Manuel

If you prefer that, sure. I personally like to think of philosophy in a broad manner. This makes me include novelists and musicians as providing provo...

These are just convenient designations. "Western" philosophy goes from Plato to Russell, but it does not include the Buddha or Lao Tzu, etc. etc. So n...

Ah. Gotcha. Thanks.

Sure, I see that. I mean, if we go straight to the point, I could say that the simplest explanation possible for everything is "strict" or "strong" so...

Ok. Let me try to put that in another way, otherwise I'm going to get confused. Either we are in an illusion or in reality. Let's assume we don't know...

Yeah, saw it. But what does that mean? I understand the phrase "conscientious objector" in war time, but can't make out what it could mean in the anti...

Yeah, this is true. Camus point is rather fair concerning the present. On the Sisyphus front, if it were for a few years sure but I mean, for all eter...

Sure. If people don't buy the argument, it's not worth beating them in the head with it. In his case, however, I don't think it's possible to distingu...

If a doctor said I have a better chance of surviving if I do what? If I do something that takes less steps than doing what is usually done? Is that mo...

I think it fails as a concept too. I don't know what such a thing would even amount to in practice.

Very well put. :up: Exactly. We can easily come up with more and more scenarios in the blink of an eye. But this doesn't clarify the situation, unless...

I don't understand what you are getting at with the analogy. Illusion-based world or not, you'd still have 50% chance to die. The "less stepped involv...

Sure, that's a problem too. But like you implied, aiming at having something like "the mind of God" is extremely unlikely. I think we should be gratef...

:up: Yes, that sounds about right."Reality as a whole" in not a coherent concept in that, it's not clear what aspects should be denied the status of "...

That could be the case. Or it could be that we simply don't have the capacity to peer into nature any further. Explanations only go so far before we a...

It's less probable, there are less step involved in thinking that this is "normal" reality vs. an illusion. If you speak of representations caused by ...

Sure. Fun movie. But I don't know if there's a way to test one of the fundamental ideas in that film: that a dream within a dream lasts longer the mor...

Yes - the mechanistic picture of the world keeps popping back up, even though it was refuted by Newton hundreds of years ago. It appears that we have ...

Well, I mean I don't know if science has any views per se. People doing science have views, often very different views it seems to me. But I do agree ...

But our best science at the moment seems to imply that our universe is probabilistic and not determined. Dennett believes in free will as well. I'm no...

:clap: What you don't can often be much more important than what you do.

This comes up from time to time. But if this were so, that is, if everything you see and experience is an illusion, then what happens when you have wh...

:lol: For sure Wittgenstein is that, it's part of his style. Heidegger can be one too, and others. :clap: That's the right way to think about these th...

Does intuition has to play a role in this, as in, I have a particular kind of experience that reveals something to me about the world, but as soon I e...

I actually have a question about this. If one can't speak about the Tao or know about it, what is one speaking of? It seems like like trying to captur...

Mainländer tried to think of God in secular terms and essentially "thought" his way to a "simple union" or a "simple substance", don't now the correct...

I have to admit, I giggled at the title of the thread. On a serious note, "significance" in relation to what? Who, outside our selves can measure or e...

Na man, it's fine. The vast majority of the time it's pretty childish and establishes no point. But it can be amusing. As when Schopenhauer talked abo...

:lol:

As long as experience is left out, the description is not complete at all. The subject of "mind independence" is one of the hardest of them all! I'm i...

Well if that quote were applied to bats, then what you say is correct. But it's also true to say that we can't apply that quote to other animals eithe...

There's a lot to say about that, but I have to get going, it's getting late here. I agreed w/the quote, but I did not use those words - he was talking...

:100: That's spot on.

Unless one thinks that acting like a bat, or a dog,as a human being, says much about being that specific animal. This does not mean the bat is not con...

How can you know that? If you believe that, then you cannot believe your own statement. You need to have a vague notion of correct knowledge or belief...

If done well, I think they can be very effective. But as noted, most of the time they aren't a good idea. There are degrees of insults too.

I stopped after 1Q84, I read like 6 of his books in a row. But I wanted to read different authors. I might try that one: some people say it's very goo...

:cheer: :fire: Both fantastic books! I'm re-reading this one and my next re-read is gonna be Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it was my favorite of his from wh...

If "know" is to have any meaning at all, then I'd say that experience is what I most intimately know about myself.

Currently reading: Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami Writings 1902-1910 by William James EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody Understand...

I should have added, if you want to get a general sense of what its like to be a person, a good novel is as good an answer as you could get. And even ...

Ah. I'm missing the main point, or the point altogether, full stop.

Either philosophers should stop "abstract" philosophizing and do something valuable in the world, by "doing things" or they are wasting time? But this...

1) Suppose there is something that "it is like to be" in general. Now the question can be framed: what's it like to be you? Can you say what this cons...

Lucy Allais' Manifest Reality is so, so, so good. :starstruck:

It's a bit complicated. If the person is tricking another person for sake of power, it's not good. On the other hand, some people tend to believe almo...

He sure is justified. But I'd like to note that he may be the first to explicitly postulate the noumenon, he was not the first one to express our inab...

And that's the big problem. Given how much time we may invest in a certain way of thinking that adopts certain belief sets, how are we going to discer...

:100:

Ah. I think I understand now what you have in mind. Honestly? We would like to think that we are rational, open-minded people and that if some evidenc...