Olivier5

Old argument, but a logical one. The existence of evil pleads for manichaeism rather than monotheism. Hence the character of the Devil, as the god of ...

A Woman's Purse A woman's purse weighs like her whole life was inside it Between a book she never finished reading and some makeup to stop the flow of...

Rest assured that I am not technically young anymore. We lose neurons everyday. Ultimately, there aren't enough left, and we lose our mind. But I stil...

Yes, and even though we may like the historical underdogs, those who lost, it doesn't mean that them losers where any better morally speaking. . Mind ...

History is filled to the brim with horrors. No nation, no tribe is innocent. Placating our modern views and standards on the past as you are doing is ...

This sounds like an apology of incoherence. Just because one philosopher failed to have coherent thoughts doesn't mean others can't or shouldn't try t...

What Are You Dreaming? -- Ab? al-?ayyib A?mad ibn Al-?usayn Al-Mutanabb? Al-Kind? (ca.915 – 965 CE) What is there to feel happy about? I have neither ...

Let's call them the A word and the N word, then...:smile:

Good question. On a purely existential level, getting old appears to me better than the alternative. At least at this point; I might change my mind la...

You would rather be murdered than raped, personally?

Some beliefs don't submit to facts, because they are more than mere thoughts. They structure our thoughts, given them meaning within a frame of refere...

European people are the result of the breeding of pre-Indo-European females with Indo-European males. We are the children of millions of rapes spread ...

Not really I suppose. But the fact is that it is getting copied inside your body at this very moment, quite a lot in fact, because your body constantl...

sorry, pocket post...

Of course the nazi could have been me. I was lucky. O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis; vita detestabilis nunc obdura...

"The loss of the self in the monolith" sounds like an apt description of death. Our body will become mineral, as a matter of fact. But while we are al...

That strikes me as hard to believe. But yeah, as long as human thoughts count for something, I would say that determinism is internally logical.

Well then, your definition of 'Volition' above -- or the very question "does volition exist?" for that matter -- would not even exist as a question or...

Fair enough. When you wrote those words quoted above, did you: a) in fact want to say something else entirely, but these are the words that came out o...

As above, please define 'volition'. I am speaking of 'agency', which may or may not be the same thing.

You ask good questions, which counts for something. I don't have any complete answer to that but here would be my take. Reason and meaning are things ...

Yes to that. We know very little of what matter, energy, fields, space, time etc. 'really' are, so the term 'stuff' is adequate. It describes precisel...

Imagine you have been raped by a big guy who overpowered you and, your know, invaded your intimacy. Suppose he let you live rather than kill you after...

If we want to be totally exhaustive, there is also the possibility that there exist several gods.

Any father I know would be happy that his daughter is alive.

So you are saying that suicide is the long term solution to all short-term problems.

You speak lightly of these matters. I wish you will never have to chose between your life and the integrity of your anus., but if you ever have to, I ...

So you'd you rather be murdered than raped?

And by the way, you can of course disagree with simple logic -- scores of illogical 'philosophers' do it all the time -- but it's at your own expense.

Thanks. That's always the most important!

You'd have to ask him. But it certainly looks like DNA is getting copied a lot.

More precisely, my point is that intellectual activities such as science and philosophy cannot deny the agency of human reason without contradicting t...

Just wanted to clarify. Re God I mean

Yes, Spinoza's view. Note that this is NOT my view. I'm indeterminist. I think the universe is imperfectly predetermined, only partly so, that there i...

Nope. Do you?

Completely. It applies to any cogent process. E.g. if I give you a shopping list and I tell that it's the result of some chemical reaction within a so...

Spinoza is right on that train of thought: determinist in a rational way, that is to say in a way that allows for reason to exist and to work.

Because to write down a meaningful (scientific) theory (or to contribute to it's development) is not something you can achieve by some random permutat...

More precisely, some form of agency is implied by the capacity to develop meaningful and possibly true theories (which are more than just assertions).

Is this a relevant consideration though? Does the source of the error matter? And if yes, 1) why does it matter; and 2) what evidence do you have that...

Shoot. I think it's logically watertight. It's not my idea by the way. It's been said time and again, including in the very terms I used by a US cogni...

Support. Accommodate is too weak. Let me try to explain what I mean. Let us start with a logical point: A theory cannot deny the possibility of its ow...

I think it does. Even some forms of determinism support volition (if by that you mean agency).

I see no good reason to assume an infinity of worlds. It's a very heavy hypothesis, it assumes a humongous lot, and to explain away what? A little ran...

Put this way, the choice is between: 1) assuming that the wheels of determinism have a little 'lash' between them (indeterminism), and 2) assuming the...

As you must know, there's the law and then there's the spirit of the law. The two are always a bit askew.

Okay, good point that chaos and regularities are not mutually exclusive. And I agree that there is some degree of chaos in my own mind at least - a ne...

Evidently DNA codes for proteins and not for thoughts like human languages do, so it stands to reason there will be major differences between the two ...

Indeed. I propose that malapropisms are the random mutations of human languages. DNA too is a language, though a chemical one, and what I find interes...

The brain is highly structured, and not chaotic in the sense that people are predictable to a fair degree. They sleep at certain times, they have cert...