You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Michael McMahon

Comments

In: Pantheism  — view comment
"Reverse psychology is a technique involving the assertion of a belief or behavior that is opposite to the one desired, with the expectation that this...
September 16, 2022 at 17:38
In: Pantheism  — view comment
Is Christianity a victim of its own success? In other words has it lost some of its rebellious image by becoming such a large religion? Perhaps it's a...
September 16, 2022 at 16:41
Determinism can be claimed to reduce criminal responsibility but this doesn't let dualism off the hook either. For example if the mind is completely s...
September 14, 2022 at 00:41
"Diplopia is the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object that may be displaced horizontally or vertically in relation to each other. ...
August 30, 2022 at 16:24
Is science at war with religion? In some sense science is a lot like America. America is a superpower that is limited by their own beliefs in toleranc...
August 20, 2022 at 07:57
Is it possible to change the genetics of future children? According to natural selection this is impossible and only the periphery of our genetics is ...
August 19, 2022 at 21:49
When we look around are we seeing light or electricity? If what we are seeing is electricity inside the brain then electromagnetic radiation would be ...
August 18, 2022 at 02:25
I'd a dream not too long ago where I was explaining to an interviewer about my theories. He was asking me about how we'd know if the light we see is d...
August 12, 2022 at 11:33
I don't sing and so listening to more music won't turn me into a great singer or musician. Perhaps the brain enjoys music because the more we listen t...
August 08, 2022 at 09:42
In: Pantheism  — view comment
They say never to judge people by appearence yet a divine being would likely be far more accurate in their preception than us. Sometimes people can re...
August 05, 2022 at 19:43
In: Pantheism  — view comment
Talking to yourself or imagining your inner voice as being projected out loud can be a symptom of a mental illness. But such a thought experiment coul...
August 05, 2022 at 11:07
In: Pantheism  — view comment
The scary thing about reincarnation is not only embodying a new person but also being "adopted" into a new family. In a metaphorical sense you'd be fl...
August 01, 2022 at 09:08
We know the immediate past exists because it takes time to form coherent thoughts and to retrieve memories. Perhaps one difference between Alzheimer's...
August 01, 2022 at 07:02
Who said the ghost in the machine had to be white! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGCaw7yKdUTomb of Anck Su Namun
July 31, 2022 at 19:55
It might be tempting to think that because animals are less self-aware than humans that this must mean their experience of time is less complex. Yet w...
July 27, 2022 at 09:09
An animal isn't rational but for the sake of argument let's imagine that a deer had the same IQ as a person. We'll ignore the ethical implications of ...
July 27, 2022 at 03:18
So we're all descended from fish and pass through a fish phase in the embryo phase! The first life forms were fish and so that would mean we're all de...
July 25, 2022 at 20:22
In: Pantheism  — view comment
In an infinite universe there simply isn't enough room for there to be two fundamentally distinct souls! Otherwise we'd need to duel!
July 24, 2022 at 04:44
In: Pantheism  — view comment
God is described as omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent but not necessarily omni-professional. Life isn't the same as a package holiday or a tri...
July 22, 2022 at 22:45
In: Pantheism  — view comment
The only thing worse than ethnic charity is no charity at all.
July 22, 2022 at 02:31
In: Pantheism  — view comment
There are different kinds of evil. Angry violence is one kind and the fake love of perverts is another type. Both are very wrong and exploitative for ...
July 21, 2022 at 21:27
One could metaphorically interpret perspective to be absent if we consider distant objects to remain the same size when they move even further back. F...
July 19, 2022 at 17:16
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_Bedroom_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Let's analyse the photo in the context of ...
July 19, 2022 at 16:17
Asians and Europeans have a very similar physique even though the people from either continent are facially very different to each other. Do the mille...
July 19, 2022 at 07:05
It took hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of scientists and millions of reciprocating civilians in different nations to collectively work out a...
July 19, 2022 at 06:42
For some of my anti-realism thread I work backwards from a terrible panic attack I had in late 2017. I try to interpret it through the realism of othe...
July 19, 2022 at 05:51
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Landscape_from_Saint-R%C3%A9my_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg One anti-realist interp...
July 19, 2022 at 05:24
In: Pantheism  — view comment
If we did see someone like Jesus when we died, depending on your religion, then he'd be over 2000 years old. We often use the BC and AD reference poin...
July 18, 2022 at 17:14
In: Pantheism  — view comment
I heard some right wing pundits claim that the onus is more on Islamic countries to have accepted Syrian refugees. Needless to say we've an equal resp...
July 17, 2022 at 19:24
In: Pantheism  — view comment
If God gave Hitler a choice of being mercilessly killed thousands of times in future of lives or else to endure thousands of years in a hellish dungeo...
July 15, 2022 at 22:19
In: Pantheism  — view comment
The Devil is often portrayed as extremely violent which leads some religious people to reject the very existence of hell. It's becoming more common to...
July 15, 2022 at 20:17
Fruit Art - Web Search When we buy meat in the shop it becomes tolerable to dissociate the food with the animal that was killed to produce it. Thankfu...
July 13, 2022 at 19:17
In: Pantheism  — view comment
"Most sodomy, most anal intercourse takes place between men and women." "I'm not interested in sodomy and buggery, I am not interested, so forget abou...
July 12, 2022 at 14:38
In: Pantheism  — view comment
This reminds me of those time travelling questions about the ethics of killing baby Hitler. It seems like a gruesome question because all babies are b...
July 12, 2022 at 10:26
In: Pantheism  — view comment
In physics there is a perennial debate between the quantum mechanics of atoms and the gravity of planets. The two best theories don't interact well wi...
July 12, 2022 at 09:51
Objectification: "the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object eg. the objectification of women in popular entertainment." If determ...
July 09, 2022 at 17:52
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PsV1x7WAwGkVanilla Sky - Intro Scene I read that it cost a million dollars for the producers to empty Times Square for t...
July 03, 2022 at 16:00
Is the brain's visual system like a mirror or a camera? I recently took a target practice video where the camera's menu screen was pointing towards th...
June 26, 2022 at 04:05
Is there an argument that elements of cosmopolitanism can be non-real? I once heard the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle joke that the average person i...
June 25, 2022 at 01:09
What might be some non-real solutions to the arrow paradox? Perhaps the background moves backwards such that a still object would appear to move forwa...
June 20, 2022 at 02:06
In: Pantheism  — view comment
Does the Hindu belief in karma and a cycle of ribirth require divine intervention to punish the souls of evil individuals? We don't attribute much age...
June 11, 2022 at 22:33
In: Pantheism  — view comment
"A handful of scientists are testing a controversial practice of using virtual reality to diagnose pedophilia in men in hopes of helping them manage t...
June 01, 2022 at 19:02
I've had temporary and unsettled feelings in my past that were a bit weird. They started off as very mild thought-lines that gradually evolved into un...
May 30, 2022 at 23:33
Saying that the mind moves the body by magic might seem like a perfect non-explanation. We might think of a spell by a wizard's wand to be random. Ind...
May 26, 2022 at 03:25
Very rarely I've experienced weird sensations that I can't fully describe but they still leave a brief impact on my subconscious. Perhaps it's that my...
May 24, 2022 at 23:15
In: Pantheism  — view comment
Misotheism: "a hatred of God." It's possible to distort any worldview which includes pantheism but nonetheless pantheism can offer another antidote to...
May 06, 2022 at 23:04
It might be ironic but a possible benefit of anti-realism is hyper-materialism. Anti-realism and materialism are often opposites but sometimes they mi...
April 24, 2022 at 08:48
If my mind is equivalent to the light I see and your mind is equivalent to the light you see where our colour perceptions are separate, then it'd be l...
April 20, 2022 at 07:13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvKhXhpssF0 Iron Giant fight scene We say that extreme complexity is correlated with consciousness but it's not immedi...
April 10, 2022 at 19:21
Simply walking around or moving our torso can create enough relative motions in our vision to work out how size varies with depth.
April 10, 2022 at 16:58