It's a curious word. In other languages, there are no good translations as it is almost always attached to religious aspects of the world. At least in...
I changed it today, funnily enough. Yeah, life feels like that often enough Sisyphean. But to go to anti-natalism to these extremes seems to me to col...
Perhaps. It's plausible. I wouldn't hold my breathe for transhumanism. It's a noble goal. But I think they think science is like I don't know God or s...
We can play this game. I think it is evident that there is no single capitalist society which exists in the world. Same with communism. As stated by S...
Ah cool. I will take a look. Thanks. :up: Very interesting. For my benefit, permit me to re-formulate this: So the particles move in all trajectories ...
In some of the pop-physics books I've read, people like Sean Carroll, Carlo Rovelli, Art Hobson and the like, they tend to say that a field is kind of...
I thought the whole chaos theory business began with someone trying to predict weather patterns, which a priori, looks easy enough, but turned out to ...
With what I've seen, it doesn't seem to lead anywhere. And I don't understand what the "theory" is supposed to be. Would like to know. And suspect you...
As with many things AN, this assumes what it's trying to prove, by making suffering the end point of everything. Suffering is a part of everything, bu...
Depends on what philosophy you have in mind. If it is limited to academic philosophy on mind or linguistics, then almost nothing carries over to urgen...
Probably. But it's hard to say with much confidence. They may actually believe that. I don't see any reason to suppose it's true. As to why it is impo...
I'm not understanding. I'm saying matter can be conscious: we are conscious matter. Matter has inherently as a potential of (by way of a specific conf...
If I'm honest I'd say I don't know. Then again why should anything in the universe be able to think at all? It seems to be the case that for the overw...
I said I do not think it's a fact. You can speak of you eating atoms, or seeing them, or feeling them. That's a particular from of description. You co...
I don't think it's a fact, it's a belief. You cannot show that atoms are conscious or experience something minimal. They may or they may not. How to s...
No, I mean I have in mind our ordinary commonsense intuitions in which we think of ourselves as having a mind and a body. This includes the current pe...
Someone asked a similar question, so I'm repeating myself but I think the following book is quite good and covers a lot of territory: Mental Reality b...
When you say: "Right this person, is YOU. YOU, as a human being, the same YOU since you were born, not your body, which is in constant change. You can...
That's hard to say. I don't personally like the word "theorist" too much, I think it is often invoked by people who studied the social sciences, as I ...
What's deep is usually dependent on the type of person you are. You may be into ethical problems or epistemology or aesthetics. There are, however, a ...
It's probably a good idea to avoid stupidity, in as much as one is aware of it in the first place. A whole other issue, which perhaps is correlated wo...
I never said that. Anybody could've be born to a tribe. Drinking stuff coming from bottles is not irrational behavior actually. Or it doesn't seem so ...
It's obvious, isn't it? I'm not so sure. If you send bleach to tribe in the middle of the jungle, it isn't clear to me that they wouldn't drink it to ...
I think that in one sense you are correct. If by "body" you have in mind what we commonly refer to as human bodies, meaning your limbs, your stomach, ...
There are plenty of very fascinating mental phenomena. Deja vu is one of them, it's kind of surreal and strange. Doesn't mean it's true, in the sense ...
When we reach such levels of complexity as human behavior, it is not clear to me that these models are discovered much, interpretations can vary signi...
It takes a quite a bit of effort, in my experience. What makes it worse is the fact that many people disagree on what these words mean. The Sanford En...
Maybe we can't. But I'd speculate that things-in-themselves make sense in an ontology, though this can be debated. That's a fair attitude, makes sense...
We're now talking past each other. I said (some) people already see "ghosts". You can find them in these entertainment channels were some guys get a c...
Well, if you want to go that route, you'd probably want to say that these are natural phenomena as in the end, all processes are. Yes, the brain is th...
Well, that's the thing. Some suggestible people already (claim) to see ghosts, demons, angels, without any extra cognitive faculties. In fact, I suspe...
Mmm. That's where I think this thought experiment can be misleading. This paranormal stuff, ghosts and the like, are all quite ancient registers of ou...
That true, if transhumanism turns out to be correct, that is, that we can "super-evolve". But I don't think transhumanism is quite reliable. But, I ho...
Yeah, I don't think people think they are intentionally making the world a worse place by doing what they do - not implying that you said this by the ...
Yes. I think that's accurate, and I don't have a reason to think it should be otherwise, once we shed our naïve realism. Dreams are interesting. Of co...
Sorry, I missed your post initially. I mean, if we were able to go to a habitable place, say, in the Andromeda galaxy, then we should be able to exper...
I suppose one way to start would be to try an identify a situation or a scenario which most people would consider stupid. If we can't agree on that, t...
Lots of good stuff to go over in that post. Obviously, such an OP can be taken as not being satisfied with how much we have and can know and is thus s...
I hope you find it to your liking. Well, as far as I know, most mathematicians are Platonists in some sense. As for "ordinary objects", it's hard to a...
Yes. The curious aspect of this, within the modern-day rationalist tradition exemplified by Chomsky and McGinn, is that the stuff "out there", is quit...
Yes. Correct. It's a shorthand description. We detect photons through equipment. Eddington's book is quite good, if a bit dated. But he has the merit ...
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