It was meant in the broadest sense possible so as to include any interpretation. Human life compared to what? To anything else in nature, including ot...
Then that's a problem. How can we be more or less confident that we know what a famous philosopher is saying? Is the point to be able to reproduce, wo...
Yeah, this then goes into Russellian self-paradoxical situations of the set of all sets containing itself and so on. We can only wildly guess, but I s...
Yeah you can say colours are illusions, that what matters or exists independently of us, are the wavelengths. But that's precisely not the quality peo...
It may not be everything. There may be other universes. As to what our universe - which admittedly may be the only one - expands into, saying "nothing...
Depends on several things, two of which stand out to me: 1) What do you mean by "physicalism"? Do you mean it analogous to something like what Dennett...
That's sensible on the whole. And it is a curious tendency that many people tend to find some of these figures interesting at a certain age bracket. O...
We haven't been able to understand consciousness in over 2000 years. Some are now hopeful neuroscience will tell us what it is and how it works, I thi...
Given how infrequently one remembers them, I've managed to retain some memories of them by will, though I've heard that writing them down helps. In so...
That's a lot of questions, much of them the classical ones. I think we enter into even more difficulties, instead of less problems, if we start doing ...
No, I don't think life has a meaning or purpose, outside of what we give it. More and more I'm drawn to the idea of life - experience - this thing her...
It depends on the person, the idea under discussion and how the author is received. It can and often does help to read the classics, but I don't think...
I'm very liberal here. I don't even think you need to read more than one philosopher to "do philosophy" well. I'd go so far as to argue that those who...
I think so too. I still have trouble believing that he (and the Churchlands', etc) actually think that consciousness is an illusion. It's a bit like i...
Well, that would be an interesting option. How far would the qualia waves go? It's one thing to say that it is redlike would it also be roselike? Depe...
Ha. Maybe, I don't have any moral problems with that. :p The issue, as I see it, is what does it even mean to say that an experience "maps" on to cell...
Maybe an optimal science of brain might be able to say what areas of the brain are responsible for consciousness. But we've mapped all 300 or so neuro...
I think the answer to this depends on what type of topic you have in mind. If you're talking about the starting point of the universe, then that's one...
That makes more sense than thinking of "mental" and "physical" as opposites of some fundamental kind. I mean, the way it looks to me is that the menta...
"Real" is an honorific term. If I say this is the "real truth" or the "read deal", I shouldn't be understood as saying that there are two kinds of tru...
You escape that dualism by being aware that in saying "mental reality precedes physical reality", you aren't stipulating that the mental and the physi...
What other reality is there? You can say mental reality, but mental reality is part of physical reality. Physical is a better word actually, because t...
If by "awareness" you have in mind the kind of thing people who use this word take it to mean, then no DNA has no awareness. If you invent a technical...
Exactly. There's just no ideas one can engage with that may be of some interest. I'm forgetting who it was that said this, but the argument was along ...
Say what you will about people like Hayek or Schumpeter or anyone from the Austrian school. One could very much disagree with what they were saying an...
Damn. I got a pang in my head as I read your answer. Psychobabble, hierarchy chaos and the dragons. And lobsters too. Makes even Ron Paul look far mor...
Ah. Sorry mixed the context. :p Still, I'd like to know just who in the heck do people have in mind when they speak of "right wing intellectuals", I'm...
I presume you have in mind people like von Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Ropke and the like, right? Otherwise who is left? Ayn Rand? Ben Shapiro? These pe...
Already points 2 and 3 are very problematic. I doubt the vast majority of research is done to "edit our environment", it's mostly done out of curiosit...
As already mentioned by others here, science was not distinguished from philosophy until the mid 19th century. Prior to that it was all more or less "...
I wasn't attempting to be hostile towards anybody, I was clarifying a comment made by me that was taken as giving excuses for fascism. I was pointing ...
Fringe people who are assigned as being to the "left", mostly on the internet, focusing far more on whether a person should be referred to as a LatinX...
But aren't you a metaphysician? I mean, what's not to get about the supreme principle of negative theoretical connotations in which sings don't stand ...
Very good point. It's not as if there's an equivalent between say BLM and White Supremacists. Yeah, they are two wings on different spectrums, but it'...
I think its standard usage. As in, if your hypothetical friend, Jones, memorized something, you wouldn't say Jones' brain memorized this information, ...
That's a pretty sweeping statement on many topics. It would help your argument to provide more empirical examples, specifically publicly observable on...
That sounds about right. I'd only modify what you said by replacing "the brain storing information" with "people storing information". I don't think w...
It's possible that, if you are generous enough with interpretations of what others have said, one could conclude, that there are no "truly new ideas",...
This is an extremely difficult problem. I've read a but about this topic, and I think I've found a novel that discusses, or problematizes this issue b...
Thanks for the source. Within that context, I doubt he meant it literally as if it time were an actual illusion. I may be wrong, but using that as an ...
I believe, and I may be miss remembering, that when Einstein wrote that, he wrote that letter to the wife of a friend who had died, so he was trying t...
Those things that you make have value, make it worth living. We've all been in that "state" we call, "before we existed", we can assume, somewhat safe...
I'm not sure I follow. This argument you put forth seems or appears to assume that we are aware of reality directly. That is, that mountain over there...
That's quite hard to work out. You say, for example that "bacteria might have a modicum of perception and feeling in some sense without self-awareness...
We have problems determining if certain animals are conscious, and in the case of animals, we actually have much more data to look into, behavior, env...
I mean yes, you can argue what the OP says. But why signal out consciousness only? I mean, we would also have pancarbonism, panwaterism or even paniro...
Do psychologists not use "physicalism", when they treat patients? Like do they deny that whatever the patient is suffering is not a real phenomenon ju...
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