Simon Paynton

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]

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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Unseen wrote:
Not by empathy. You may empathize but you experience no actual pain.

OK, I will experience distress and emotional pain, as if I had really stubbed my toe.

_Robert_ wrote:
Come on now. The billionaires need that money. You think those inflatable lips, tits and tender boats for their mega-yachts are cheap?

You’re right, they are that bad.  There’s a narrative in the UK that Trump’s tariff earnings are going to promote tax breaks for his rich friends.

TheEncogitationer wrote:
When Government defunds Harvard and the rest of Ivy League Academia, it is not so much exercising speech of it’s own. Rather the Government is forbidding forced speech, which results when taxpayers are forced to support these institutions promoting Antisemitism, as well promoting as the Critical Race T…

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Unseen wrote:
We use the same word, pain, but my sensation is mine alone. You can’t feel it. And of course it’s true vice versa. We simply make an assumption of parity based on similar behavior, but when it comes to my perceptions and yours, each of us is on a desert island with no hope of rescue.

But if I see you stub your toe, and I am at all…[Read more]

PopeBeanie wrote:
instantaneous disentanglement could occur if a dimension exists where those two particles are actually very close to each other, or perhaps even still joined as one particle or wave.

In higher dimensions, that could happen.  That makes perfect sense in its way.  Distance is distance, in 1-dimensional units, no matter what d…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
If we go “above” our three-dimensional world, we go into the fourth dimension of time, from which we can see the 3-d landscape, embedded within spacetime, some way into the past and future.

Hang on, I’m not sure about that.  It’s “some way in space”, not the past and future.

To go “above” our world, it’s a 4-d world, so we…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
It is at best a faulty analogy and here’s what’s wrong with it. That example envisions a three-dimensional object, the ball, on a two-dimensional surface, which is easy to visualize. However, a real massive object exists in a three-dimensional space. Infinite number of planes. In the one-dimensional example, we see it sinking int…

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PopeBeanie wrote:
I.e. it’s more like a cosmological distance dimension is increasing.

I think that’s very true, @popebeanie.  Or, more than one dimension.  All the dimensions maybe.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
She was living in a “safe” country when I knew her.

That’s good to know.  She was courageous.  I was afraid of what might happen to her.

jakelafort wrote:
It is awesome you are not an ideologue.

Ideology is antithetical to free thinking.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Many Muslim women still need permission from male relatives for the little things……. like marriage, travel (in some cases), choosing what to wear, gaining an education, speaking, singing, reading and even getting certain medical procedures done. But apart from that……

This paper, from the (weirdly virus-r…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Remember Nessrriinn from the old TA site?

Was she the lady from Saudi Arabia?  What happened to her?  Is she in prison, for being normal?

jakelafort wrote:
So the daughter pipes in that she was amazed at university that the first thing she was taught was that we should not judge Islam for these practices. The daughter goes on to describe it as a betrayal of human rights.

Do you have this video?  Of course, I deplore making excuses for the medieval abuse of women.  I would be i…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Tell me Simon if you are okay with the cultural relativism that protects abusers and punishes the abused.

No, I’m not OK with beating women, or for making excuses for it.  Do people really do that?  Can you find evidence of a “lefty” defending abuse of women by Islam?  I’m not denying it happens, but I’ve never seen it in the fl…[Read more]