Gregg R Thomas

_Robert_ wrote:
He’s turning the Iranian sponsored malfeasance at Harvard into another anti-woke shit-show instead of dealing with Iran like he promised. Hey, we all know anti-woke nonsense is way more important than having a democracy, a free market economy, an educated public or rule of law.

He doesn’t have to be such a dick about it.  I’m no…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Again, this is the kind of stuff that encourages hatred of philosophy as empty egg-headedness.

I think it’s ordinary straightforward philosophy.  It would interest some people.

_Robert_ wrote:
The “Free Palestine” camp should be allowed to express their misguided opinions like everyone else AND be punished for rule breaking like everyone else. That should be the focus of the effort, but it’s not. The focus is on crushing education and replacing learned people with easily controllable idiots wearing red dunce caps. Defun…

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TheEncogitationer wrote:
You could have teamed with Eli Whitney and made a Strawman Assembly Line with that line of thought.

Slaves, of course, are morally blameless for their condition

If you accept determinism, as I do, then everyone is blameless for their condition.

That said, slaves have rebelled and freed themselves. There are many examples…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Perhaps atheism asserts nothing but an atheist can assert that God doesn’t exist and here I am doing it.

God does not exist because he/she/it is impossible like a round square, counting to infinity, or unringing a bell. If that is true, then God’s nonexistence is true to a mathematical-level certainty.

Consider an…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Mirror neurons and other neural junk whose name(s) escapes me and neural pathways are activated when something observed causes alarm or joy/ecstasy. If one is high in empathy watch a movie and start crying or repulsing the automatic response to some tear jerker shit. Zeus ex machina or some shit.

That would be emotional…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
If you want to numb somebody’s sense of empathy, as well as any love of philosophical thought, just have them read that essay, as well as the others in Nagel’s What Does It All Mean?

It may or may not be a godawful book, but I think it’s an interesting question to ask what it’s like for some totally different organism to…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
Empathy is informed sympathy

I think that’s a good description, if you mean informed emotional resonance.  Empathy has three components: cognitive perspective taking, emotional resonance, and empathic concern or compassion.

A psychopath can have empathy in the sense of cognitive perspective taking; but they can’t do emotional…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
If empathy is what it takes for us to do the right things, that’s great. However, the dichotomous situation of living standards always throws me for a loop.

In a recent Facebook post answering a person who likes to remind leftists like me that the Democrats were very keen on the KKK and it was a Republican who freed the slaves, I…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
@unseen you made the exact point that I also thought. Empathy is the feeling when you can relate to an injury or event because you have been through similar events and you  feel knowledgable sympathy. You do not feel anyone else’s experience.

Indeed, if I stub my toe and keep quiet about it, who is going to say “I feel your pa…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Try explaining what water is to a fish.

I think the limiting factor there is probably the fish’s level of intellection.

You can certainly explain to a human of reasonable intelligence who’s awake what air is.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
In other words, Nielsen would agree with Wittgenstein’s skepticism about the internal comparison but lean even harder toward dismissing the worry as philosophically idle — what matters is shared public criteria for use, not metaphysical guarantees of inner sameness.

I think that is essentially the conclusion Wit…[Read more]

Empathy is informed sympathy

Someone has told me they are an Empath. What is an Empath? Is there a Sympath as well?

Try explaining what water is to a fish.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Yes, Wittgenstein argued that there’s no way to verify if two people feel the same thing internally. His “private language argument” basically says that sensations are private, but the language we use about them is public and is only meaningful because it connects to public criteria like behavior and expre…

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In Wittgenstein’s famous discussion of pain and private language he points out that there is no way to know what someone else senses. If you and I coincidentally stub our toes at the same time and react simultaneously in a similar fashion, is this sufficient to declare that we both feel the same thing? No, and there’s no way to verify the not…[Read more]

This new London Tube map is excellent!  Article.

But if I see you stub your toe, and I am at all sympathetic with you, then I will feel your pain by empathy. We’ve evolved that as part of the human suite of cooperative abilities.

What is it like to be a Bat?

@Unseen you made the exact point that I also thought. Empathy is the feeling when you can relate to an injury or event because you have been through similar events and you  feel knowledgable sympathy. You do not feel anyone else’s experience.

You hear people all the time saying their empathy forces them to feel everything (usually bad things) fr…[Read more]

I read this article this morning. In my head, I can’t trace the route from cell consciousness as described, to the almost non-sequitur of changing reality.

Basically they’re proposing that our cells have a consciousness and actually make decisions – and then somehow that affects reality and we’re reshaping our future.

Opinions would be super…[Read more]