4
votes
Accepted
How can nature without self-awareness and intelligence create living beings with self-awareness and intelligence?
Living organisms are examples of dissipative systems, like a wind-Zephyr, or the Red Spot storm on Jupiter. This general category, involves emergent structures that are sustained by their accelerating ...
4
votes
Accepted
I know Survival of the fittest is realistic. But is it morally ethical?
There are a few points to discuss here...
First, 'survival of the fittest' (in Darwin's model) is concerned with the fitness of a group or species, not so much the fitness of individuals. Any specific ...
3
votes
Accepted
Does natural science assume indirect realism?
Indirect realism is the view that our contact with reality is mediated ("filtered") through our sense organs and/or cognitive faculties. We do not experience reality "as it is, out there". This isn't ...
3
votes
What are "generation and corruption" in Aristotle's philosophy?
Here is how St. Thomas Aquinas, in his De principiis naturæ §§6-7, explains generation and corruption:
Because generation is a motion to form, there is a twofold generation corresponding to this ...
2
votes
What is implications of well ordering theorem regarding order in nature?
Axiom of choice has nothing to do with free will and the well-ordering theorem has almost nothing to do with order in nature. They just have similar names.
The axiom of choice says that the Cartesian ...
2
votes
Accepted
How does science treat supernatural claims?
Science is about measurement; supernatural claims are those which depend (in one way or another) upon something which is intrinsically unmeasurable.
Thus the claim:
"Something had a round trip ...
2
votes
Where is it that I go when I dream? Part 2
Going with the example of hypnagogic/ hypnic jerks, these were the brain's way of giving us one last chance to adjust our position, reducing the risk of falling out of the tree branches we were ...
1
vote
The concept of time - arrow, pattern or both?
Time is neither an arrow nor a pattern. According to our current best mainstream theories of physics, time is a dimension in a four-dimensional spacetime. I cannot begin to imagine how you might ...
1
vote
How can nature without self-awareness and intelligence create living beings with self-awareness and intelligence?
How does awareness arise from non-awareness? From the perspective a natural epistemology (SEP) in philosophy, it emerges (SEP). There are many phenomena in the universe that emerge, if you believe in ...
1
vote
"All there is are cells" as a philosophical school of thought
Atoms have substructure though, like quarks. Atoms as we consider them were only confirmed in the early 1900, with Ernst Mach still insisting matter was fundamentally continuous in 1903 (a lesser ...
1
vote
Is there space even though there is only color, not objects? (re-question)
In the physical world, the absence of light is just the absence of it, not a property called blackness or darkness.
Why is this different from experience?
Putting attention on sight and “seeing” black,...
1
vote
Accepted
Is there space even though there is only color, not objects? (re-question)
I assume you are asking this question from the point of view of a strict empiricist, and that by "concept of space" you really mean to refer to a concept and not the real space of physical ...
1
vote
How does science treat supernatural claims?
Supernatural is defined as that which is "beyond natural".
Oxford defines it as "Manifestation or event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature&...
1
vote
How does science treat supernatural claims?
Supernatural claims have evidence against them from the outset of the claim these days. We have seen the history of many similar claims never having been proven. Ever since Thales and the birth of ...
1
vote
How does science treat supernatural claims?
‘Good’ science treats all claims equally: if the claim can be proven to be correct then our understanding of science is enlarged or refined to accommodate it. The vast majority of observations fit in ...
1
vote
Accepted
Was Luhmann influenced by Schelling?
It is very hard to prove a negative, but I am pretty confident that there is no direct influence after checking a lot of English and German sources.
They do have some similarities, probably because ...
1
vote
What is the historical relationship between physics and philosophy?
The OP asks whether the disciplines we call philosophy and physics (or science) arose from some more primitive philosophy that split in two. Such a position would make sense if the approach to the ...
1
vote
What are "generation and corruption" in Aristotle's philosophy?
As I understand it, in Aristotle's context:
"generation" means "creation" (also in the sense of "composition"/"association")
"corruption" means "destruction" (also "decomposition"/"dissociation")
...
1
vote
Accepted
Is your phone a natural product?
The answer depends on your definitions. You provide one set of definitions, but they aren't the only ones.
Alan Watts often pointed out that there are two ways to treat yourself or other humans. ...
1
vote
Is your phone a natural product?
Your phone is not a natural object in the way a tree or a storm or the planet Mars is. We can claim that the natural is a social construction in the sense that all we have access to is a world ...
1
vote
Is your phone a natural product?
The laws of thought
A thing exists
It is either true or not
There is no middle place between true or false
Natural - not influenced by man, man-made - created or changed by mans influence.
The word ...
1
vote
Is your phone a natural product?
I think that the presence in our language of the word "natural" implies that there is something other than what is natural.
In the same way, the words "artificial", "impossible", "unnatural", "fake", ...
1
vote
Accepted
Would the existence of an eternal, uncaused object conflict with the naturalistic framework?
As Mauro quotes, naturalism is the heuristics that everything in
this world is the result of natural "causes" - of course, naturalism accepts that events on the quantum level may have no cause at all. ...
1
vote
What are "generation and corruption" in Aristotle's philosophy?
I remember reading an explanation of Aristotle's eudaimonia, describing it as 'human flourishing' and locating it in his background as a student of plants and biology. If we look at his views on mind ...
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