Manuel

I agree. Physics is indeterminate in regards to metaphysics. But I think the same can be said about the metaphysical status of the brain and even of m...

We've got science which isn't common sense, so we'd made progress. How far we'll go, who knows?

It depends on what you mean by "perceive", if by this word you mean our normal human perceptions without that aid of technology, then it's by now an e...

Excellent post. :clap:

Well, 13 pages later and still no consensus on what metaphysics is or what it should be. But then you notice that debates of this kind has been going ...

Matter is much stranger than how it appears to common sense. Common sense tells us to think of matter in terms of solid, indestructible stuff. But thi...

A person is thinking. How the thought is created is quite obscure, it seems we are extremely far from finding an answer to this. The thought isn't rea...

I had in mind Wiles when he managed to give proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, he said that one part that wasn't making sense, but then he remembered som...

You can be sane and sober and mistake a cow for another animal. Sane and sober people can hallucinate too and often do, such as seeing water down the ...

But knowledge isn't justified true belief, it can't be defined by a strict set of criteria. A fact is deemed to be a fact, when it is recognized by th...

I don't have many problems with it. I do think the phrase "scientific revolution" or specifically his "paradigm shift" (not mentioned in these quotes)...

I don't necessarily see problem. Very often, when a physicist or a mathematician finds a solution to a problem, they describe it as "elegant". And wha...

I don't see why not. Certain experiments could be said to be an artform, such as using sophisticated devices to see detect the wave function collapse....

I think it does, but we cannot prove it beyond doubt. This was actually Hume's position, which is sometimes interpreted as him saying that we don't kn...

I should add that Sellars can be quite useful here. He can be and often is rather obscure in exposition. But his distinction between manifest image an...

Clearly.

I think this particular thread is doing fine. I was thinking that if you did begin another one on consciousness being an illusion, then I'd think one ...

That's fine. Supernaturalism is hard to even articulate, it seems to me. But there are all kinds of people in the world. Good luck on that thread. It'...

Maybe, it's possible. But I really don't see any reason to believe consciousness is an illusion at all. So although people may debate it, I don't see ...

I mean, there are people who think consciousness is a kind of illusion. But there's no evidence for this at all besides appealing to the fact that neu...

Florida Man does some crazy shit. :wink:

Sure. I mean Australia has a relatively rational government. As far as I know, I do remember that global warming denial was somewhat higher in Austral...

Absolutely. No doubt. It also mirrors a rightward shift in all developed countries since the 1980's, with the rise of neoliberal dogma. So, as you've ...

Yeah. But a good deal of Floridians must not care. Maybe half. They've had a string of bat shit crazy mayors. It doesn't get much weirder than Florida...

This is debated here? Not even Descartes would have doubted to take the vaccine. :snicker:

Pretty much.

Yes it is. It's essentially Strawson's Real Materialism (minus the panpsychism), the view that everything that exists is physical. But this does not m...

I'm afraid I don't follow. Why would matter (or physical stuff) count as more real than mind? Mind is a configuration of physical stuff. So far as we ...

Now that our intuitive notion of body has collapsed, the rest remains terminological - which does not imply it is trivial, at least not to my eyes. "T...

Neither really. But I don't think you can have a large society without some degree of planning - how central it should be, is hard to say. We probably...

I'm a bit of a broken record, but I believe Chomsky has provided ample evidence for what I'm arguing. The mind-body problem was a metaphysical concern...

It's not so communist. Just like the USA or Europe is not capitalist. These things don't exist.

Anyone who claims to be wise, is not. You don't look to find it, you stumble towards it. Not much of use can be said on this topic, I don't think. Unl...

Ideally, nobody. They should all be destroyed. In reality? Law enforcement. But this should be overlooked by a democratic committee to prevent abuse o...

1) For understanding how power works generally, I don't think it's possible to beat Understanding Power by Chomsky. Not much more to say here. 2) To u...

Exactly. But that's the point, how one views a machine. We project it into nature. It doesn't follow that our projections are correct. More often than...

Machines are something we attribute to nature. They aren't found in nature. Action at a distance disproved the world is machine because mechanistic ma...

There are no machines in nature. This point was proved decisively when Newton discovered action at a distance, which shows that there need not be phys...

I don't think so. We have anthropomorphized machines and have in turn mechanized people. Thus we swap parts with computers. But a brain is a biologica...

I think that this is the goal of philosophy, if not one important one, to try and unify things. The question is if we're actually doing this by evokin...

After spending considerable time thinking and reading on the topic, it is almost as obscure now as it was before I focused on it. Avoiding new age stu...

It seems to me that many people already are ontological pluralists. Sure, you can get the odd person who thinks that everything ultimately reduces to ...

:up: It seems we tend to agree on most things. I'm a genetic-pessimist, which is to say I cannot help it, it's in my constitution. I think it's a mino...

It's a sound option. I think the most pressing alternatives here are idealism/materialism/neutral monism vs. eliminitavism. That's substantive, but ea...

Probably not. The ever increasing reality of climate change is simply too bad and so little is being done which is required to mitigate (not getting r...

Mysterianism would say we don't have the capacities to understand the answers to these questions. We just don't know. It's not that someday down the l...

What would perfect human "goodness" look like? We may have a skewed notion of perfection, compared to something like God. As to things it can't do, pa...

I'll keep a note then. Hands' book is by far the best science book I've read, by far. But, as you say, too many books, too mucho info. Hmm. Reason as ...

Sure. But if plants are sentient, which they may be, we're also killing them, or as a guy once said "we're eating our food's food!". Point taken thoug...

Man, the one shocking portrait of "God", one that is actually interesting, speculative, and predicted a big bang using reasonable speculation, is Main...