Recent content by Copernicus

This is completely nonresponsive. Do you understand the difference between a noise and a sound? I told you what I thought it was, but you did not agree or disagree. Instead you talked about something else. Are not both part of our mental model of reality? Unless you want to engage me on the...

Josephus was not the earliest reference to Jesus. That is Paul. Josephus wrote between 75-79 AD, and the authenticity of his references to Jesus is in dispute. Unfortunately, most of the text concerning early Christianity has been filtered through later Christian scribes, who were known to...

Thanks for letting me know something about your background. I would not have thought that you had expertise in the area of psychophysics. My problem was, and still is, trying to figure out what your point was and how it related to what I was talking about. Much of what you write above...

Let's start with more than zero. Zero is what we have now. Paul was apparently locked in a struggle with Peter over who should control the growing cult missions among gentiles. In particular, Paul didn't think that Gentiles needed to submit to circumcision or always eating kosher. Peter and...

How do you get anything like that from my use of the term "sense-data"? Maybe I should have said "qualia" instead of "sense data", although I have a problem with the way philosophers use that term. What I really don't understand is what point you are trying to make with all of your wordy...

Neither plausibility nor blatant appeal to authority justifies the assumption that some person we now call "Jesus" existed. Some contemporaneous historical evidence to corroborate his existence would help, but we have none. Otherwise, the historicity of Jesus is little more than a very popular...

The problem with the Noah story is that it wasn't the original story, which can be found in the world's oldest recorded epic--the story of Gilgamesh (in Akkadian. "Bilgamesh" in the original Sumerian). The problem with the historicity of Jesus is not only a lack of evidence, but the fact that...

Look, you started the chain by commenting on my claim "... our models of reality are all interpretations of sense data." I didn't find your comment relevant or sensible, so I commented back. Your subsequent attempts to "amplify" your remarks have not helped to clarify your response to me, and...

Nope. It doesn't help when I read what you wrote. Perhaps we are signaling each other on different wavelengths. What you wrote above appears to bear no relation to anything I wrote.

Thanks for the video link. Well worth the listen. Absent some big concession at the negotiating table, I don't see how Putin can stop himself from some kind of military action just to save face. Even if Putin gets a face-saving way out, he'll only be back at it later. This is so similar to...

Things are heating up now with a major cyber attack from Russia on Ukraine. I expect Russian cybercriminals will also be attacking the US, simultaneously with any military attack, especially when the inevitable sanctions from the West start coming into play. The latest intelligence announced...

That's been my experience, too. T-Mobile rolled out its bare bones version of Scam Shield to all its subscribers last year, so I've been using that tool along with Hiya. The sad fact is that I have to live with the annoyance of frequent spam attacks or pay more money to get better protection...

I use Hiya and T-Mobile's Scam Shield service. It doesn't do much good to block numbers in your local area code, because they are usually automatically generated spoofs that change all the time. Scam shield can do a lot more, but they charge extra for services that don't actually cost them...

As long as you don't in any way use your senses to detect signals, you may be making sense, but I'm not quite sure how you manage that. :)

Logical positivism failed for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that meaning had nothing to do with verification. That much should have been obvious to Ayer, since speech acts other than statements are also meaningful. Ordinary Language Philosophy ultimately gave rise to some...