sthippo.bsky.social
Husband, father, engineer, student of philosophy
113 posts
586 followers
1,108 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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Someone should ask her how she knows XX and XY chromosomes determine sex. Does she get to use science when it’s convenient and reject it when it’s not?
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Fourth kind: people who pick up only the litter they personally drop, even if it’s surrounded by other litter
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Do atoms exist? Boltzmann-Mach debate
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The o-in-itself causes the sense data and the sense data causes the o
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Not quite. Seeing o starts with sensing light. There is no o until your visual system processes that sense data and decides it’s an o
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The way I see it a human being has both calculable AND incalculable worth
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I like how friendly Hawaii is, the cities there always say hello
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My all time favorite
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Could it be the shadow cast by a shadow
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💯 It’s a work of comic genius
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Every billionaire up for nomination should be asked if they understand what life is like for most Americans, and if they say yes, they should be asked how they achieve such understanding. Of course it’s all but impossible.
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I think this is on the right track but I think a better definition would be creation of knowledge rather than processing it, with knowledge defined broadly as usable and effective information. So stimulus-response is not enough; the organism has to capture the information implied by the stimulus
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I am convinced Biden could have gotten this deal a long time ago. He simply refused to use the leverage he had.
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And they have a lot more smell.
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They are smaller but more importantly they are dog-shaped.
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I for one would not consider that a change for the better
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Trump can’t even play 1D checkers
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You seriously believe Trump knows how to play chess?
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Except for the one problem the billionaires can’t solve: once the apocalypse arrives, why would their security guards keep taking orders?
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Fine president, except for the genocide.
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They could both be true. Life is intrinsically valuable, and simply to live is a worthwhile purpose. But that should just be the starting point. We have it in our power to enable and protect and enhance lives beyond our own, and it falls upon each one of us to figure out how to do that.
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Related philosophical topics:
- the mind-body problem
- emergence
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In my view this falls short. It may account for physical events themselves but the information that moves around as a result of these events is lost.
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A reductionist would say it all boils down to molecules interacting and when we talk about, e.g., seeing a forecast for rain and taking an umbrella, we’re using convenient shorthand for the interactions of huge numbers of molecules.
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Studying correlates is how science works. You have to understand a phenomenon to define it. There has been enough research on consciousness that a number of definitions have been proposed. Perhaps none of them are right. But how can you know without actually considering them?
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Until the success of the atomic theory of matter in the 19th century, “atom” was a philosophical- metaphysical term. Even then, some philosophers continued to assert that statements about atoms could not be objectively true because they are unobservable
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Clearly you are mistaken. There are many scientists studying consciousness, forming hypotheses, carrying out experiments, and developing theories. This proves that #consciousness is indeed a natural science term (though admittedly very challenging to define)
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Can you explain what you mean by mental? What differentiates it from physical?
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Me neither. I ask because perception is usually defined as a mental state. You just have your own definition of perception as a reaction of any kind, not necessarily mental.
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You have a mental impression of the calculator because you have a mind. The calculator has no mental impression of you because it has no mind. It is just in its physical state. It doesn’t know or care how it got there
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Is there a psychological aspect to the rock’s perception, or is it purely physical?
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A radar builds an image of a target using radio waves, which does seem related to perception. But a rock? I don’t see how a rock perceives anything, unless you are defining “perceive” to mean “affected in some way or another by” which is not a very useful definition
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Brilliant. The information is gone from the display, but there is still a mental echo of the calculation. The mental world has its own mental batteries which keep the mental impression going
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I feel like I was there.
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Someone's been playing with the Subtle Knife again
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I would really enjoy a defense of 3
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I myself believe 4, but my question is for OP who said “wherever information arises, a mental impression is instantiated” which would seem to rule out 4
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Type 19 X 19 on a calculator but don’t look at the answer. Which is true:
1. No information arises, no mental impression
2. Information arises and a mental impression is instantiated
And if 2 is true, where is the mental impression?
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One could argue that mitochondria have been hijacking eukaryotes for 2.5 billion years
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Fascinating
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The best book reviews lay out the broader historical and conceptual context of the topic, situate the book in that context, and reference at least one other book that either challenges or supports the book’s thesis
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all the properties. When I perceive something I have a mental image of it. I’m pretty sure a plasmodium has no mental images
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The difficulty with terms like consciousness and perception is that, like everything else in the world, the boundaries are vague. Is a simple chemical feedback system the same as conscious perception? It serves the same function, and has many of the same properties. But that doesn’t mean it shares