GENIUS FORUMS

MindExpansion, What is reality?...Reality is a state of mind, that is brought on by consciousness.... Reality is the bullet that kills you regardless of what you think its ontological status to be. Oddly, I've never known an anti-realist to actually test this hypothesis. I guess even brains in vats ...

Sapius, Sure, we can call any temporal event a process, and we can even sum up such things with sweeping generalizations if we wish. Although, what we should be asking ourselves is exactly what question we're trying to answer by doing such things. As far as your metaphysic is concerned, I think you...

Faust13, I'm not completely dismissing Hume, but his compatibalism is totally incoherent. If I didn't choose to forget, or to drop something, I cannot be blamed for it. Although if you put a few shells into the 7-11 guy, you pretty much can be. By the common social conventions of just about every h...

As an unashamed Humeian I'll go ahead and take a stab at defending him. First off, he was a skeptic (as all good philosophers tend to be), but not a complete skeptic. If we're stuck in Cartesian thinking, where the world can supposedly be understood in terms of logic, then I can see where his views ...

Unidian, Determinism cannot be established empirically, as Hume showed. It is essentially a metaphysical issue. It is a conceptual construct of logic. Hume simply demonstrated that inference was involved in beliefs about causality. That doesn't make it an entirely metaphysical issue. For instance: ...

Matt, That sounds funny coming from someone who can't even hold a coherent conversation about it. I don't happen to think that everything that folks claim to be certain of is something that can be known with certainty. In many circumstances I don't even think that such claims are true. I once sough...

Unidian, But determinism and free will are still just concepts - two sides of a conceptual coin. Are you suggesting that the term "determinism" isn't used to reference a state of affairs believed to exist in the world? If so, then I'm curious as to how you'd go about defending it. If it's...

Sapius, OK, other than the connectivity as described; what exactly is “conscious-ness”? I like the way Nagel put it in describing consciousness as being characterized by its phenomenal contents and a "what it is like" feeling. There's something it is like to see red. Hey! Why would I ...

Matt, No, it's the other way around. The world of sensible facts is a subset of the world of concepts. You can see this by looking at the physical brain and the physical senses and seeing that no object whatsoever goes directly into the brain, but only data goes through the senses and into the brai...

Sapius, Now without this system of “recognition through differentiation” (which is expressed as “A=A”), that lies at the core of our consciousness itself, I have a rather fundamental problem with this notion. To understand my reasoning, you'll need to first understand that I consider the co...

Kevin, This means that his spirituality is in fact only an empirical science, and not spirituality at all. His spirituality, I imagine, boils down a bunch of shoddy inferences. That makes it the product of (bad) logic. We really can't say that such a hypothesis simply awaits testing, as it can't be...

Sapius, I am saying “a rose”. Now what? Where do we go from here? We can only really derive meaning from context, so to just say "a rose" leaves a lot open to interpretation. We really can't say much about the term "a rose" due to the fact the statement is so information voi...

Sapius, If at all, I would rather say that every state of affair is exactly what it is, rather than it is merely a state of affairs. "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." -Gertrude Stein "Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying 'is a … is a ...

Sapius, (It was this urge to express experiences in words that has actually developed the kind of vocal cords that we have today. Mental notions arrived far before we could “conceptualize” abstract concepts, and with that began a search for truth.) I don't really think that language emerged out...

Or, are you actually trying to suggest that someone can never see things that others don't? No. I wasn't trying to suggest that. Folks with synesthesia, autism, perfect pitch, etc; obviously experience the world differently from other folks. So if someone had synesthesia and they were to say "...

Leyla, I just have one question about this: why do you think you would report certainly seeing an actual (no less) butterfly when what you’re actually looking at is a picture of a butterfly? Bad education resulting in erroneous propositions? I intentionally chose a rather absurd example to illust...

Leyla, But the fact and truth of the matter is that not only do you have to identify (A=A) the butterfly in order to say anything about it, but you have to identify any thing that you want to say about it. Also, for any object (such as butterfly) to be that object, it necessarily must be that objec...

David, I'm about to backtrack a bit. I was mixing up some of my own views with those of Wittgenstein, and realized that I've made a couple of important mistakes in my explanation of it. First off, it would appear that you were right in suggesting that the Tractatus was senseless: "6.54 My prop...

DHodges, Ignoring tautologies for the moment, this seems to be a correspondence theory of truth. That is, there are statements, and objective facts, and the truth of a statement is measured by how well it corresponds to those facts. Edit: deleted original text I had originally posted that Wittgenst...

I'd like to add here that Wittgenstein saw the terms "true" or "false" as only applying to sentences or statements. States of affairs cannot be true or false as they are what is in reality, and facts cannot be true or false as they are what is in the world. They are what simply i...

Leyla, You've misunderstood. You had pretty much right until... (Thus, a state of affairs is neither true nor false but is always sensible only by virtue of its somehow being the case.) A state of affairs isn't sensible because it is the case. Rather, we know that a state of affairs is the case whe...

David, "A state of affairs that is the case is a fact. Thus, if a proposition reports a state of affairs to be the case, it is stating a fact." That's still not quite right. You're getting close though. Using the terminology of Wittgenstein, not all propositions are true or false. A propo...

David, I'd also like to point out that Wittgenstein wasn't a pragmatist, and wasn't suggesting that tautologies are useless and thus invalid. Rather he was suggesting that they are incapable of reporting on that which isn't strictly definitional. They cannot speak of that which is in the world. The...

David, "There is no sense in a tautology, therefore a tautology is senseless." By his own reckoning, this is senseless. No. A tautology is senseless in that there is no sense in which it is not the case. That which is senseless is not limited to that which is always the case, as contradic...

A summary of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A tautological proposition can be defined as the opposite of a contradictory proposition. Whereas there is no sense in which a contradiction is the case, there is also no sense in which a tautology isn't. Thus, we will call such propositions senseles...