34 ideas
| 7973 | There is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say [Baudrillard] |
| 7975 | The task of philosophy is to unmask the illusion of objective reality [Baudrillard] |
| 7986 | Drunken boat pilots are less likely to collide than clearly focused ones [Baudrillard] |
| 7982 | Instead of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis, they now cancel out, and the conflict is levelled [Baudrillard] |
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| 7974 | Without God we faced reality: what do we face without reality? [Baudrillard] |
| 7987 | Nothing is true, but everything is exact [Baudrillard] |
| 14193 | 'Substance theorists' take modal properties as primitive, without structure, just falling under a sortal [Paul,LA] |
| 14195 | If an object's sort determines its properties, we need to ask what determines its sort [Paul,LA] |
| 14196 | Substance essentialism says an object is multiple, as falling under various different sortals [Paul,LA] |
| 14198 | Absolutely unrestricted qualitative composition would allow things with incompatible properties [Paul,LA] |
| 14190 | Deep essentialist objects have intrinsic properties that fix their nature; the shallow version makes it contextual [Paul,LA] |
| 14191 | Deep essentialists say essences constrain how things could change; modal profiles fix natures [Paul,LA] |
| 14192 | Essentialism must deal with charges of arbitrariness, and failure to reduce de re modality [Paul,LA] |
| 14197 | An object's modal properties don't determine its possibilities [Paul,LA] |
| 14189 | 'Modal realists' believe in many concrete worlds, 'actualists' in just this world, 'ersatzists' in abstract other worlds [Paul,LA] |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| 7978 | There is no need to involve the idea of free will to make choices about one's life [Baudrillard] |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| 7980 | In modern times, being useless is the essential aesthetic ingredient for an object [Baudrillard] |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| 7983 | Good versus evil has been banefully reduced to happiness versus misfortune [Baudrillard] |
| 7981 | Whole populations are terrorist threats to authorities, who unite against them [Baudrillard] |
| 7976 | People like democracy because it means they can avoid power [Baudrillard] |
| 7977 | Only in the last 200 years have people demanded the democratic privilege of being individuals [Baudrillard] |
| 7979 | The arrival of the news media brought history to an end [Baudrillard] |
| 7984 | Suicide is ascribed to depression, with the originality of the act of will ignored [Baudrillard] |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |
| 7985 | Pascal says secular life is acceptable, but more fun with the hypothesis of God [Baudrillard] |