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To my understanding, organisms evolve in order to adapt to their environment and its pressures. If that is the case, how come we are conscious? It seems like consciousness is an unnecessary add-on. Why aren't we p-zombies? P-zombies can do the same thing any other organism can, right? Or is it possible that consciousness is an illusion?
Eddy Nahmias
March 25, 2010
(changed March 25, 2010)
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Suppose there are two mutations that would allow a species of plant to gather more sunlight for energy, one that would make it grow taller than competing plants and another than would make it grow wider. The species happens to evolve to grow taller. It is true that it might have achieved the a... Read more
This sounds like the kind of a question a first-year philosophy student would ask, but here goes... Why should anyone be interested in philosophy in the first place (i.e., why should I care about Cartesian knowledge, or Locke's primary and secondary qualities, or bother with questions about the meaning of life if I'm already happy)? It would be nice to get a rational response to some of these very introductory questions...
Jean Kazez
March 25, 2010
(changed March 25, 2010)
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I certainly don't agree with Socrates' famous assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living. So the reason why you should be interested in philosophy is not because otherwise your life will not be worth living! I would say that you should (morally should) be interested in ethical questi... Read more
Are there logical relations between colors? For instance, is it logically true that red and blue make purple?
Miriam Solomon
March 25, 2010
(changed March 25, 2010)
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Perceived color is a matter of retinal and neurological processing. People with full color vision see a variety of spectral inputs (from single frequency to mixed frequencies) as purple. Perhaps you are asking, could people who perceive red and blue normally see a mixture of red and blue as... Read more
Is it ok to kill ants for fun.
Oliver Leaman
June 4, 2010
(changed June 4, 2010)
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I think there is a difference between saying that all that matters is pleasure and pain, and thinking that pleasure and pain is a good place to start when looking at such issues. If it is an open question whether ants feel pain, then we should not kill them, if that might hurt them, it seems to me.... Read more
Are symmetry principles laws of nature, or meta-laws of nature? The intuition is that laws of nature are contingent. That is, it could be different in different logically possible worlds. Does this hold true for symmetry principles? Could there be some symmetric principles that had to hold in all possible worlds?
Marc Lange
March 25, 2010
(changed March 25, 2010)
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My view (which I defended in my recent book, "Laws and Lawmakers" from Oxford University Press) is that symmetry principles in physics are widely regarded as meta-laws. For instance, the principle that all first-order laws must be invariant under arbitrary displacement in time or space explains wh... Read more
This sounds like the kind of a question a first-year philosophy student would ask, but here goes... Why should anyone be interested in philosophy in the first place (i.e., why should I care about Cartesian knowledge, or Locke's primary and secondary qualities, or bother with questions about the meaning of life if I'm already happy)? It would be nice to get a rational response to some of these very introductory questions...
Jean Kazez
March 25, 2010
(changed March 25, 2010)
Permalink
I certainly don't agree with Socrates' famous assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living. So the reason why you should be interested in philosophy is not because otherwise your life will not be worth living! I would say that you should (morally should) be interested in ethical questi... Read more
Is it possible to realize something which is not true? Or do all realizations point to a truth? For instance, if I realize that "life is short" does it really imply that life is really short? Or is that realization just a form of value-judgment and does not have anything to do with truth? Thanks for this very helpful site. Keep up the good work and the spread of wisdom.
Mitch Green
March 22, 2010
(changed March 22, 2010)
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Thank you for your question. I'd say it is not possible to realize something that is not true, and this is due simply to the meaning of the word 'realize'. This word is what semanticists fall "factive", meaning that the sentence following it must be true for the entire sentence in which it occu... Read more
If we made contact with an alien species which was clearly intelligent/sentient, but at a very different level to us, for example, if in the future humans found a planet inhabited by a species which was approximately as intelligent as our distant ancestors (and ancestors which were less intelligent than us for genetic, not simply environmental reasons), should we consider one alien to be as important as one person? Whatever conclusion I come to seems to throw up problems: if we say yes, then should we consider the life of a chimpanzee to be as important as that of a human? If we say no, then presumably we would have to concede that if we met aliens more intelligent than us then we would be less important than them. Or perhaps there's a base level of intelligence above which all sentient beings are equal, but how would we determine that base level? On the other hand, if we move away from intelligence and look for something else like signs of a capacity for love or mourning to evaluate a species moral worth, this implies we might have to start to consider animals like dogs or elephants, which seem to show some of these, morally equal to humans. I know the question of whose life is 'more important' is probably an odd one, and even sounds pretty unpleasant, but we could conceive of a situation where it came up. For example, imagine a twist of the trolley question where you have to decide whether or not to change the direction of a runaway tram and either let two people die, or actively kill one person. Well, what if the question was let a human die or kill a less intelligent (but sentient) alien? (Presumably if it was a chimpanzee or a dog most people would kill the animal rather than let the person die.) And of course, there are many other questions it would lead to such as what if we wanted to colonize the planet, and in a way which avoided slaughtering the aliens or badly damaging the environment of the planet, but they clearly didn't want us to? Should we worry about their wishes if we feel they are being irrational? Sorry if I've been a bit long winded, and I know this is all very hypothetical and a bit scifi, but I think it's an interesting question and I hope I'm not the only one!
Andrew N. Carpenter
March 22, 2010
(changed March 22, 2010)
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I think it is important to distinguish intelligence from sentience. As you suggest, it is possible that there exist beings that are much more intelligent than humans are just as, for example, humans are much more intelligent than, say, dolphins. On the other hand, I don't think it makes s... Read more
Are there any books you could recommend about the concept of reality? The philosophical origins of reality that is. Thank you!!
Donald Baxter
March 18, 2010
(changed March 18, 2010)
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You might try the first few chapters of Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy and see if that is relevant to what you have in mind.
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Since I am doing a study about colors and how they relate to the natural world in ways that we perceive them, there is an obstacle for this research. What is the opposite color of Brown, a neutral color representing the balance of primary/secondary/tertiary (etc.) colors?
Jonathan Westphal
March 18, 2010
(changed March 18, 2010)
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"Opposite" is not in this connection a very well-defined word. "Complementary" is more precise, but then we should inquire: physical additive complementary, i.e. such as to cancel the test colour in light superposition and produce neutral or white; physical subtractive complementary, i.e. s... Read more