Recent content by zimbo

Please read my post again - I said I didn't agree with morality being supernatural in my reply to 1) of the original post. What I agree with is the essentially personal nature of morality - in how only beings with awareness of self and others as conscious agents capable of 'choice' or the...

Nice post. Regarding 1) I agree that morality itself is not defined completely by nature. This does not mean that we can judge many natural occurences in a moral way - a volcano eruption is neither morally right or wrong. But I don't think that morality is supernatural because humans are...

Following wuli and others, I would think that statement 4 is exaggerated - the total amount of information in the universe is large but not necessary infinite. Leibniz had something quite similar in mind in his theory of monads in relation to his deterministic worldview: the central idea is...

back on the topic of beauty . . . I found this passage in a biography of Mozart (of all places!) - it's about the relationship between beauty and death. This is a good example of 'psychobabble' - mixing psychology and artistic commentary, using big words and convoluted sentences along the...

Damn, AG beat me to it :wink: I second that view . . . (having done the same course and got the same book) It has all the classic papers - from Descartes, Locke, Hume, to Ryle, Place, Armstrong, Kripke . . . to Nagel, Searle, Fodor, Dennett, Chalmers . . . May I also add that it's not...

As Dawkins tirelessly reminds the readers in his books many times, each of us are descended from a very long line of ancestors - each of whom had been successful in passing on his/her/its genes when many of their contemporaries had not. So, if behaviours are influenced (if only partially) by...

So let's see: either we have periodic emptying of the bowels of solid, or nearly constant excretion of large volumes of gases . . . sure it's less inconvenient to go the farting route, but just imagine the smell! Unlike solid waste, you can't exactly flush gases down a drainpipe. Unless...

Behaviours that promote the spread and long-term suvrival of the individual's genes - whether it be an individual's own genes or identical genes on other individuals.

Diarrhoea = excess of fluid in the bowel commonly caused by malabsorbtion of fluid from the stool or excess secretion of fluid from the epithelium Just imagine the effect of adding 2 L or so of fluid into the GI tract a day :wink: Of course it may be possible to coax the intestinal...

I think it's a continuum - something is more alive than others. While other things are definitely NOT alive. Animals, plants etc. are definitely alive, and more alive than a virus, which in turn is more alive than a growing crystal, which in turn is more alive than a dead horse (not talking...

Perhaps, but anything that is man-made is ALSO natural. The opposite of natural is not artificial, but supernatural. It seems to be nothing more than human arrogance to regard a house as 'artificial' and a beehive as 'natural'. Everything is natural (unless you believe in a supernatural...

Perfection is a value judgement - it is related to the concept of 'good'. Perfection only makes sense if there exists an endpoint as to how good something can be. Of course we don't know how good the world or ourselves can become. A perfect world is one which 'couldn't have been better' -...

Let's not confuse between 'law' in the legal sense (eg government laws) and 'law' in the scientific sense. The first is mainly prescriptive ('you must do so and so or else . . .') while the second is descriptive. It is impossible to go against 'natural law' because since we are natural...

First point: a country is an abstract entity comprising of people interacting with each other in a certain way. There are several aspects of 'patriotism' raised by earlier posts: 1)pride in one's country 2) loyalty to one's country 3) feeling that one's country is superior to that of...

I surely have - very colourful music (and overused in movies IMO). I prefer other sections from the same piece - try 'In trutina' and 'Fortuna plango vulnera' (sp?) I agree with the need for loops. So let's see what you conclude from that . . . I don't agree with what you say about...