Sorry I was a little snippy in my response. That free will is undermined by a deterministic universe is an old and perfectly respectable philosophical...
Well, there is this position, to which I am somewhat sympathetic, that the abstract (mathematical) entities that we find to be indispensable in explai...
You are not answering the question. You don't need to tell me about how you think free will does not exist because I've heard this a thousand times, a...
Gotcha. Yes, it's a good question. But I would like to turn it around: What would a real, non-illusory free will be like? In what way would it be diff...
Yes, and thank you for a comprehensive response. Oh but I don't think that we derive the concept of time from the clock. From the moment of the first ...
Again, I am at a loss as to what occasioned your ridicule. Do you think that in order to understand the authors' point here, one needs to have studied...
Yes, exactly, clocks (periodic processes) don't define time in the way definitions usually work, i.e. by completely reducing one concept to one or mor...
I don't know that having at least heard of Aquinas' Five Ways constitutes "technical background knowledge," but fine, let's assume that some readers d...
Honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about. Technical terms? What technical terms? Here is the sentence again: "The first three of Aquinas's ...
Perhaps we've been reading different articles, because my impression of the SEP is the exact opposite. I am a consummate layman: never took a philosop...
I mean what was referred to in those days as the First World - North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia. The liberal democratic order in those ...
I wonder whether a few decades from now, the post-war Western liberal democratic order will come to be seen as an aberration, or yet another passing p...
I think you have it a little backwards. We should think of time in relation to physical "clocks," such as heartbeats, diurnal cycles, pendulums or ele...
Did you read this in Wikipedia Argument from analogy perhaps? Perhaps it may help to think of a property of P as any predicate applied to P: P is red ...
I think that this line of thought is psychologically naive. No, perceptions, thoughts, a certain order and hierarchy of our mental architecture - thes...
An ethical system is typically named after its core value. The core value of humanism is the human being. If they are basing this value on something e...
You are making it sound like cooperative behavior is motivated entirely by self-interest, which just isn't true. I don't even care to argue the point,...
But where are you getting the idea that humanists are basing their ideology on evolution (thereby committing the naturalistic fallacy)? This is not a ...
@"fdrake" pointed that out back on page one. Of course, the matter is not so cut and dried as to be dismissed out of hand, as evidenced by decades of ...
Dennett's objection is to reflexive ontologizing of naive psychological notions of subjectivity. In the linked essay he gives a quote of Searle (also ...
This is a caricature of Dennett's position. Dennett does not say that conscious experience is an illusion, in the sense of being unreal. He is saying ...
You have never read either Homer or Virgil, have you? You got it exactly backwards. Virgil takes up the Trojans' narrative (for obvious reasons), and ...
Two cells are not identical to one cell. So you can run the same argument in that case as well: one cell has a property that two cells lack: its numer...
You've posted the exact same argument before. You didn't get much of a discussion, because the idea is trivial and there is not much to discuss. If A ...
You cannot put the blame on polls for not getting the result right a year or two before the event. What do you think pollsters are - oracles? How woul...
There are a few common responses to such challenges. One is to bite the bullet and deny free will. This is a very common response among amateur philos...
Right, but still, we, with our macroscopic sense organs, would never know about quantum effects if they did not propagate to our scale. So although th...
How would macro-level indeterminism help? It wouldn't give you any control - on the contrary, it would make your actions erratic, out-of-control. Your...
I don't see a line of reasoning here. You just make statements to the effect that determinism is the case "in your mind" and leave it at that, without...
Well, facts and figures are obviously of no help to you - that was my point. When the margin of victory is as thin as that, margins of error will come...
I just looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_Australian_federal_election Both polling results and election results ...
Some sort of empirically informed analysis, not just your say-so. But you have already dismissed science and philosophical analysis as suitable tools,...
You haven't "SHOWN" either the science or the logic. In my very first response in this thread I advised you to have a closer look at the science of co...
You were the one that went "down a sidebar about epiphenomenalism" when I challenged you on your assertions. Now you got cold feet and doubled down on...
Oh so epiphenomenalism is what you were about all this time? Well, dualism is not the only alternative to epiphenomenalism. Indeed, I don't think dual...
These are nothing but bland assertions. How do you know that human-like intelligence can go without consciousness? Why is it absurd to suppose that an...
As you can see, Hume didn't say anything of the sort. His thesis is that we can never demonstrate the existence of a cause. Again, Hume wrote about hu...
There is an even more basic method of reproduction, and that is what a lot of origin of life research focuses on: self-replicating molecules, which ar...
On the contrary, Hume appeared to support the notion of a necessary connection between events in nature. All that he said about uncertainty and probab...
Context and history do matter; the phrase "all men are created equal" is too ambiguous otherwise. You can speculate all day what it means to be "equal...
No. You don't even need to develop AI in order to have a computer that can solve certain problems as well as or better than people can - that's what c...
It is stupid. Again, I have to ask, do you have any idea about the context and the history of the phrase? Any idea at all? If you don't then the obvio...
That's another glib statement that doesn't help the discussion. Sure, science doesn't know everything there is to know about consciousness, but who do...
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