T_Clark

As the saying goes, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A corollary might go - to a metaphysician, everything looks like metaphysics. I'll now ...

@"fdrake" I was looking for something in Burtt's book and came across something that I think explains what I was trying to say in my first post better...

And now for the hard part. To start - and I don't think this is directly related to my argument - if you look on the web you'll find that opinion is a...

This is a good, thoughtful response. You're making me work. Thanks. I'll give an example, which doesn't address your quantum mechanics comments. I got...

I'm not ignoring your post, just thinking through an answer. And also tending to my hurt feelings because you called me incautious and metaphysically ...

You wrote that the conservation of energy is unfalsifiable. I pointed out that it has already been falsified. How is that irrelevant? As far as I know...

I agree with you it is wrongheaded to use science to try to demonstrate that the world is deterministic. As you note, this would have been the same ba...

Methodologically, scientists have had to assume, presuppose, that the world is deterministic - that things have causes - in order to do their work. De...

This is not true - it had already been falsified in 1905 by Albert Einstein. E = mc^2. Energy and matter are equivalent. Conservation of energy has be...

The law of conservation of energy is not metaphysics. It’s physics. You should work on not being such a putz.

Metaphysical ideas don't tell you about how stuff happens, they tell you how to talk about how stuff happens. Maybe I still don't understand. I'm maki...

That makes sense.

As for "But I don't think that "invent" is the appropriate description...Hence it is more appropriate to say that we discover these." I guess I disagr...

I don't have much patience for people who want to question the existence of free will in our everyday lives. I guess it is an interesting metaphysical...

I know you've read my diatribes on metaphysics before, so you should know that, in my view, metaphysical positions, i.e. absolute presuppositions, are...

Yes, you're right. Of course we are influenced by our environment and our human nature. That kind of influence is addressable by empirical methods. Bu...

And lucky to be.

How did we get zero? How did we get negative numbers from natural numbers? How did we get rational numbers from integers? How did we get real numbers ...

There are infinitely more irrational numbers then there are rational ones, so it's not just pi. They're just regular old Joe Sixpack numbers. I guess ...

Although I think the driving example is a good one to address the issue we were discussing, there are better ones. Taoism has a concept of wu wei, act...

It's clear you are a Renaissance Man.

Are those our only choices?

It doesn't make sense to me that the feeling of intention and agency you are referring to is the free will. We make decisions and take voluntary actio...

An interesting article, but I don't think it really says anything about whether or not there is free will. Why is it significant that "the feeling of ...

Yes. I think this whole issue is troublesome because of disagreement on what actually "constitutes the choice." As you've heard me say many times, thi...

Here's one of the songs I sing - over and over. Whether or not the world is deterministic is a matter of metaphysics, not a matter of fact. I'm not su...

This says it all - "the problem of masculinity." Keeping in mind I'm a registered Democrat and a liberal who thinks Biden was the best president in my...

I almost never agree with you when we talk politics or social philosophy, but I agree with what you say in this post.

This and your whole post make a lot of sense to me.

Other empirical studies have been performed similar to the one you linked that purport to cast doubt on free will. This is from Wikipedia. I find this...

A condescending and insulting way of putting it. It makes you look like a pompous prig.

I don't think there is any mental/physical causation problem that needs to be resolved. Let's not dive into a "hard problem of consciousness" discussi...

Good points, and important, but when I start getting into computation theory and chaos theory, I usually say something stupid. I'm not even sure what ...

In normal usage, "meaningless" means without significance. Synonyms include empty, pointless, and senseless. As Shakespeare said - Full of sound and f...

I'm sorry @"Arcane Sandwich" was banned, but I'm glad you gave him a chance to work things out before he was.

Strikes me that the mechanisms and processes of dreaming are not a suitable subject for philosophical speculation. As you have hinted, the answers to ...

I have argued in the past and I still think can be considered true that if something cannot be predicted, even in theory, it is meaningless to say it ...

And yet, "man is but a 'cloud of particles'" is a valid and sometimes useful perspective once you remove the offending adjective (or is it an adverb?)...

Welcome to the forum. We have the determinism discussion here often, and it can get tiresome. That being said, I like the way you've laid this out. Th...

I would call that way of seeing the world "metaphysics." All the isms in philosophy have the same characteristic you identify - they all "depend on ho...

These are not true M&Ms. As @"Noble Dust" might say, they are abominations. I have found that, if you suck on M&Ms for a few minutes, the dye in the s...

I think that makes sense for plain M&Ms, but I would think maybe peanut M&Ms would require something a little more robust.

There are a lot of sophisticated gastronomes here on the forum and I could use some help. I have a wine question. What kind of wine should I pair with...

I plan to submit this post, along with your nomination for the Nobel Prize in Philosophy, to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvFx9-qTHI

When I was just 13 - you might say I was a musical proverbial knee-high, I heard a couple new sounding tunes on the tube and they blasted me sky high....

Let’s say, hypothetically, from a philosophical perspective, if you were never actually a rat, would this still be true?

I'm not sure I understand. Is "the true vision life gave to" us a reflection of our own true nature or something that comes from outside such as relig...

This is a thoughtful response and it helped me clarify for myself some things I've been thinking about. I think the first three paragraphs are a good ...

I think this is right, I also think they see it as mystical.