Metaphysician Undercover

As I said, my mathematics is not good, so I don't see how the example deals with the problem. Say object #1 and object #2 are seen to be different, bu...

Best wishes. Get well!

If all these people are trying to convince you of this, perhaps you ought to consider that it's you who is being ridiculous.

Yes I agree that logic is impossible without this fundamental first step. But if contradiction is inherent within the first step, don't you see this a...

This doubt is not outside the language-game. The skeptic is asking what does the word "existence" mean here, what does it mean to exist. When we try t...

Well, I disagree. I think we learn what's impossible from the past, not what's possible. We make up possibilities with our minds, logical possibilitie...

You are confusing habit with certainty. Behaving in a habitual way, in no way indicates that one is certain about one's action. If you take that appro...

If it's a natural right, it cannot be forfeited. If you are talking about given rights, as privileges, then you cannot justify any so-called "right" w...

This fundamental first step, to overlook the fact that two distinct instances of "a" are not identical in an absolute way and are therefore not actual...

That's the nature of time, it makes reality rather complicated. But it's not necessarily true that "we want to be freer less predictable". In reality ...

Free will and determinism are different ways of seeing human actions, human existence. The fact that the rock will fall has nothing to do with determi...

You make the oddest assertions Sapientia. I really don't see how seeing is the same thing as believing.

Well hard free will, in the way you described it as completely random acts, doesn't really make sense. And I've never heard a description of "soft det...

So you believe in free will, that the future is not determined. You do not believe in determinism. Why do you claim that we are all naturally soft det...

Do you not believe that there are possibilities concerning what will happen in the future, and that your decisions can have an affect in relation to w...

I've never heard of "hard free will", would that be like every decision is a completely random decision?

Where's the refutation? Where's the thought experiment? Let's go, get on with it,. I haven't got all day.

Where's your thought experiment?

I don't see a refutation

The word is the thing. Words are the subject of this discussion. And, from looking at words we are trying to determine whether there is such a thing a...

Yes a word is a thing. That's my evidence, the word itself, as a thing. By denying that the word is the thing, you are simply denying the evidence. Bu...

But if the future already exists, in a hard determinist way, we wouldn't have any incentive to attempt to influence what we apprehend may or may not o...

There is no natural right to defend your life. That's irrational nonsense, because it is natural that you must die. We all must surrender our lives, t...

If there's a bad smell hanging around thread like this, most likely it's because the threads are rotten.

I'm not convinced of the conclusion that if it is impossible to avoid the tint, then it is impossible to know how things really are. I think it just m...

Within the brain, there is an agent, which creates its own wave patterns, interacting with the other wave patterns such that the person perceives the ...

Perhaps we cannot carve up the mind because that would kill the person, but we can make these distinctions in principle to help us understand, just li...

Well, I can't agree with this. That's not what the Robbins video described though. It described each person's mind as creating a hologram from the bra...

Right, but "the justification" may or may not be composed of other beliefs, or may be partially composed of beliefs and partially composed of other th...

This points to the issue with the nature of "an event". The events which we describe, and have words for describing, are proper to our experience of d...

I don't agree. I am much more than memory. I think, I anticipate, and I act, none of these things can be directly attributed to memory. So memory is o...

I agree, doubt is inherent within belief because we know that we are never beyond the possibility of mistake. But I think that what separates belief f...

Correct, I demonstrated why this claimed "right" is irrational. Can you either refute my argument, or provide a better one to justify your assertion t...

Ha ha, hope you don't mind if I laugh about that. We can see that belief is a mental thing, and there are other mental things like thinking, rememberi...

OK, but that requires that the boundary between past and future is a real medium, a substance,as the holographic film or plate, and that's quite diffi...

Actually, I think it would be more productive to differentiate these so-called "different kinds of believing" as something other than believing. This ...

I just demonstrated to you why the right to a weapon for self-defence would be irrational. Do you have a counter-argument or just a hollow assertion? ...

So the surface is the boundary between past and future? This boundary is the medium upon which the hologram exists?

But you're referring to the belief, as the belief that the sky is blue as well. And there cannot be the belief that the sky is blue without "blue". So...

A hologram requires a surface, in the video demonstration it's a plate. Is Bergson saying that in the case of the human mind, the body acts as the sur...

How could there be a colour that we know of as blue, without the word "blue"? Remove the word "blue" and we wouldn't know of that colour as blue. The ...

This is what I don't understand. What is the holographic universe?

I must admit, I cannot grasp the holographic concept. I've read Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order", but I find that there is something missing...

I was being sarcastic

Seeing is believing. Literally.

This is the issue with the nature of time. Common sense shows us that we need to accept as brute fact the substantial difference between past and futu...

It's not off topic. Do you recognize the fundamental difference, which is exposed by the length contraction and time dilation implied by relativity th...

The alternative which I was trying to lead our discussion toward earlier, is to assume that the tinted glass cannot be avoided. This is to deny the re...

I think you misunderstand the nature of a "right". There are two ways to look at rights, either a right is something given, as a privilege, or a right...

You seem to be overlooking a basic problem which quantum mechanics exposes to us. This is that the nature of "an event" is, inherently ambiguous. From...