This depends on the area of enquiry. In rational investigations, I'd say that people want to pursue truth or matters of fact, all the while keeping in...
Yes. You could say philosophy attempts to problematize "the given". In clearer terms phycologists tend to work with certain assumptions, philosophy qu...
I've read that article many times in the past, it was part of my thesis and yet I still have some problems with it, in that, I find that although I th...
I'm glad you liked it. I find that it causes me some considerable mental anguish :rofl: It's like what the heck am I even talking about? It's very har...
You keep making good comments here. :) You are correct, it is a hard problem. There are others too, mentioned by smart people: As Darwin said: "Why is...
The goal of science, or one of the goals, is to be able to describe what happens when no human being is around. It's far from trivial, being able to d...
No, I'm not convinced either that physics will tell us much about consciousness. But, I could be wrong so I like to follow different arguments, in so ...
I tend to agree very much with that view. I only would add that I think there are many hard problems: gravity, life, matter, etc. You don't have a per...
Perhaps. But it would make more sense to try and establish how other people have experience first. We take it for granted, but we can't find a way to ...
Sure, you can do that. It's not to imply that math and language don't have anything in common. We all have to use language to some extent to get aroun...
Sure. Even if AI may not explain human intelligence, who knows what might happen as we continue developing technology? In either case we still discove...
I can't go too deeply into technical matters, cause I'll get lost. So I'll try to keep it fairly basic, if that's OK with you. I can see the attractiv...
There's an excellent essay on this very topic by Galen Strawson, called Red and 'Red'. It's available online, but it's very expensive, so not worth it...
Mathematics being a language is metaphoric. It doesn't have the same properties of natural languages such as syntax, tenses, verbs, etc. as well as mo...
Does your model follow certain aspects of Penrose's and Hammeroff's theory? It's hard to say if quantum processes produce consciousness. It's plausibl...
Phrased like this, this question is terminological. We can say that a machine "knows" to recognize our voice the way a calculator "knows" what the ans...
Depends what field of philosophy you are talking about. If it's philosophy of mind, then yes, some aspects of the field are similar to ideas found in ...
I can't resist adding some more comments here, this really is an inexhaustible topic. People have different sensibilities, preferences, perspectives, ...
Well, there's a lot to your post. Lots of good information. It's very interesting. I'm simple minded, so forgive my misunderstanding, if there is any,...
Yes, it's a complex topic. I hope it's not connected with extreme political correctness of the postmodern variety. If it's simply feminism, then there...
There's good paper on the "red" argument, surprisingly, but that's a topic for another thread. What you are describing reminds me of Susan Haack's "In...
Hmmm. It's certainly possible. Then again, when Democritus was talking about atoms was he talking about the same atoms Bohr was talking about? It's no...
It depends on what you mean by "reality". Reality, so broadly construed, is the combination of your senses interacting with consciousness. If we had n...
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond. You quoted me, but I'm not Banno. I'm sure said person will have something to say. In the context of the spe...
I'm in a planet in the andromeda galaxy in space, or so the evidence indicates. Saying what "here" means exactly, is not so straightforward. Currently...
There are two definitions of philosophy that I know of, both of which imply strangeness. One, told to me by an important figure, is that philosophy ha...
I can't find it online, save for it being pay-walled. I have it as a PDF, thus I can only send it through email. It's called "Mysteries of Nature: How...
Very much so. The curious thing about this is that there seems to be no direct way to communicate mysticism, we have to elude, circumscribe, reveal, r...
Given the immanent catastrophe of climate change, I think many of these aspects of totalitarianism are going to become quite real. Pessimism of the in...
Well, I mean, I think there's good actual evidence for this view. I could send you a very good essay about if you are interested. But, in either case,...
That is exactly right. I used the example of other people to make the point somewhat easier to conceptualize than the whole world. I hope there is a w...
There's too much to say about that, that it's hard not to sound like a crazy person. Trying to be brief, I think we should keep in mind that there are...
I'll have to go to my "religion" and quote what I think it is: Strangers passing in the street By chance, two separate glances meet And I am you and w...
I mean, you are correct that people have been doing it for thousands of years. The thing is to do it well, it helps to illustrate the point by adding ...
Fortunately, it's very very short. The problematic thing is how to interpret it! I'll have to compress even that to give the bare essentials, which is...
I've always thought that Wittgenstein's mysticism in the Tractatus was extremely sensible and fascinating. The only disagreement I'd have with his pre...
Well, if you stick to pleasure without specifying what this entails, then the argument is obvious. But what fits under the term pleasure isn't trivial...
Correct. But this focuses on the pain side, there are other considerations. Unless you think pain is the only metric that matters in human life. It's ...
Well, If I was not already clear, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument. Not completely, but I think it's not unreasonable, so I'm not sure why you...
I've been reading a bit more on anti-natalism. If anything, it's helpful to highlight the issue of the consequences of having children in today's age,...
You are correct, in part. It's true that we don't need to understand it. But Descartes, Locke, Newton and the like expected understanding. They though...
That's a good question. It's not clear. I believe it depends on a topic for topic basis, and it depends on how far back you're willing to go. If you b...
We don't understand gravity. We can describe it with equations, but that doesn't mean we understand it. Newton, who discovered it, was baffled by this...
Well, this may be a roughly Neo-Kantian or Rationalistic-Idealist understanding, but I believe it to be accurate nevertheless. The idea would be that ...
A deeply personal decision, I suppose it affords great meaning to one's life and also gives the parent a new sense of purpose and very substantial res...
I'm not religious and I think "faith" often implies, in many, but not necessarily all cases, belief in the absence of evidence. Having said that, what...
Well, I have in mind people like Colin McGinn or Noam Chomsky, not some spiritualists or religious types. The basic idea is that there are many questi...
As you describe it, that's a very difficult question to answer in a straightforward manner, in the sense that this seems to me to be individual depend...
I think we'd need to distinguish between the principle of charity vs. suspending judgement. I think we should be charitable to most people, they may b...
Comments