Gnomon

Oh really? The book I reviewed is indeed not "generally accepted". And the authors were aware that they were going beyond the conservative interpretat...

I'm sorry if I blasphemed your idol by calling him "soft". I meant no disrespect. Instead, I was just making a relevant distinction between Empirical ...

Yes, really. :smile: The authors of the ACP book I quoted go beyond the mere evidence of a "selection effect" to imply that Darwin's aimless "Natural ...

You put your finger on the difference between my general philosophical worldview and your specific scientific paradigm. I suspect that you think I'm m...

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle implies that the evolution of the cosmos is teleological. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Barro...

Denial is easy; understanding is hard. Obviously, if you doubt that evolution is progressive, then it's not "obvious or self-evident" to you. But, if ...

Thanks for your articulate criticism of my post. It demonstrates the depth of your understanding. :joke:

I hope you will pardon me if I don't respond directly to your categorical claim that my expressed opinions are incorrect. They are not scientific fact...

Speaking of evolutionary emergence, Charles Darwin touched on the notion of FreeWill in his The Descent of Man. In a Philosophy Now article, Samuel Gr...

Yes. I provide links to expert opinions in all of my posts, to provide support for my layman's opinions. As you noted, the experts are not unanimous i...

Great! I was just playing with your screenname. :smile: I too, am cautiously optimistic that evolution is moving toward an improved version of the par...

That's OK. I don't take the smoke-without-fire too seriously. It's par for the course, for philosophers who explore the outer limits of human knowledg...

Oh yes. I notice on this forum that "Teleology" is a hackle-raising four-letter-word for some people. For them, it implies an obsolete anti-science id...

Yes. A statistical relationship is not spatial, or quantitative, but informative & qualitative. For example, a mathematical Ratio compares abstract va...

If you only look at the top lines of a Google search, you'll only see the most popular ideas, not the most perceptive. The Stanford entry below provid...

Name-dropping is not a philosophical argument. :smile: Name-calling is not a philosophical argument. :joke:

You seem to be using the term "designed" in the religious sense of the creator of a perfect Garden of Eden. But, even the storytellers of that myth we...

Teleological explanations for the evolution of "endless forms most beautiful" are certainly not mainstream today, in secular science. But there is a s...

I agree that apocalyptic Prophets and commercial Crystal Ball Readers sometimes make absurd claims. But economic analysts and weather forecasters are ...

It's true that in Mesopotamian & Mediterranean traditions, teleological arguments were produced by theologians to defend their belief in the invisible...

I agree with your general implication, that whatever will be is what will become real. Hence, each individual's destiny was "meant to be" in some gene...

Yes. That's what I mean by "FreeWill within Determinism" (as explained above, and in my last reply to ). Semi-rational Humans are not totally free, bu...

Since "Real" for most folks means "material" or "physical", i prefer to speak of Potentials & Constructive Absences as "Ideal" or "meta-physical". Tha...

As you implied in a previous post, the universe has a "broken" symmetry. Perfect symmetry would not allow for change & positive evolution. Perhaps tha...

Yay! You have become a guided mission within the mostly random flux of natural causation. What makes the difference is Intention & Selection. :grin:

Deacon put his finger on the crux of this FreeWiil debate. Those who hold a "mechanistic model" of the world are self-blinded to the Holistic & Organi...

I read Giorban's book several years ago, and it blew my mind. Sadly, he exercised his FreeWill with the ultimate personal choice : "to be, or not to b...

Yes. I envision the "splitting" of the BigBang Singularity as an ovum (egg) dividing. First one cell becomes two, and then two become four, thus the b...

Speaking of "Emergence" and other mysterious appearances. I just came across an article by Tom Siegfried of Science News, that may shed light on anoth...

Yes. I know. I was just using poetic license. I'm not quite as stupid as your sophistry-mockery makes me out to be. But, then there is no empirical ev...

Come-on now! Big philosophers don't cry over spilled mockery :joke:

Smart move! Some advocates of Panpsychism imagine that all elements of reality are conscious agents. But my interpretation of "Universal Information" ...

Yes. Several philosophers, over the ages, have concluded that, in order for anything temporal & temporary to exist, something stable & eternal must ex...

I assume that "this" refers to the poetic & religious notions of human autonomy & moral agency that are rejected as wishful thinking by some philosoph...

It's not the bookish intellectuals like Marx & Engels that the CIA is worried about, but those sword-wielding activists, like Lenin & Stalin, who are ...

I don't know. It's a mystery to me. :smile: Ignorance is the not knowing that opens us up to philosophical wonder, to scientific discovery, to human w...

Yes, but that other "part" of the brain is not a physical Location ; it's the holistic governing Function we call the "Conscience" or the "Super-Ego"....

Yes. That's what I referred to in the blog review as "Un-scripted". The analogy is to actors improvising their character's lines & gestures within the...

Thanks. But you might not agree with some of my Poetic & Philosophical speculations on controversial topics such as Consciousness & Free Will. :smile:

OK. I'll admit that "wetness" is a qualia, not a quanta. But "liquidity" is a measurable physical difference (e.g. viscosity) between gas, solid & liq...

“Those of us who want to believe that human beings have free will must find sufficient evidence that our minds are something more than can ever be att...

Boy! Your Nihilist & Determinist attitude has really made you sour and cynical. :naughty: However, if your philosophical worldview is actually Absurdi...

My reference was not to the Greek alphabet, but to the evolutionary theory of paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Other scientists, such as Fra...

Respectfully : "To each his own". :wink: An old physically-grounded joke says that "Opinons are like *ssholes . . . everybody has one, and they stink"...

As an amateur philosopher, I don't concern myself with reductive physical particles, but with the holistic meta-physical -- or "sub-physical" if you p...

For what it's worth, here's my own cosmic calendar. It shows an optimistic upward progression, despite all the physical entropy and political digressi...

Yes. But ironically, some posters on this forum prefer to give "priority" to the reductive specific laws of Physics, and to diminish the importance of...

Yes. I suspect that the feeling of Free Will is easier to justify in the modern era of Democracy and Technology, than it was back when the average hum...

I may not have made it clear in the post above, that the author of the book wanted to prove that FreeWill is believable, but after all his reasoning, ...

I just can't leave the ghost of Free Will in peace. Since this is one of the most polarized topics on the forum, I find it one of the most interesting...