For the eudaimonia of sentient beings. It seems reasonably likely that discoveries about Higgs Bosons may lead to technological advances that help sen...
It is remarkable how much sound and fury this issue generates (eleven pages showing now on my computer) when there is so little at stake. My attempt t...
Interesting. I wasn't aware that this was a significant topic of discussion back then. The closest I can think of is Zhuangzi's musings over his dream...
That returns us to where we started, which is that the only difference I can see between those two is the non-philosophical difference of the words us...
I expect it can help with the concerns, but first we need to understand the nature of those concerns, and that has not been made clear. Dream experien...
Or we can be pragmatic while we do philosophy, as the American Pragmatists, amongst others, did. In my experience, that approach leads to a more meani...
No. Most statements in philosophy arguments that start with 'So you' (or with 'Obviously') are wrong, and this one is no exception. There are pragmati...
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but I've yet to see anything that suggests there is any difference between 'being conscious of a mental tree' and...
I agree I wouldn't say a lot of physicists are wage slaves, but you're probably right that some are. The reason not many would be is that physics is f...
I don't agree with that at all. Why 'obviously'? And why this anthropomorphism of the gene? The last person I saw doing that was Richard Dawkins - not...
Sorry, I'm not following you, so I don't know whether I agree or disagree. What is the 'it' that you think is reductionist and meaningless, and why do...
My thoughts are that I agree, up to the 'instead' (I have no time for certainty of any kind) and I disagree with everything after that. I don't think ...
If you're prepared to contemplate the uncontemplatable there is arguably a loophole in that Gödel's incompleteness theorem only applies to logical lan...
Godel's theorem does not say that we cannot prove the statement by going outside the system. Indeed, for the unprovable statements often considered in...
If by 'religious need' you just mean the need that many feel to explore and express spiritual feelings and ideas, then I agree that it is likely an in...
Taken on faith yes, but not in the same way, because the act of faith in science is consistently being vindicated in this world, whereas that in relig...
Yes, and my response to that is that that's not how science works, and that the text is not something that a thoughtful scientist would say. Theories ...
I don't think I'm following here. Why is there a need for a policy? Won't it just naturally happen that, in the absence of centrally-planned intervent...
I have never observed a scientist say anything like that about quarks. Why should a scientist care whether a lay person believes in quarks? Such a bel...
I don't feel any essential connection between emotion and truth. Beauty makes me emotional, whether it is fictional, illusory or something else. YMMV ...
I will read it as soon as I can. The question that immediately springs to my mind is how he might square that with the political stand he took against...
Perhaps the answer is that the philosophers that were any good declined to answer the question on the grounds that it is ill-formed and meaningless. :...
This cannot be directly deduced from 1 and 2, since neither of them mentions an external world. At best, there may be some steps omitted, that introdu...
Yes it's disgusting. I wish they'd be honest and concrete over the lawns so that the building really looks like the fortress of paranoia it has become...
Was Nixon a bad president - aside from being a crook? From what I've heard of historical accounts of his presidency, there were some good and unexpect...
"military/armed police" Only a British resident could write that. Well, actually, I searched and, based on this page, realised I need to add Ireland, ...
When I looked into this a few years ago I observed that the positions of peak medical bodies in countries where there is no significant religious or c...
For me, the past is real insofar as it affects the present, or can affect the future. Every one of us has been radically shaped by the events in our p...
I wonder whether that story about retroactive child support for a child somebody never knew existed is an urban myth. A bit (not a lot) of internet se...
Sex is no different. What is different is that in your example the injured party sued the culprit as soon as they found out who it was, whereas in the...
Public policy based on whatever grab-bag of anecdotes an internet search can throw up? Really? You're a mathematician. You know the importance of basi...
Then I will imagine the powerset of God, which will be a strictly higher order of infinity. And the next day I will imagine the powerset of that, whic...
That provides no argument at all in favour of lax gun laws. That somebody who has received credible death threats by powerful adversaries needs armed ...
Because saying 'Define God to be the greatest imaginable being' is equivalent to the following sequence of statements: 1. There exists an idea X of a ...
In the same sense that it's reasonable to say that 'X is the greatest integer', or perhaps 'Fred is the fattest ten-foot tall man', or 'Nemo is the sm...
It is certainly a valid question, and an important question, but why a dilemma? A dilemma is a decision that is hard to make. I don't find it hard to ...
Really. Why? The definition in 1 is loaded by containing a hidden premise that there is an idea of a being that can be imagined that is greater than a...
You say you 'just like it'. I suppose 'it' is the beard, right? That's eminently understandable. What I don't get is why gender issues have to come in...
Do you like the beard for its own sake (its silky smoothness, the fact that it gives your fingers something new to fiddle with while in business meeti...
I don't know what that means either. Does God walk humbly and want me to do that too? I have never thought of the biblical version of God as particula...
The distinction is crucial in a child's early education. For many children there is a phase - sometimes prolonged - when they can read the words of a ...
Yes, something is revealed, but the word 'revelation' is not used unless that something is significant. In English one does not say 'I was just browsi...
Comments