26
Maybe 14 billion years of history and four fundemental physical forces is a huge simplification. Our creators could be dealing with 14 trillion years ...
June 23, 2021 at 13:38
I think the closer we get to being able to create brains in a vat in this world, the more likely it is that we actually are brains in vats. There is a...
June 23, 2021 at 13:35
For sure, but that explanation appears to be a ways away: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05097-x As someone who has woken up during surger...
June 23, 2021 at 02:18
This is pretty much the view of Boehme, and was picked up by Fichte and Hegel. I haven't read Schelling directly, but I believe his ideas fit here too...
June 23, 2021 at 01:58
In the first creation story God created light before the sun, as well as plants. This obviously doesn't make sense from a pure natural sciences perspe...
June 22, 2021 at 18:51
Interesting stuff. The idea that the universe as information has always fascinated me on a few fronts. First is how we should view universal laws, suc...
June 21, 2021 at 15:36
Interesting question I thought of related to this: Suppose we were introduced to strong evidence that the universe was a simulation, such as say, some...
June 20, 2021 at 17:30
I don't see Poland and the Baltics letting the German army in for an invasion whose success would have been dubious. And even if we allow this, which ...
June 19, 2021 at 14:00
I'm not plugged into the counter terrorism world the way I was back when I worked in it, but I believe this stems from the mobilization of previously ...
June 19, 2021 at 13:01
One of the biggest ironies of the China issue is that a carbon tax would do wonders to help move manufacturing back to the US. Chinese goods are cheap...
June 19, 2021 at 12:54
I've always been more interested in World War I. I think it's because of the complexity of Great Power politics back then. I find the Great Game confl...
June 19, 2021 at 12:50
I think this actually the problem. There are multiple ways to define physicalism. I've seen physicists refer to their own experiments on non-local cau...
June 19, 2021 at 12:36
This was the equivalent of watching a boxer go out with the strategy of bobbing and weaving so vigorously, without ever throwing a punch mind you, tha...
June 19, 2021 at 01:10
The point I was making was that the materialist position was stronger a a century so ago when we felt we had a good grip on what matter was and it see...
June 18, 2021 at 22:37
I find it ironic that Many Worlds has been used to justify materialism because the idea of reality as a Pleroma of all potential realities, infinitely...
June 18, 2021 at 14:39
I take it from this that you subscribe to a pragmatic view of truth, "the truth is the end of inquiry?" This isn't my understanding of the recent hist...
June 18, 2021 at 14:23
Not trying to be pedantic. The claim that the ontological proof was the only surviving one was what made me think we were talking about deduction alon...
June 18, 2021 at 11:17
It's just a quip in response to one. I don't actually think the main motivation for idealism is to be special and have magic things, or that materiali...
June 17, 2021 at 21:47
I feel like a similar level of critique works against the materialist though. They want to think they are special. They want to be in the know. They a...
June 17, 2021 at 21:21
I suppose by "prove" you mean the formal sense, rather than just convincing someone? That does seem like an impossible bar to meet. I mean, you can't ...
June 17, 2021 at 21:14
I think it's materialists who are subject to more unverifiable tosh. One of the more frustrating elements of reading through the philosophers of yore ...
June 17, 2021 at 20:42
In his lectures on the Phenomenology, Jay Berstein gets into this subject. He is talking about the logic of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and a student...
June 17, 2021 at 19:57
The problem with peaceful redistribution from the top is that the people on the bottom don't see themselves as part of the same culture or nation, and...
June 16, 2021 at 12:26
Reading these responses, I feel like the anthropic principal is relveant: It seems like a corollary principal could be reached outside the physical sc...
June 14, 2021 at 15:46
I voted no. The US is becoming more polarized and partisans are more vocal in embracing authoritarianism on both sides, but this polarization itself u...
June 13, 2021 at 22:44
How does pure majority rule protect the perogatives of minorities? How does it offload responsibility to a strong, independent beaurocracy (something ...
June 12, 2021 at 19:59
"if you get high enough you can become a super strong wereape, but don't trip too hard or you'll become primordial goo" At least that was what I took ...
June 12, 2021 at 19:39
Yeah, evolutionary psychology is a field where hypothesis is substituted for theory. Whole books are just long series of hypothesis strung together an...
June 12, 2021 at 13:54
Don't get the hate. Some level of bipartisanship and side switching is needed. Otherwise you have policy lurching drastically every time a different s...
June 11, 2021 at 19:50
I suppose I'm more on your side than Wayfarer's. There are myriad effective ways human societies could be organized but the range in which they are or...
June 11, 2021 at 12:51
That's an interesting way of phrasing it. I think we're in agreement. Yes, a definition probably is in order. By conciousness, I mean self awareness. ...
June 11, 2021 at 01:17
I may have accidentally given that impression. I actually think these findings and BBT gives more room for theories like Jung. Archetypes could be the...
June 10, 2021 at 14:23
Sounds fine to me. I like complex war games. Axis and Allies and Hearts of Iron are enjoyable, and generally more of a challenge playing as the Axis, ...
June 10, 2021 at 13:56
I'll add that, unfortunately, a lot of this has to be supposition since science is not able to pin point the origin of individual ideas in the brains....
June 10, 2021 at 13:43
For sure, I am currently working my way through J.M. Bernstein's two semester series on Hegel and reading reading Hackett's 1,700 page line by line co...
June 10, 2021 at 11:40
I suppose for a better, and much more widespread instance of leftist hysteria, one need only look to "Bush did 9/11," and "the Iraq War was primarily ...
June 10, 2021 at 10:37
Interesting question. I do not believe moral philosophy offers a good solution to the question of defining communities. To my mind, a challenge for mo...
June 10, 2021 at 10:23
If only that were true. I started off philosophy with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Later Plato. I was absolutely delighted like many students reading the...
June 10, 2021 at 09:42