26 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 17082 | Paradox: why do you analyse if you know it, and how do you analyse if you don't? [Ruben] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 17087 | The 'symmetry thesis' says explanation and prediction only differ pragmatically [Ruben] |
| 17081 | Usually explanations just involve giving information, with no reference to the act of explanation [Ruben] |
| 17092 | An explanation needs the world to have an appropriate structure [Ruben] |
| 17090 | Most explanations are just sentences, not arguments [Ruben] |
| 17094 | The causal theory of explanation neglects determinations which are not causal [Ruben] |
| 17088 | Reducing one science to another is often said to be the perfect explanation [Ruben] |
| 17089 | Facts explain facts, but only if they are conceptualised or named appropriately [Ruben] |
| 2584 | Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain [Block] |
| 2582 | A brain looks no more likely than anything else to cause qualia [Block] |
| 2574 | Behaviour requires knowledge as well as dispositions [Block] |
| 2576 | In functionalism, desires are internal states with causal relations [Block] |
| 2575 | Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries [Block] |
| 2583 | You might invert colours, but you can't invert beliefs [Block] |
| 2578 | Could a creature without a brain be in the right functional state for pain? [Block] |
| 2585 | Not just any old functional network will have mental states [Block] |
| 2586 | In functionalism, what are the special inputs and outputs of conscious creatures? [Block] |
| 2579 | Physicalism is prejudiced in favour of our neurology, when other systems might have minds [Block] |
| 2577 | Simple machine-functionalism says mind just is a Turing machine [Block] |
| 2580 | A Turing machine, given a state and input, specifies an output and the next state [Block] |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |