Gnomon

Do you think I'm being fast & loose with my language here? In my thesis and my posts, I provide specific definitions of such terms as "physics" and "m...

What material evidence do you have to support your belief that personal choice is illusory?

Yes. That's why I'm only advocating FreeWill in a Compatibilist sense. Humans obviously don't have god-like magical freedom to do anything they want. ...

This is a philosophy forum, not a Communist Re-education Camp. So of course we are free to disagree. But, I suspect that we are not that far apart on ...

I've enjoyed discussing the old Freedom vs Determinism question with you. But if you are going to place Metaphysics*1 off-limits in a philosophical fo...

Yes. But, at the macro level, the minuscule "observer effect"*1 could be ignored. Only after scientists began probing into the microscopic level of ph...

Yes. I was using physical indeterminacy as a parallel analogy to the philosophical question of Freedom vs Determinism. Do you consider philosophy to b...

Good point! Until the advent of Quantum physics, scientists had no need for a "conceptual apparatus" of "choices". But the necessity for Observer choi...

True, but your description sounds like a romantic fairytale version of history : an age of fatherly kings, and courtly knights, and fair maidens, and ...

I think you missed the point of my post in favor of FreeWill for moral agents. Moral arguments carry no weight for scientists. But shouldn't they be i...

Yes. I'm aware that my "articulation" of a Causal Gap in Determinism is un-orthodox. But it's based on science, not magic. Beginning in the early 2000...

Your Fork-in-the-Road argument may illustrate the notion of Free Will choices. But as a philosophical proof, it may or may not be convincing to determ...

Me too. Being apolitical by nature, I wasn't familiar with the notion of American "High Toryism" or Western "Confucianism. So, I looked-up those terms...

Disclaimer : not an expert on any of these socio-political concepts. But for clarification of terms : High Toryism has been described by Andrew Heywoo...

Excellent observation. Both Plato & Aristotle were doing Science in 500BC, but walking the tightrope without a net of technology-enhanced empirical ev...

Yes. The Hard Problem is not a "real" problem, it's an "ideal" problem. It's not a Scientific problem, but a Philosophical dilemma. It's not a problem...

Modern Determinism typically looks to Quantum Physics to underwrite the notion that "Randomness rules!" But it may not be that cut & dried. Quora foru...

gave an interesting distinction : romantic Fate vs pragmatic Determinism. The ancient Greeks observed the same less-than-ideal living conditions that ...

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker argues against the Empiricist belief that ideas only derive from personal experience. However, his examples of "inna...

I found the article scientifically interesting, but philosophically unsatisfying. As I noted to : "The Aeon article is extremely interesting in terms ...

The April-May 2024 issue of Philosophy Now has an article by Raymond Tallis entitled The Illusion of Illusionism. Speaking of Consciousness, Tallis sa...

Thanks. Yet I think Aristotle did associate both ideas in his discussion of Natural Purpose. The "everything has a purpose" quote combines several wor...

Unfortunately, we can't see "purpose" in the non-self world with our physical senses, but we can infer Intention from the behavior of people & animals...

Thanks. That summary is in agreement my own understanding of the Real/Ideal and Phenomenal/Noumenal dichotomy. But my question was about your characte...

Thanks. But, can you clarify Kant's "equivocation" for me? If the ding an sich is not Phenomenal, is it not then Noumenal by default? Is there a third...

Disclaimer : not erudite on Aristotle, Plato, or Kant. But I think they were onto something, even when I can't say exactly what it is. I suppose the i...

Well put! Compared to blasé moderns --- with artificial senses, allowing us to see our "pale blue dot" from a god-like perspective --- ancient humans ...

I happen to agree with your conclusion that, in the real world, FreeWill and Determinism co-exist in the paradoxical synergy of statistical Probabilit...

Thanks. But it's a bit late in life for me to begin a scholastic study of "German idealists". I have a pretty good foundation in the pioneering Greeks...

I'm not a Schopenhauer scholar, so I'm just shooting in the dark here. His description of WILL --- "a blind, unconscious, aimless striving {random err...

He probably didn't say that in so many words. But the common quote attributed to the "wise man" is an English paraphrase of the Greek original, intend...

Ari did seem to assume the existence of some kind of supernatural beings, beyond the limits of human senses*1. But to me his "unmoved mover" sounds mo...

I'm not an Aristotle expert, but I do refer to his ideas on Metaphysics whenever discussions about philosophical "hard problems" --- as contrasted wit...

So, Lewis Carroll proved that what we see in the "looking glass" is actually a separate dimension where everything is reversed from the normal world. ...

In other words, what we see in a mirror is an optical illusion? Does the brain try to make sense of the symmetry flip, by imagining the third dimensio...

Interesting summary of general philosophical principles, extracted from real-world details. Forms are the essential idea of a thing that is instantiat...

Yes. I don't project a sunny Pollyanna view onto our imperfect world. But I also can't subscribe to Schop's gloomy-give-up outlook. I wouldn't want to...

OK. I'll leave the grown-up philosophy to those who are able to gnaw on tough gristly meat. But his fatalistic worldview (amor fati) is not for me. Al...

I wasn't talking about , but about a dismal worldview that is not amenable to my own. From comments by other philosophers, I concluded long ago that "...

I can see why Kastrup might endorse Schopenhauer's analytical Idealism, and why you could appreciate his notion of a Mind Created World. But I have ne...

I'm not sure what the "contradictory propositions" are in this case. Are you talking about A> knowing-Omniscience vs B> acting-Immanence : design & cr...

Some self-reference is necessary to have a self-concept. So I guess you're saying that Laplace's demon is omniscient until it begins to doubt its own ...

OFF TOPIC AGAIN. You might want to move these devolutionary digressions to a new or old thread : Realism vs Idealism or Phenomenal vs Noumenal, or Phy...

OFF-TOPIC : not specifically about evolution vs alternative theories of how we got to here Since my knowledge of the long-running Realism vs Idealism ...

Yes. That's why the quantum physics discovery of an active role for the observer challenged the Copernican Principle, that Earth and its inhabitants e...

Yes, but I'd say : "bemusing". The Weak Anthropic Principle*1 seems to be reasonable & uncontroversial. And in accordance with scientific guidelines. ...

I'm afraid you're getting way over my head, since I know nothing about Laplace, except for a couple of famous quotes. I assume you're referring to Lap...

I'm no expert on Buddhist beliefs, but a quick Google indicates that there is no single dogma on the topic of Evolution ; instead there are "schools o...

No and Yes. All living organisms must be able to sense both positive and negative environmental impacts on Self. So, focusing solely on the negative i...

Your quote is exactly the "open-ended question" I referred to. Is it possible to calculate the future position and momentum of multiple particles accu...