Philosophy Now Forum

The English language is flexible. Due to its diverse origins, it easily changes with the times. The King's English is nothing more than a slightly out of date, but carefully pronounced version of the everyday speech of residents of London, Chicago and Brisbane. Accordingly, society's current hullaba...

"Fact check: Is that an accurate number? Figuring 3 generations every 100 years, that’s 30 generations every 1000 years, or 150 generations for 5000 years, about as long as man has been out of the caves. Even considering possible lost civilizations of 15,000 years ago would amount to only 450 ...

What constitutes a beautiful, or near perfect, human face? A standard of beauty for the rest of our bodies seems much clearer. All humans alive today are very closely related, a single species descended from a common ancestor a mere 180,000 years ago. Accordingly, very fit people, such as well-round...

Most higher order animals exhibit substantial differences in size, shape and features of the bodies of male and female members. What are the philosophical implications of these differences for Homo sapiens? None. Why do you think there should be? The differences are averages , anyway. Many women ar...

In that case you might be interested in supervenience. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience#Mental_ properties Thanks, Ginkgo. I had not heard that term before. It seems to fit my concept that each successive "layer" of existence or ontological category is supervened on the previou...

By 'semantic content' of thoughts, I can only assume you mean 'meanings.' By 'intentional', I assume you mean referring to to something outside of us. So, you claim that science cannot decipher what first person reports mean, or refer to. I do not see why science cannot provide an evidence-based ex...

Just a suggestion Chas, but you could simplify it by classifying everything under two broad headings. Firstly, all the dualists theories of philosophy of mind such. This would include such things as mind body dualism, occasionalism property dualism,etc. Secondly one could use monism as a means of c...

I prefer to define consciousness rather broadly. Only live animals with brains can be conscious. Brainy animals are sometimes awake and other times asleep. Only when they are awake do they possess and exhibit consciousness. Any attempt to divide the term further seems misguided to my eye. The bigger...

Paul Chuchland's 1981 article "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes" is an attack on commonly-held beliefs about human psychology and an argument for the eventual reduction of all mental activity to explanation by neuroscience. In the course of dissecting "folk psyc...

Wanderinglands: Following in the footsteps of the Marxists, you appear to be misusing the term consciousness . Its true the human race can be neatly divided into people who demonstrate the desire to think deeply about themselves and the world they inhabit, while the remainder seek to live as simply ...

Computers in general, and especially early, primitive attempts at "thinking" machines (e.g., IBM's Deep Blue), are an artful representation of our minds, or more precisely our current conception of how our brains and minds function. Humans created computers in their own image, so to speak....

Andy Kay said: What is the principle difference between the way that crystal reproduce and the way that living things reproduce that would help me to understand the essential characteristics of living things? My depth of understanding of how crystals grow, much less reproduce, is so shallow I can’t ...

How do these differ? I am curious, because analytic types look to existence, more or less developing on the account found in Frege, and treating existence as a second-order predicate. But those of other persuasions look to being, apparently taking it to be something quite different, and even occasi...

Because only living things grow, reproduce and evolve into sentient beings. Crystals grow and reproduce -- would you consider them to be 'living'? When you make the claim that living things differ from non-living things in that they "evolve into sentient beings" are you saying that non-li...

But it's still not clear why you think that living entities should be considered anything more than highly complex configurations of non-living entities. Because only living things grow, reproduce and evolve into sentient beings. In that respect, living organisms behave in ways that transcend the u...