This is probably a foolish question but I'm bored and I think you get paid for this, a short answer would not offend me nor would none at all. Can you make any kind of judgment about a person by the look in their eyes, I'm not sure judgment is the right word. Iv seen people who I could tell had been through a lot and been right, coincidence maybe but I'm not sure maybe its hormones or something. Perhaps you've spent some time thinking about it if so please share if not please share anyway.PS you guys are amazing and I thank you for all the answered questions, I never thought I'd get an answer to one let alone all of them cept for one but I understand why it wasn't answered. I don't know what you get paid but its not enough

Hello, Is everything in the universe invisible in its natural state? This question sounds strange, and maybe it's a bit hard to see what I mean, but I'll try to be as clear as possible. Imagine yourself outside of the universe, and that there are no other living beings in it. Since the light isn't reaching your eyes, you can't see the universe. The light inside the universe doesn't mean anything to you, it's just energy. Now, if you have, let's say, a room with nobody inside, being outside of the room would be the same as being outside of the universe when it comes to the meaning of light in the room. Yes, I understand, you can't see an object if your eyes are not exposed to the light reflected off an object, but what if there is no living being to interpret the reflected light? So, maybe a better question is what does light mean to a human if there is nobody around to form an image from the light? Thank you very much.

Does the fact that our perceptions can be represented geometrically and that geometry consists of eternal truths independent of the mind prove that an external reality underlies our perceptions?

Does our mind alter our perception of taste from the way things look and/or previous experiences?

I recently read an article by a philosopher who stated that physicalism must be false or at least incomplete because it doesn't adequately account for experience. For example, say you knew all the physical information involved in seeing a sunset, even if you convey all that information to a person you'll never actually describe a sunset. Say you know a blind woman (since birth) and she asks you "what's it like to experience a sunset?", do you go off saying well it's a wavelength hitting the photoreceptors in your eyes which send electrical signals to your brain, even if that's true she's still no closer to understanding what experiencing a sunset is like. The point being that you can't reduce experience (or qualia) down to purely physical information. Personally I agree that it's impossible to describe experience with just physical information, even with something as simple as the smell of an orange, you can only communicate a description of what the smell of orange smells like tautologically, i.e. "it...

In describing Kant's idea of the "thing-in-itself" Thomas Pogge (in response to a recent question on this site) recently wrote that "According to this explanation, space and time are then features only of objects as they appear to us." I'm having a difficult time deciphering this statement. To me when you speak of a feature of an object you are referring to that object in-itself almost by definition. It seems like space and time could be either a feature of the world or a feature of our mind/cognition or psychic tendencies which we project onto the world but not both. To say that space/time is a feature of the world as it appears seems to involve a confusion of how language is used to speak about being. Appearances can reveal or distort being but I don't see how they can contribute to being. We don't speak of colors as features of the (outer) world as they appear to us do we? We try to figure whether colors originate in the mind or in the world and though we allow that there is some degree of interaction...

Do you need an earlier perception to have a memory of something?

Are humans capable of feeling extreme physical pleasure as intense as extreme physical pain? If that is the case what ethical beliefs would we have to change if we wanted to maximize the occurrence of extreme physical pleasure in a way that accorded with a utilitarian hedonistic ethical system?

Is it at all a possibility for everyone in this world to see different colors but call them the same name? For example, if someone sees yellow, they call it yellow but another person sees the same color but to them it's green but since we've defined that it's yellow, they go along calling it yellow when really they see green.

Recently someone asked: I wonder about the notion of a masochist as somebody who enjoys suffering. Is it possible, logically, to enjoy suffering? Doesn't suffering necessarily preclude enjoyment and vice-versa? Would it be more accurate to say that a masochist enjoys something that non-masochists consider suffering? And a philosopher responded: I think that one definition of suffering is 'pain'. And someone could gain pleasure from pain, physical, or indeed psychological. So to say that a masochist enjoys suffering sees fine to me. Well.....I don't see much clarification here. Am I the only one? I think it might be just as hard for the question asker to imagine the relationship between suffering and pleasure and pain and pleasure. Maybe suffering is a larger category than pain that logically precludes pleasure so it's not hard to see a paradox there but with the narrower connotation of pain as a physical kind of suffering you can imagine that their can be an accompanying pleasure somehow. But the...