Perplexed

I would suggest that the appalling lack of insight into human nature demonstrated on this thread would place you firmly into the category of "deficien...

People agreeing with you is not evidence. What is it specifically about your brother that makes you sure that his actions have caused harm? Because th...

The mothers may have more insight into the particular vulnerabilities of their own daughters but it does not follow that they better understand the da...

My place is not to judge the man but the best course of action. In this case I think it is for Tree Falls to maintain the integrity of his family and ...

Boredom is a reminder that life has lots of inherent meanings and that the one we are currently using to frame our experience is not conductive to the...

Your argument so far relies solely on the repeated use of the word 'children'. However, the age range 16-19 years is not considered to designate child...

Incidentally, I think it is noteworthy that my initial comment which was in part intended to defend to right of young women to consent to their own se...

You are assuming suspect competence based on age alone. I was trying to establish facts about the individuals involved, which I think is a better way ...

Just to get this clear, apart from making sexual comments about my family, you are arguing that the views of the females engaged in sexual act do not ...

Regardless of how your brother rationalises the situation, do you not think that having your support as a brother could be of benefit to him? It sound...

No, the individual girls experience of the situation is most certainly not irrelevant and ages are not worth a damn when considered in isolation which...

Did these arguments relate in any way to your brothers attitude and behaviour towards women? Have you considered trying to rebuild the relationship so...

This is cause for concern. Are you in possession of any of the facts relating to the complaints?

Here's another perspective. Many 16-19 year old girls like to have sex. Who's to say that the experience these girls had with your brother wasn't over...

I think that many of the spiritual and religious traditions believe that a "union with the divine" entails a kind of ethical mastery as opposed to the...

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When ...

With regard to anxiety I think that it can produce a cascade of thoughts which often are unhelpful because they merely perpetuate the anxiety. In this...

I have a hunch that those who are dismissive of meditation are probably responding to what they see as a negative attitude towards thinking. Often med...

I'm not sure your answer is convincing because we do not only keep maths that has practical utility. It need only be internally coherent and can be bu...

I mean it gives us an applicable framework with which we can make sense and order our experiences. It is a pure form which the principals of physics t...

But then we still get to choose to follow these instincts or not. Obviously we are still constrained by external forces. I don't get to chose to sudde...

The difficulty is that if maths is a conceit, how is it that it can be applied to the world? This was one of the fundamental questions Kant was trying...

I suppose meditation can also have quasi-religious interpretations which seek a way of knowing not captured by discursive, logical or linguistic metho...

I believe meditation is a technique for focusing ones mind, no? I suppose it could be considered a denial that unfocused use of the mind delivers the ...

What you are describing is not mysticism but denial. i.e. hiding from valid distinctions. The trouble is that a great deal of discrimination takes pla...

Then this hasn't allowed space for free will and is not the compromise I was speaking about. What role do you play in determining them?

Do you say that the condition is unknowable to the agent themselves?

While I agree that it would be surprising if Kant did not know about this geometry, he had no reason to apply it to space as a whole and for the reaso...

Could you give a bit more info, in what respect do you regard them to be wrong?

As far as I'm aware Kant did not mention the geometry of the surface of spheres but in any case that is merely a subset within Euclidean space and as ...

If who I am at a given moment is completely determinate then is any choice possible?

But if physical effects external to ourselves can be shown to influence the geometry of space, is this not fatal to the assumption that space is an a ...

If a probabilistic determinism allows space for free will then that enough of a compromise for me.

Are you saying that Kant would have denied that any physics experiment could reveal that spacial geometry was not Euclidean?

I was wondering about this. Before Kant, a priori truths were considered analytic and so are true by definition. The a priori synthetic truths may be ...

Definitely! :) Yes I would seek to find some sort of compromise. Are you saying you'd be happy to give up free will?

Thank you for clearing that up andrewk, I think I need to swot up a bit on my general relativity. The essay that posted is actually very interesting i...

I image that that laws are not fully deterministic or else that they apply over a limited scope. Is it even logically possible for full determinism to...

how does matter in motion reach the point at which it can exhibit choice?

If the self is determined, from where does the power of choice arise?

Yes thank you for clarifying my point. In the transcendental aesthetic Kant speaks of space not as an objective absolute background like Newton, nor a...

I wasn't trying to pit science against metaphysics, I was making the point that its a worthwhile endeavour to asses the foundations of any system as w...

I don't think non-Euclidean geometries would be considered intuitive or come under the transcendental aesthetic because they are concepts of the under...

Many thanks for this, ill take a read.

Could this method not lead to avoidance of difficult situations? If one changes their course each time there is turbulence are they not just victims o...

I suppose one would need to get to the bottom of the source of their feeling in order to understand the connection it has to the direction they have c...

SophistiCat, just to let you know that I haven't been notified for the past two replies that you have sent me. One could imagine any number of self co...

Can we be sure that this hasn't happened simply because we've traversed a significant course in one particular direction and thus obscured the other p...

In this definition, knowledge-for-own-sake would correspond to truth. However, this too seems to be based on workability. i.e. the way we chose to obs...

But how can tell you're not just seeking whatever path happens to be favourable to you. i.e.. because it confirms your biases rather than has genuine ...